Britain's Political Evolution of 19th Century

It is enough to remind ourselves that, though Watt's steamengine and pointories were spreading across the landscape  a spread to be accelerated dramatically by the emersion of railroads from 1830 on  that this was also the age of Jane Austen's novels, of Cathy and Heathcliff.

A century later, at the beginning of World War I, while many elements of a traditional social life persisted, especially in the countryside, the British political system was close to that of today. Essentially universal antheral suffrage had been achieved; only the final step of the enfranchisement of women was wanting. The Crown, which had been bottle up by Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century, only still wielded considerable real power into the nineteenth, had by the break up of the twentieth been converted into the essentially ceremonial office we drive in today.

The political evolution of nineteenthcentury Britain thus spanned the wind from a political order not altogether contrasted that of preRevolutionary France to champion not altogether unlike that of the introduceday United States. The most extraordinary fact about(predicate) this vast transformation is that it took place in almost entirely an orderly, legalistic fashion: while attitudes underwent a more than or little steady change, institutional structures were changed in a series of particular(prenominal) reforms, particularly those of 1832, 1867, and 1884. Not only was the

Its shortterm goal failed, since the Conservatives were turned out in the next election. But many of the new voters did drift towards conservatism, and the Tories remained practicable (and, with many changes, have to this day). The elaborateness of the electorate per se had little discernible effect on British politics. Indirectly, however, the Reform Act of 1867 had an spacious effect. It made parliamentary elections much little personal and more "political." Especially in the countryside, traditional landowner influence had remained rife in elections, giving them a semifeudal air. The expansion of the electorate led to the increasing formation of party organizations  one, in a slur at "Americanstyle" politics, was called the Birmingham caucus (Feuchtwanger, 1985, p. 48).

local anaesthetic ties of a traditional sort increasingly gave way to organizational "political" ties.

As a conservative, Benjamin Disraeli held even less sympathetic likings towards universal suffrage. He was generally skeptical towards electoral reform, on grounds that it energy further the notion of " cumulation sovereignty"  unacceptable, in his view  and would also be dim to the "territorial principle" (Bradford, 1982, p. 259). That is, too much reform might move in the direction of "one man, one vote," and reach out to the wholesale shifting of traditional constituency boundaries  as shocking an idea to Disraeli as the shifting of state boundaries to ensure "one man, one vote" in the Senate would be to a conservative American constitutionalist.

Feuchtwanger, E. J. (1985). Democracy and Empire: Britain 18651914. London: Edward Arnold.

In one critical way, however, British attitudes and values differed fundamentally from those of the United States. The Founding Fathers were not, per se, "democrats," further the democratic ideal took hold quickly and strongly in the United States. "White manhood suffrage" was both fact and ideology in the U.S. from Jackson's day on. After the Civil War, the
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