In Ireland and in Scotland there were some slight differences as to the scale of the qualification from those that were proposed for England; but in the three countries the principle was the same, and the right to vote was associated with a certain occupation of land or payment of household rating, and new constituencies were created where towns, unrepresented before, had grown up into recognized importance. By the changes that the Bill proposed to make no less than half a million of new voters were to be created throughout Great Britain and Ireland. For the purpose of diminishing the enormous expense of elections it was proposed that the poll should be taken at the same time in separate districts, so that no voter should have to travel more than fifteen miles in order to record his vote, and {143} that the time over which an election contest could be spread should be greatly reduced, and reduced in proportion to the size of the constituency. It is as well to say at once that that part of the Reform Bill which aimed at the due reduction of election expenses to their legitimate and necessary proportions proved an utter failure. No reduction in the amount of what may be called working expenses could have diminished, to any satisfactory degree, the evil from which the country was suffering at that time, and from which it continued to suffer for more than another generation. Bribery and corruption were the evils which had to be dealt with, and the Reform Bill of 1831 left these evils as it had found them. The Bill, however, did, in its other provisions, do much to establish a genuine principle of Parliamentary representation. To begin with, it proclaimed the principle of representation as the legal basis of the whole Parliamentary system. It abolished the nomination of members, whether by individual persons or by corporations. It laid down as law that representation must bear some proportion to the numbers represented. It made actual, or at least occasional, residence a qualification for a voter. These were the main principles of the measure. The attention of readers will presently be drawn to the manner in which the Bill failed to answer some of the demands made upon the Government by the spreading intelligence of the country, and left these demands to be more adequately answered by the statesmen of a later generation. Enough to say that with all its defects the Bill, as Lord John Russell explained it, was, for its time, a bold and broad measure of reform, and that it laid down the lines along which, as far as human foresight can discern, the movement of progress in England's political history will make its way. {144} CHAPTER LXXII. THE GREAT DEBATE. [Sidenote: 1831--Sir Robert Inglis and Reform]