e "rotten"
boroughs--uninhabited constituencies like Old Sarum. Grey, the Whig Prime
Minister, at once resigned, and the Duke of Wellington endeavoured to form
a Tory anti-reform Ministry. But the task was beyond him, the temper of the
country was impatient of any further postponement of the Bill. Petitions
poured in urging Parliament to vote no supplies, and resolutions were
passed refusing to pay taxes till the Bill became law.

On Wellington's failure to make a Government, William IV. had to recall
Grey, and the Whigs resumed office with an assurance that, if necessary,
the King would create sufficient peers favourable to reform, so that the
Bill should pass.

The battle was over, the anti-Reformers retired, and on June 4th, 1832, the
Reform Bill passed the Lords by 106 to 22, receiving the Royal Assent three
days later.

The Whigs protested that the Reform Bill was _a final measure_, and Sir
Francis Burdett, the veteran reformer, was content to vote with the Tories
when the Act had become law. But there is no finality in politics, and the
Reform Bill was only the removal of a barrier on the road to democracy. The
Tories described the Bill as revolutionary, but as a matter of fact the Act
of 1832 neither fulfilled the hopes of its friends nor the fears of its
foes. What the Act did was to transfer the balance of power from the landed
aristocracy, which had been in the main predominant since 1688, to the
richer members of the middle class--the big farmers in the country, the
prosperous shopkeepers in the towns. The working class was still voteless,
and the old democratic franchise of Preston and Westminster was gone from
those boroughs.

The first reformed Parliament met early in 1833, and the change in the
character of the House of Commons was seen at once. Government accepted
responsibility for legislation in a way that had never been known before.
The New Poor Law, 1834, and the new Municipal Corporations Act, 1835, were
the beginning of our present system of local government. Slavery was
abolished in all British Colonies in 1833.

Greville, in his Memoirs, gives us an impression of the new regime in
Parliament as it appeared to one who belonged to the old dethroned
aristocracy.

"The first thing that strikes one is its inferiority to preceding Houses of
Commons, and the presumption, impertinence, and self-sufficiency of the new
members.... There exists no _party_ but that of the Government; the Irish
act in