l add 2,000,000 more, nearly twice as much as was
added since 1867, and more than four times as much as was added in
1832.

The bill was read a second time (April 7) by the overwhelming majority of
340 against 210. Even those who most disliked the measure admitted that a
majority of this size could not be made light of, though they went on in
charity to say that it did not represent the honest opinion of those who
composed it. It was in fact, as such persons argued, the strongest proof
of the degradation brought into our politics by the Act of 1867. "All the
bribes of Danby or of Walpole or of Pelham," cried one excited critic,
"all the bullying of the Tudors, all the lobbying of George III., would
have been powerless to secure it in the most corrupt or the most servile
days of the ancient House of Commons."(74)

On the third reading the opposition disappeared from the House, and on Mr.
Gladstone's prompt initiative it was placed on record in the journals that
the bill had been carried by a unanimous verdict. It went to the Lords,
and by a majority, first of 59 and then of 50, they put what Mr. Gladstone
mildly called "an effectual stoppage on the bill, or in other words did
practically reject it." The plain issue, if we can call it plain, was
this. What the tories, with different degrees of sincerity, professed to
dread was that the election might take place on the new franchise, but
with an unaltered disposition of parliamentary seats. At heart the bulk of
them were as little friendly to a lowered franchise in the counties, as
they had been in the case of the towns before Mr. Disraeli educated them.
But this was a secret dangerous to let out, for the enfranchised workers
in the towns would never understand why workers in the villages should not
have a vote. Apart from this, the tory leaders believed that unless the
allotment of seats went with the addition of a couple of million new
voters, the prospect would be ruinously unfavourable to their party, and
they offered determined resistance to the chance of a jockeying operation
of this (M47) kind. At least one very eminent man among them had privately
made up his mind that the proceeding supposed to be designed by their
opponents--their distinct professions notwithstanding--would efface the tory
party for thirty years to come. Mr. Gladstone and his government on the
other hand agreed, on grounds of their own and for reasons of their own,
that the two changes