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Extra info for Party and Politics, 1830–1852

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Whether the Conservatives were better organised than their opponents and whether, if they were, that superiarity played a decisive part in their performance at the 1837 and 1841 elections are questions difficult to ans wer. 8 that they had more money, but litde to suggest that they were more efficient at getting their supporters on to the registers. But whatever the explanation for it, the Conservative triumph in 1841 was alandmark in British political development. '36 It is a striking sentence which accurately and tersely sums up the developments which make the decade after the reform act the formative years of the modern British parliamentary system: a fight for supremacy in the House of Commons between organised parties, acting independendy of royal favour or royal wishes and recognising that the source of that supremacy was an electorate whose sentiments, however difficult they might be to decipher, were becoming of cardinal importance in politics.

If this bill should be rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it may ever remember their votes with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck oflaws, the confusion ofranks, the spoliation ofproperty, and the dissolution of social order. Some modern historians are persuaded that Whig alarmism was not entirely fanciful. Eric Hobsbawm has written that in 1831-32 England, for the first time since the 17th century, found itself in a 'political crisis when something like a revolutionary situation might actually have developed'29 and E.

Macau1ay reminded his audience that on1y a few months earlier, just across the Eng1ish Channel, resistance to reform had provoked uprising, the 'Ju1y revolution' which had topp1ed Charles X from the French throne and driven hirn to take refuge in England. There were revolutionists in England, too, he warned, and the object of the reform bill was to thwart them. At present we oppose the schemes of revolutionists with qnly one half, with only one quarter of our proper force. We say, and we say justly, that it is not by mere numbers, but by property and intelligence, that the nation ought to be governed.

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