A uniform system of voting, such as a £5 or household suffrage, which
is now proposed as a remedy for all the evils of society, is of
necessity a _class representation_, and the class to which it gives
the ascendency is the _lowest_ in whom the suffrage is vested. It must
be so, because the poor being always and in every country much more
numerous than the rich, the humblest class of voters under every
uniform system must always be incomparably the most numerous. It is
this circumstance which has given the ten-pounders the command of the
House of Commons under the new constitution; they are the humblest and
therefore the most numerous class enfranchised by the Reform Act, and
consequently, under the uniform household suffrage, they have the
majority. They have so for the same reason that, under a similar
uniform system, the privates in an army would outnumber the whole
officers, commissioned and non-commissioned. But if the suffrage is
reduced so low as to admit the representatives of the operatives and
"proletaires," or those whom they influence, (which household or a £5
suffrage would undoubtedly do,) what measures in the present state of
society in this country, and feeling throughout the world, would they
immediately adopt? We have only to look at the newly formed republic
of France, where such a system is established, to receive the answer.
Repudiation of state engagements, (as in the case of the railways;)
confiscation of property under the name of a graduated income tax; the
abolition of primogeniture, in order to ruin the landed interest; the
issue of assignats, in order to sustain the state under the shock to
credit which such measures would necessarily occasion, might with
confidence be looked for. And the question to be considered is, would
these measures in the end benefit _any class of society_, or, least of
all, the operative, in a country such as Great Britain, containing, in
proportion to its population, a greater number of persons dependent on
daily wages for their existence than any other that ever existed?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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