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 laborer, who had been educated by hunger and toil, succeeded in establishing a national union among men of his class (1872).  In 1884 Mr. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister, secured the ballot for agricultural laborers by the passage of the third Reform Act, which gave all residents of counties throughout the United Kingdom the right to vote on the same liberal conditions as the residents of the towns.

It is estimated that this last law added about two and a half millions of voters; this gave one voter to every six persons of the total population, whereas, before the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832, thre was not over one in fifty.  When the new or so-called “People’s Parliament” convened (1886), Joseph Arch and several other candidates took their seats in the House of Commons as representatives of classes of the population who, up to that date, had no voice in the legislation of the country.