When the House of Commons met on the 19th of February there was a general desire to make rapid progress with the Reform Bills. Efforts to secure the representation of minorities, to oppose an increase in the members of the House, to cut down the representation of Ireland, to disfranchise the Universities, were resisted, and the alliance of the two Front Benches crushed all opposition. One member only was successful in carrying an amendment. This was Mr. Raikes, who had been Chairman of Committees in Lord Beaconsfield’s Government, and who now succeeded in reducing the perpetual penalties inflicted on voters in corrupt boroughs. On the 11th of May the Seats Bill was read a third time, and when it went to the House of Lords it was speedily passed. The Tories, who objected to the compromise, found spokesmen in Mr. James Lowther, Mr. Chaplin, and Mr. Raikes. The opposition of the last-named was the most active, but it merely resulted in effecting a few changes in the nomenclature of the Bill, and in what the _Times_ termed “his more than paternal solicitude for the leisurely progress of the measure.” No measure of reform proposed in the Queen’s reign by a responsible politician was ever designed to produce such a mighty change in the British Constitution as the Reform Bill of 1885. Lord Grey and Lord John Russell, by their Bill in 1832, added not quite half a million voters to the Electorate of the United Kingdom. The Reform Bill of 1867 increased the Electorate from 1,136,000 to 2,448,000. In 1885 it had grown to be 3,000,000, and to this number Mr. Gladstone’s Bill added 2,000,000 new voters.[204] The Seats Bill, which distributed the 5,000,000 electors into electoral groups, was a much more complex measure. The chief difficulties were two in number. First, there was that of determining the standard by which the claim of a borough to separate representation could be conceded; secondly, there was the difficulty of discovering how votes should be cast in towns possessing more than one member. Here curious contrasts can be drawn between the old order and the new. [Illustration: PRINCE HENRY OF BATTENBERG. (_From a Photograph by Theodor Prümm, Berlin._)]