right to a good coat on his back, a good hat
on his head, a good roof for the shelter of his
household, a good dinner upon his table.
Stephens had well understood that universal suffrage
was the most durable way of empowering the British
masses further and guaranteeing a coat, a hat, a roof, and
a good dinner for the working man.
Ultimately, Earl Grey was successful both in ensuring the
passage of the First Reform Act and in defusing the
revolutionary tides without taking any major strides toward
universal mass suffrage. The 1832 reforms were modest,
only doubling the voting franchise from 8 percent to about
16 percent of the adult male population (from about 2 to 4
percent of all the population). They also got rid of rotten
boroughs and gave independent representation to the new
industrializing cities such as Manchester, Leeds, and
Sheffield. But this still left many issues unresolved. Hence
there were soon further demands for greater voting rights
and further social unrest. In response, further reform would
follow.
Why did the British elites give in to the demands? Why
did Earl Grey feel that partial—indeed, very partial—reform
was the only way to preserve the system? Why did they
have to put up with the lesser of the two evils, reform or
revolution, rather than maintaining their power without any
reform? Couldn’t they just have done what the Spanish
conquistadors did in South America, what Austria-
Hungarian and Russian monarchs would do in the next
several decades when the demands for reform reached
those lands, and what the British themselves did in the
Caribbean and in India: use force to put down the
demands? The answer to this question comes from the
virtuous circle. The economic and political changes that
had already taken place in Britain made using force to
repress these demands both unattractive for the elite and
increasingly infeasible. As E. P. Thompson wrote:
When the struggles of 1790–1832 signalled
that this equilibrium had changed, the rulers
of England were faced with alarming
alternatives. They could either dispense with