Such were the general provisions of this great measure of reform; a bill similar in principle having already been enacted for Scotland, and another being shortly after passed, with such variations of detail as the differences in the circumstances of the country required, for Ireland.  Some of the clauses, especially those which preserved the vested rights of freemen and their families, and which required a certain amount of property or rating qualifications in the town councillors, were not originally included in the bill, but were inserted as amendments in the House of Lords; and it may be remarked that the result of the discussion in that House afforded a proof of the sagacity of those peers who, though conscientiously opposed to the Reform Bill, preferred allowing it to pass by their own retirement from the final divisions to driving the minister to carry his point by a creation of peers, since the avoidance of such an addition to their numbers as had been threatened enabled them now to force the adoption of these amendments on a reluctant minister.  And it seems difficult to deny that the first was required by justice, and that the second was most desirable in the interests of the measure itself.  Without it the town councillors, from among whom the mayor was to be chosen, might have been selected from the poorest, the least educated, and least independent class of the rate-payers.  In some boroughs, or in some wards of many boroughs, it may be regarded as certain that they would have been so chosen; and such an admixture of unfit persons would have tended to bring some degree of discredit on the whole council, while to the successful inauguration of a new system the establishment of a general feeling of respect for it and confidence in it was of primary importance.  The danger, too, of so ill-judged a selection would have been greatest in the larger boroughs, those being, at the same time, the very places in which the occasional difficulty of maintaining order and tranquillity made it even more necessary than in smaller towns that the council should enjoy the esteem and confidence of their fellow-citizens.

The principle that every man who contributed to the rates had a right to claim a voice in the election of those who were to expend them, which the minister laid down as the justification of the clause conferring the municipal franchise on all the rate-payers, was strongly contested by Sir Robert Peel, though neither he nor those of his party in the Upper House proposed any alteration of the bill in this respect; but he pointed out that, though Lord John affirmed it to be the known and recognized principle of the constitution, he had not acted on it in the Reform Bill; and it is certainly open to question whether the adoption of some limitation would not have been an improvement on the present measure.  The doctrine established in this instance by Lord John gave a preponderance at every municipal election to mere numbers, since the poorest class is everywhere the most numerous, and its admission led almost inevitably to a reduction of the parliamentary franchise at some future day, though certainly at this time, and for many years afterward, Lord John was far from contemplating any alteration of the Reform Bill, but, on the contrary, took every opportunity of proclaiming his adherence to it as a final solution of the question.