The grave question now is, How far will this peculiar old system continue and how far will it be altered?  I am afraid I must put aside at once the idea that it will be altered entirely and altered for the better.  I cannot expect that the new class of voters will be at all more able to form sound opinions on complex questions than the old voters.  There was indeed an idea—­a very prevalent idea when the first edition of this book was published—­that there then was an unrepresented class of skilled artisans who could form superior opinions on national matters, and ought to have the means of expressing them.  We used to frame elaborate schemes to give them such means.  But the Reform Act of 1867 did not stop at skilled labour; it enfranchised unskilled labour too.  And no one will contend that the ordinary working man who has no special skill, and who is only rated because he has a house, can judge much of intellectual matters.  The messenger in an office is not more intelligent than the clerks, not better educated, but worse; and yet the messenger is probably a very superior specimen of the newly enfranchised classes.  The average can only earn very scanty wages by coarse labour.  They have no time to improve themselves, for they are labouring the whole day through; and their early education was so small that in most cases it is dubious whether even if they had much time, they could use it to good purpose.  We have not enfranchised a class less needing to be guided by their betters than the old class; on the contrary, the new class need it more than the old.  The real question is, Will they submit to it, will they defer in the same way to wealth and rank, and to the higher qualities of which these are the rough symbols and the common accompaniments?

There is a peculiar difficulty in answering this question.  Generally, the debates upon the passing of an Act contain much valuable instruction as to what may be expected of it.  But the debates on the Reform Act of 1867 hardly tell anything.  They are taken up with technicalities as to the ratepayers and the compound householder.  Nobody in the country knew what was being done.  I happened at the time to visit a purely agricultural and Conservative county, and I asked the local Tories, “Do you understand this Reform Bill?  Do you know that your Conservative Government has brought in a Bill far more Radical than any former Bill, and that it is very likely to be passed?” The answer I got was, “What stuff you talk!  How can it be a Radical Reform Bill?  Why, Bright opposes it!” There was no answering that in a way which a “common jury” could understand.  The Bill was supported by the Times and opposed by Mr. Bright; and therefore the mass of the Conservatives and of common moderate people, without distinction of party, had no conception of the effect.  They said it was “London nonsense” if you tried to explain it to them.  The nation indeed generally looks to the discussions in Parliament to enlighten it as to the effect of Bills.