The Life and Work of Duncan Mclaren

CHAPTER XXI. FRANCHISE REFORM. 1833 PAKLIAMENTARY reform was the first public question which engaged Mr. M cLaren's attention at the threshold of his Politi cai v. ecclesiastical career. At the beginning of the present centuryJ it en- ,,..,, franchise grossed the public mind. To earnest-minded young men, c more particularly among the class with whom Mr. M Laren was associated, it represented the cause of human freedom. It spoke of the rights of man rights withheld, but which must be asserted if patriotism were to be preserved and faith vindicated and maintained for it religious ; appealed not only to the love of freedom innate in the Scottish character, but likewise to the sense of responsibility to God. It was an outcome of the Reformation a develop- ment of the Protestantism which had established in Scot- land a democratic, self-governing Church. It was a political manifestation of the Scottish Presbyterianism, which in its purer and intenser aspects had secured the ecclesiastical franchise for the members of Christ's Church, without respect of social status or of sex. c To this early adopted faith Mr. M Laren proved true to the end of his life. He laboured to secure the parliamentary franchise for every member of the common- wealth for every man and woman householder, as a right as well as a trust, just as the ecclesiastical franchise was 140 Life of Duncan McLaren. regarded as part and parcel of the membership of his church. In his private memoranda, written in the spring of 1886, he thus described his introduction to political work : " I had never been an active working politician up to 1833. I was too obscure a man to be thought of in this connection. But I was in heart an earnest Reformer, and had attended all the great Reform meetings held in Edinburgh since the agita- tion commenced, both those in halls and the great meetings in the Queen's Park, Grassmarket, and other places. I had also attended the first purely political meeting ever held in Scotland. It was held in the Pantheon Circus on 16th December 1820. All open-air meetings were then illegal under one of Lord Castle- reagh's Acts, and all the public halls in the city were withheld through the influence of the local Tory aristocracy, who then ruled Scotland with a rod of iron. Through the kindness of my employer I was allowed to attend this great meeting. The building was filled to overflowing, and large numbers were shut out. Mr. James Moncreiff, advocate (father of the present Lord Moncreiff), was in the chair. Francis Jeffrey was the leading speaker. But all the Liberal lawyers who afterwards arrived at such great celebrity were present, and most of them took part in the proceedings. Resolutions were passed praying the King to dismiss his Ministers, and 17,000 names were affixed to the petition, while only 1700 names were got to the Tory opposition petition. On this day Edinburgh took up its position as a Liberal city, and has never returned a Tory to Parliament. The effect of this meeting was to imbue my whole heart and mind with Liberal principles, so indelibly fixed that no change has ever occurred except in an onward direction." At the great public dinner given to Earl Grey on 15th September 1834, with the Duke of Hamilton in the chair, the Earl of Rosebery as croupier, and attended by nearly every Scottish nobleman and county gentleman who then c belonged to the Reform party, Mr. M Laren was one of the Franchise Reform. 141 acting stewards. After the Reform Bill was passed, and 1834 the first flush of victory was over, while the bulk of the party " was disposed to rest and be thankful," his energetic spirit perceived that this feeling of languor was fatal to effective organisation for further reforms. He endeavoured to rouse his friends to a recognition of their duties and to hasten them to the new fields waiting to be conquered. Even in the midst of his onerous municipal labours, he in work and in 1839 he was actively engaged political ; " the chief promoter of the Reform Union," an association based on the principles adopted by the modern Caucus The first "open to every Liberal voter on the parliamentary roll, without regard to his peculiar views on any of the questions about which Reformers are at present divided." But though the Liberal party continued in the ascendant in the city and generally throughout Scotland, its reforming zeal was not active. It was disinclined for anything like c heroic and Mr. M Laren found it legislation ; necessary to turn from the leaders and wire-pullers to the people to find the enthusiasm needed for the inspiration of the party. One of these pioneer reform agitations was what was The Free- described as the Scottish Freehold Movement. Mr. McLaren was associated in this work with the Rev. Dr. Begg. In the desire to elevate the working-classes and to strengthen the national spirit of independence through