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The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria cover

The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. / From the Accession of George III. to the Twenty-Third Year of the Reign of Queen Victoria

Chapter 657: MOTION FOR REFORM.
By Edward Farr
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About This Book

The volume traces British political, parliamentary, and military developments from the accession of George III through the early nineteenth century, chronicling changes of ministry and cabinet, debates over colonial taxation and the American conflict, parliamentary controversies involving figures such as Wilkes and Warren Hastings, questions of Catholic relief and slave-trade abolition, and responses to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, including major naval and continental campaigns, the union with Ireland, and domestic legislation on finance, civil liberties, and parliamentary reform.

MOTION FOR REFORM.

On the 15th of June Sir Francis Burdett made a motion for a sweeping parliamentary reform. Nearly all the country gentlemen had left town, and those that remained were generally disinclined to enter upon this momentous question. On a division, therefore, Sir Francis was outvoted by seventy-four against fifteen. His scheme of reform divided itself into three parts: by the first article it was proposed that all freeholders, householders, and others, who paid direct taxes to the state, the church, or the poor, should have votes; by the second, that a convenient division of places entitled to send representatives to parliament should be marked out, each division be again subdivided, and each subdivision to return one member, the elections being conducted in the several parishes in one day; and by the third, that the duration of parliaments should be reduced to the period of time most agreeable to the British constitution. The merits of this scheme may have been great; but one thing is certain, that the period at which it was introduced was not the proper one for its consideration. This forms the best excuse which can be made for the defence of manifest abuses made by such men as Perceval and Canning, and who said they saw no reason whatever to enter upon the subject of reform. There was evident reason for taking this subject into consideration; but while the nation was engaged in a contest for its national existence, it would have been unwise to have tampered with the machinery of government; especially as that machinery was acknowledged by all parties to work well for the prosecution of the arduous contests in which we were engaged with Napoleon and his allies.