rights of man," and only political philosophers and a few
artisans hoped for improvement in their condition by Parliamentary reform.
Agricultural England accepted the rule of landowners as an arrangement by
providence. It was the industrial revolution that shattered the feudal
notions of society, and created a manufacturing population which knew
nothing of lowly submission to pastors and masters. A middle-class emerged
from the very ranks of the working people. The factory system brought
fortunes to men who a few years earlier had been artisans, and to these new
capitalists in the nineteenth century the aristocracy in power was as
irksome as the Stuarts had been to the Whigs. If, as the Whigs taught,
those who paid the taxes were entitled to a voice in the government, then
the manufacturing districts ought to send representatives to Parliament. It
seemed monstrous that places like Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham had no
one in the House of Commons to plead for the needs of their inhabitants.
The manufacturer wanted Parliamentary representation because he hoped
through Parliament to secure the abolition of the political disabilities of
Nonconformists, and to get financial changes made that would make the
conditions of trade more profitable. And he felt that it would be better
for the country if he and the class he represented could speak freely in
Parliament.

The workman wanted the vote because he had been brought to believe that,
possessing the vote, he could make Parliament enact laws that would lighten
the hardships of his life. The whole of the manufacturing class--capitalist
and workman alike--could see by 1820 that the House of Commons was the
instrument of the electorate, and that to get power they must become
electors. (Yet probably not one per cent. of them could express clearly any
theory of popular sovereignty.) The old Whig families, kept out of office
by the Tories whom George III. had placed in power, and who now controlled
the House of Commons, supported reform and the enfranchisement of the
middle class because they saw no way of getting back into power except by a
new electorate and a redistribution of Parliamentary seats. At the
beginning of the twentieth century the landowner, still Whig, though now,
as a general rule enrolled with the Unionist Party, has not been excluded
from political power, but the representatives of the middle-class and of
the working people are predominant in the House of Commons