Autobiography
limitation of paid agents to one for each candidate; a third was the
extension of the precautions and penalties against bribery to municipal
elections, which are well known to be not only a preparatory school for
bribery at parliamentary elections, but an habitual cover for it. The
Conservative Government, however, when once they had carried the leading
provision of their Bill (for which I voted and spoke), the transfer of
the jurisdiction in elections from the House of Commons to the Judges,
made a determined resistance to all other improvements; and after one of
our most important proposals, that of Mr. Fawcett, had actually obtained
a majority, they summoned the strength of their party and threw out the
clause in a subsequent stage. The Liberal party in the House was greatly
dishonoured by the conduct of many of its members in giving no help
whatever to this attempt to secure the necessary conditions of an honest
representation of the people. With their large majority in the House
they could have carried all the amendments, or better ones if they had
better to propose. But it was late in the session; members were eager to
set about their preparations for the impending General Election: and
while some (such as Sir Robert Anstruther) honourably remained at their
post, though rival candidates were already canvassing their constituency,
a much greater number placed their electioneering interests before their
public duty. Many Liberals also looked with indifference on legislation
against bribery, thinking that it merely diverted public interest from
the Ballot, which they considered--very mistakenly as I expect it will
turn out--to be a sufficient, and the only, remedy. From these causes our
fight, though kept up with great vigour for several nights, was wholly
unsuccessful, and the practices which we sought to render more difficult,
prevailed more widely than ever in the first General Election held under
the new electoral law.
In the general debates on Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill, my participation
was limited to the one speech already mentioned; but I made the Bill an
occasion for bringing the two great improvements which remain to be made
in Representative Government, formally before the House and the nation.
One of them was Personal, or, as it is called with equal propriety,
Proportional Representation. I brought this under the consideration of
the House, by an expository and argumentative speech on Mr. Hare's plan;
and subsequently I was active in support of the very imperfect
substitute for that plan, which, in a small number of constituencies,
Parliament was induced to adopt. This poor makeshift had scarcely any
recommendation, except that it was a partial recognition of the evil
which it did so little to remedy. As such, however, it was attacked by
the same fallacies, and required to be defended on the same principles,
as a really good measure; and its adoption in a few Parliamentary
elections, as well as the subsequent introduction of what is called the
Cumulative Vote in the elections for the London School Board, have had
the good effect of converting the equal claim of all electors to a
proportional share in the representation, from a subject of merely
speculative discussion, into a question of practical politics, much
sooner than would otherwise have been the case.
This assertion of my opinions on Personal Representation cannot be
credited with any considerable or visible amount of practical result. It
was otherwise with the other motion which I made in the form of an
amendment to the Reform Bill, and which was by far the most important,
perhaps the only really important, public service I performed in the
capacity of a Member of Parliament: a motion to strike out the words
which were understood to limit the electoral franchise to males, and
thereby to admit to the suffrage all women who, as householders or
otherwise, possessed the qualification required of male electors. For
women not to make their claim to the suffrage, at the time when the
elective franchise was being largely extended, would have been to abjure
the claim altogether; and a movement on the subject was begun in 1866,
when I presented a petition for the suffrage, signed by a considerable
number of distinguished women. But it was as yet uncertain whether the
proposal would obtain more than a few stray votes in the House: and
when, after a debate in which the speaker's on the contrary side were
conspicuous by their feebleness, the votes recorded in favour of the
motion amounted to 73--made up by pairs and tellers to above 80--the
surprise was general, and the encouragement great: the greater, too,
because one of those who voted for the motion was Mr. Bright, a fact
which could only be attributed to the impression made on him by the
debate, as he had previously made no secret of his nonconcurrence in the
proposal. [The time appeared to my daughter, Miss Helen Taylor, to have
come for forming a Society for the extension of the suffrage to women.
The existence of the Society is due to my daughter's initiative; its
constitution was planned entirely by her, and she was the soul of the
movement during its first years, though delicate health and
superabundant occupation made her decline to be a member of the
Executive Committee. Many distinguished members of parliament,
professors, and others, and some of the most eminent women of whom the
country can boast, became members of the Society, a large proportion
either directly or indirectly through my daughter's influence, she
having written the greater number, and all the best, of the letters by
which adhesions was obtained, even when those letters bore my signature.
In two remarkable instances, those of Miss Nightingale and Miss Mary
Carpenter, the reluctance those ladies had at first felt to come
forward, (for it was not on their past difference of opinion) was
overcome by appeals written by my daughter though signed by me.
