Undoubtedly, the most visible aspects of the anti-Poor Law movement were the attacks on the workhouse system and the centralized control (more apparent than real) of the Poor Law Commissioners. These were highly emotional issues capable of galvanizing thousands of men and women into dramatic and sometimes violent encounters with government, armed with righteous denunciations of the “Poor Man's Robbery Bill,” the “Bastilles,” and the “Three Bashaws of Somerset House.” But there was another facet to the opposition to the New Poor Law which has received scant attention from historians—the fight against the blatantly undemocratic electoral system created by the act. This article examines the nature of that system and the sporadic attempts to reform it during a sixty-year period, culminating in the radical reforms made by the Local Government Act of 1894.

The constitution and electoral system of the Boards of Guardians were vital components of the New Poor Law, which ensured the dominance of many Poor Law Unions by landed magnates. The key provisions were plural votes for landowners and occupiers for elected guardians, and ex-officio membership of the boards for county magistrates. The landowner's franchise was taken directly from William Sturges-Bourne's Select Vestries Act of 1818, which conferred one vote for land of £50 annual value, and an additional vote for each £25 beyond this, to a maximum of six. A separate occupier franchise was in force until 1844. It gave one vote for land valued up to £200, two votes for land of £200 to £400, and three votes for land over £400, and was the result of a compromise.

There is a well-established notion among Irish and British historians that local self-government began in Ireland in 1898, when the Local Government Act created the system of elective county councils to replace the old grand jury system in the government of the counties. The grand juries, it is well-known, were instruments of the Irish “landed interest”—the gentry and aristocracy—whose dominance over these bodies was protected by a rigid system of property qualifications and appointing procedures that admitted only trustworthy landowners to the jury seats. Since only the juries were empowered to levy and expend the county tax known as the “cess,” they were therefore also able to dominate the lesser county authorities, the county and baronial presentment sessions, through control of the purse. When the 1898 act abolished this aristocratic system and replaced it with a new system of representative county and district councils, the result was a de facto transfer of power in local government from the old landowning class to the peasantry. This view, which was first promoted by the founders of the 1898 act, has been repeated by numerous historians since then, and for lack of evidence to the contrary it prevails today.

Willian O'Brien, the nationalist M.P. and editor of the Parnellite newspaper United Ireland, might well have disputed this view if he were alive today. As a practicing politician who understood well the ways in which power can be exercised, he was more inclined to look at the practical operations of public bodies rather than their constitutions to determine which party held the real power. In his Recollections, which were published in 1905, O'Brien reminisced about the turbulent years of the great “land war” of 1879-1882 and recalled how, in 1882, that historic struggle between Irish landlord and tenant for control of the soil focused for a time in a struggle for control of the Irish boards of guardians, the 163 bodies which administered the Irish poor law in the localities.

David Lloyd George's reputation and political position seemed unassailable in 1918. Lord Beaverbrook, perhaps somewhat extravagantly, wrote of that period:

Not the least praised of all his works during the First World War was the formation between May 1915 and June 1916, of the Ministry of Munitions. In the eyes of many Britons, he had patriotically given up the prestigious and powerful Chancellorship of the Exchequer to take up the burden of munitions production when the shortage of shells and guns seemed to frustrate the British military effort. Some time thereafter the necessary armaments appeared, and the Minister and his associates shared in the popular acclaim. The apparent early success of the Ministry of Munitions helped to propel him from the Munitions Office in Whitehall Gardens to Number 10 Downing Street itself. Peter Lowe has written in his recent evaluation of this episode of Lloyd George's career:

The erosion of his political position after the war and the long period of his eclipse gave opportunity for critics to revise the popular view of the career which had received so much applause.

Professor Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her stimulating essay, “The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham,” examines Bentham's projected prison, the Panopticon, in order to reassess prevalent views of Philosophical Radicalism and its founder. She rightly directs attention to the central importance of the Panopticon in Bentham's doctrine, but her interpretation of its significance is, I believe, wide of the mark.

The major object of Ms. Himmelfarb's essay is to note and explain the extraordinary personal involvement—the obsession—of Bentham with this his most cherished project. Bentham not only waged a battle with Parliament stretching across decades to win acceptance of his plan; but, more importantly, he intended that he himself become the first warden of his novel prison. In later years, he still could not reconcile himself to defeat. Ms. Himmelfarb sees in the warden Bentham's alto ego. Bentham's scheme places the warden, the contract manager, at the literal center of the Panopticon. Invisible and apparently omniscient, all power is vested in him without any formal regulatory authority reserved to the government. The contract manager is absolute within his realm. Ms. Himmelfarb concludes that such a striking departure from conventional penal principles indicates a plan tailored to suit the personal needs and wishes of its author. There is “a poetic Tightness' to Bentham's attempt personally to play the part he had written for himself. Even if this touch were lacking, “one would be tempted to assume” psychological identification. However, Ms. Himmelfarb is able to give only one specific meaning to this identification she so rightly intuits: the Panopticon is a design for the unmitigated economic exploitation of an unfortunate few for the pecuniary advantage of society in general and the warden, Jeremy Bentham, in particular.