Some Tory expectations appear to have
been founded on the approbation I had expressed of plural voting, under
certain conditions: and it has been surmised that the suggestion of this
sort made in one of the resolutions which Mr. Disraeli introduced into
the House preparatory to his Reform Bill (a suggestion which meeting
with no favour, he did not press), may have been occasioned by what I
had written on the point: but if so, it was forgotten that I had made it
an express condition that the privilege of a plurality of votes should
be annexed to education, not to property, and even so, had approved of
it only on the supposition of universal suffrage. How utterly
inadmissible such plural voting would be under the suffrage given by the
present Reform Act, is proved, to any who could otherwise doubt it, by
the very small weight which the working classes are found to possess in
elections, even under the law which gives no more votes to any one
elector than to any other.
While I thus was far more obnoxious to the Tory interest, and to many
Conservative Liberals than I had formerly been, the course I pursued in
Parliament had by no means been such as to make Liberals generally at
all enthusiastic in my support.
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