Household Suffrage
By the Reform Bill of 1867 all male householders in boroughs were enfranchised, and all male lodgers who paid £10 a year for unfurnished rooms. The town workman was enfranchised by this Act as the middle-class man had been enfranchised by the Act of 1832, and the electorate was increased from about 100,000 to 2,000,000. An amendment that women should not be excluded from the franchise was moved by John Stuart Mill, and defeated. Some redistribution of seats took place under the Act of 1867, eleven boroughs were disfranchised, thirty-five with less than 10,000 inhabitants were made single-member constituencies, and additional representation was given to Chelsea, Hackney, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Glasgow, Birmingham, Dundee, and Merthyr. “Thus was Household Suffrage brought in in the boroughs, and a great step was made towards democracy, for it was plain that the middle-class county constituencies could not last very much longer now that all workmen who happened to live in boroughs had their votes.”83
The third Reform Act, giving household suffrage to the country districts, was passed by Gladstone in 1884, and it was followed by a Redistribution of Seats Act in 1885. By these two Acts the agricultural labourer was enfranchised, a service franchise was created for those who were qualified neither as householders nor lodgers, and the principle of single-member equal electoral districts—on a basis of 54,000 inhabitants—was adopted. Only twenty-three boroughs, the City of London and the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, retained double-member representation. The membership of the House of Commons was increased from six hundred and fifty-eight to six hundred and seventy, the present total; and the franchise remains as it was fixed in 1885—occupation and ownership giving the right to vote.
From time to time, for more than a hundred years, a plea has been put forward for universal or adult suffrage for men on the ground of an abstract right to vote, but it has met with little encouragement.84 There is, however, a wide feeling in favour of simplifying the registration laws, so that a three-months’ residence, instead of, as at present, a year’s residence from one July to the next, should be sufficient to qualify for the franchise. There is also a strong demand for “one man, one vote.” At present, while no elector may give more than one vote in any constituency, he may, if he has property in various places, give a vote in each of these districts, and some men thus give as many as a dozen votes at a general election. This plural voting by property and residential qualifications in different constituencies is not customary in other constitutional countries, and a Bill for its abolition passed the House of Commons in 1906, but was rejected by the Lords.
While Liberals urge “one man, one vote” as the more democratic arrangement, Conservatives reply by asking for “one vote, one value”—that is, a new redistribution of seats, for in the last twenty-five years there have been deep and extensive changes in the distribution of populations, and Ireland in particular is over-represented, it is maintained. But then the representation of Ireland in the House of Commons was really guaranteed by the Act of Union, 1800.85