the possession, by prudent householders, of a property qualification for the franchise, as well as in the endeavour to widen the bounds of freedom as these were defined by the Act of 1832, the two men, though differing widely on many ecclesiastical questions, found a common platform, and for several years they carried on the work together with equal enthusiasm and energy. Dr. Begg approached the question chiefly from the point of c 142 Life of Duncan M Laren. view of the social reformer. He wished the working-classes in their aspirations after self-advancement to associate inde- with manhood and the first and most pendence ; necessary step towards the acquisition of this independence was the possession of a house as an absolute property. The spirit embodied in the old song " I'll hae a hoose o' my ain I'll tak dunts frae naebody," animated the social and political economy he taught to c working-men. Mr. M Laren ardently sympathised with this teaching, and frequently in his speeches and writings he cited one of the objects of the movement in these words : " To promote the elevation of the working-classes in the social scale by encouraging amongst them habits of indus- try and economy for the purpose of thereby acquiring freehold dwellings for themselves." But in his advocacy of this reform he devoted his arguments and illustrations mainly to the political aspects of the question. This department of the subject he discussed with his accustomed thoroughness and lucidity. He surveyed the whole field of political repre- sentation in England and Scotland from the beginning of the fifteenth century, in order to show that the forty-shilling freehold was part and parcel of the British Constitution, and by elaborate illustrations of the inequalities in representa- tion in respect of population and of contributions to the imperial revenue, from which Scotland, and especially the Scottish burghs, suffered under the first Reform Act settle- ment. He further enforced his contention that injustice had been done to Scotland by the discontinuance of a franchise preserved in England. He stated these views in detail at a meeting held in Queen Street Hall, Edinburgh, 25th December 1856, at which Dr. Begg and he were the Franchise Reform. 143 chief speakers, and which the two city Members, Mr. Charles 1856 Cowan and Mr. Adam Black, attended. Dr. Begg and he " afterwards received pressing invitations from men in " earnest to address in all of the meetings parts country ; and it is interesting here to note that when, amongst other c places, they visited Ayr in May 1857, Mr. M Laren was then regarded as an old man. Colonel Shaw had doubtless in his c mind the long period during which Mr. M Laren had already occupied a prominent place in the public life of his country, and must have had little idea that nearly thirty years' good, or rather better work, remained before him. After a com- plimentary reference to Dr. Begg, he proceeded : " The meeting had also before it a venerable gentleman, who, after having performed with distinction the civic duties of the capital city of his native land, could not yet rest from labours of love towards his fellow-men. His great and loving heart still sought to elevate his countrymen in their social, moral, and for political capacities ; and these great and glorious objects he " l had come here to-night. The movement, though decidedly popular, was opposed by Liberals as well as by Tories by some on the opportunist plea that it was fitted to hinder a general measure for the extension of the refranchise, which many eager Eeformers had been for others on the vainly expecting years ; by ground 1 " Mr. M c Laren wound up the proceedings with a series of statistics which will be found unanswerable on two points. First, that the whole tendency of recent legislation for Scotland has been, by joining burghs to cut out their together, population from county constituencies ; and, secondly, that these burghs by themselves have nothing like the repre- sentation, as compared with English burghs, which they ought to have, either in regard to the numbers of their electors or representatives. One fact may here suffice : 60 English burghs, with a gross population of 392,278, have 22,548 voters and 94 members, while 69 Scotch burghs, with a population of 392,343, have only 14,907 voters, and only 14 " members ! Ayr Advertiser, May 7, 1857. 144 Life of Duncan McLaren. 1857 that the franchise established under the forty-shilling freehold would be low and others qualification dangerously ; by again under the fear that the burgh forty-shilling freeholders with their county votes would swamp the ordi- nary county electors, forgetting that the existing county constituencies swamped the proper electorate, and would have been reinforced by forty-shilling freeholders from the c counties as well as from the burghs.

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