Associations for the same object were formed in various local centres,
Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, and Glasgow; and others
which have done much valuable work for the cause. All the Societies take
the title of branches of the National Society for Women's Suffrage; but
each has its own governing body, and acts in complete independence of
the others.]
I believe I have mentioned all that is worth remembering of my
proceedings in the House. But their enumeration, even if complete, would
give but an inadequate idea of my occupations during that period, and
especially of the time taken up by correspondence. For many years before
my election to Parliament, I had been continually receiving letters from
strangers, mostly addressed to me as a writer on philosophy, and either
propounding difficulties or communicating thoughts on subjects connected
with logic or political economy. In common, I suppose, with all who are
known as political economists, I was a recipient of all the shallow
theories and absurd proposals by which people are perpetually
endeavouring to show the way to universal wealth and happiness by some
artful reorganization of the currency. When there were signs of
sufficient intelligence in the writers to make it worth while attempting
to put them right, I took the trouble to point out their errors, until
the growth of my correspondence made it necessary to dismiss such
persons with very brief answers. Many, however, of the communications I
received were more worthy of attention than these, and in some,
oversights of detail were pointed out in my writings, which I was thus
enabled to correct. Correspondence of this sort naturally multiplied
with the multiplication of the subjects on which I wrote, especially
those of a metaphysical character. But when I became a member of
Parliament. I began to receive letters on private grievances and on
every imaginable subject that related to any kind of public affairs,
however remote from my knowledge or pursuits. It was not my constituents
in Westminster who laid this burthen on me: they kept with remarkable
fidelity to the understanding on which I had consented to serve. I
received, indeed, now and then an application from some ingenuous youth
to procure for him a small government appointment; but these were few,
and how simple and ignorant the writers were, was shown by the fact that
the applications came in about equally whichever party was in power. My
invariable answer was, that it was contrary to the principles on which I
was elected to ask favours of any Government. But, on the whole, hardly
any part of the country gave me less trouble than my own constituents.
The general mass of correspondence, however, swelled into an oppressive
burthen.
[At this time, and thenceforth, a great proportion of all my letters
(including many which found their way into the newspapers) were not
written by me but by my daughter; at first merely from her willingness
to help in disposing of a mass of letters greater than I could get
through without assistance, but afterwards because I thought the letters
she wrote superior to mine, and more so in proportion to the difficulty
and importance of the occasion. Even those which I wrote myself were
generally much improved by her, as is also the case with all the more
recent of my prepared speeches, of which, and of some of my published
writings, not a few passages, and those the most successful, were hers.]
While I remained in Parliament my work as an author was unavoidably
limited to the recess. During that time I wrote (besides the pamphlet on
Ireland, already mentioned), the Essay on Plato, published in the
_Edinburgh Review_, and reprinted in the third volume of _Dissertations
and Discussions_; and the address which, conformably to custom, I
delivered to the University of St. Andrew's, whose students had done me
the honour of electing me to the office of Rector. In this Discourse I
gave expression to many thoughts and opinions which had been
accumulating in me through life, respecting the various studies which
belong to a liberal education, their uses and influences, and the mode
in which they should be pursued to render their influences most
beneficial. The position taken up, vindicating the high educational
value alike of the old classic and the new scientific studies, on even
stronger grounds than are urged by most of their advocates, and
insisting that it is only the stupid inefficiency of the usual teaching
which makes those studies be regarded as competitors instead of allies,
was, I think, calculated, not only to aid and stimulate the improvement
which has happily commenced in the national institutions for higher
education, but to diffuse juster ideas than we often find, even in
highly educated men, on the conditions of the highest mental
cultivation.
During this period also I commenced (and completed soon after I had left
Parliament) the performance of a duty to philosophy and to the memory of
my father, by preparing and publishing an edition of the _Analysis of
the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, with notes bringing up the doctrines
of that admirable book to the latest improvements in science and in
speculation. This was a joint undertaking: the psychological notes being
furnished in about equal proportions by Mr. Bain and myself, while Mr.
Grote supplied some valuable contributions on points in the history of
philosophy incidentally raised, and Dr. Andrew Findlater supplied the
deficiencies in the book which had been occasioned by the imperfect
philological knowledge of the time when it was written. Having been
originally published at a time when the current of metaphysical
speculation ran in a quite opposite direction to the psychology of
Experience and Association, the _Analysis_ had not obtained the amount