in the management of local affairs,
and the city officers sometimes spent the income of large charitable
funds in feasting and merrimaking while the poor got little or
nothing.

A law was passed (1835) giving taxpayers in cities (except London)
control of municipal elections. By a subsequent amendment, the ballot
in such cases was extended to women,[2] and for the first time perhaps
in modern history partial woman suffrage was formally granted by
supreme legislative act. A number of years later the political
restrictions imposed on the Jews were removed.

[2] Woman suffrage in municipal elections was granted to single women
and widows (householders) in 1869. In 1870 an act was passed enabling
them to vote at schoolboard elections, and also to become members of
such boards. By act of 1894 women were made eligible to sit and vote
in district and parish councils (or local-government elections).

There was a considerable number of Jews in London and in other large
cities who were men of wealth and influence. They were entitled to
vote and hold municipal office, but they were debarred from election
to Parliament by a law which required them to make oath "on the faith
of a Christian." The law was now so modified (1859) that a very
prominent Jew, Baron Rothschild, took his seat in Parliament. Finally
the Oaths Act (1888) abolished all religious tests in Parliament.

600. Second and Third Reform Acts, 1867, 1884; County and Parish
Councils (1884, 1894).

In 1867 the pressure of public opinion moved Mr. Disraeli (later Lord
Beaconsfield), a member of Lord Derby's Conservative Cabinet (S479),
to bring in a second Reform Bill (S582), which became law. This bill
provided "household suffrage." It gave the right to vote to all male
householders in the English parliamentary boroughs (that is, towns
having the right to elect one or more members to Parliament), who paid
a tax for the support of the poor, and to all lodgers paying a rental
of 10 pounds yearly; it also increased the number of voters among
small property holders in counties.[1]

[1] See Summary of Constitutional History in the Appendix, p.xxvi,
S31. Lord Derby held the office, but Mr. Disraeli was really Prime
Minister.

There still remained, however, a large class in the country districts
for whom nothing had been done. The men employed by the farmers to
till the soil were wretchedly poor and deplorably ignorant. Joseph
Arch, a Warwickshire farm l