cial life persisted, especially in the countryside, the British political system was close to that of today. Essentially universal male suffrage had been achieved; only the final step of the enfranchisement of women was wanting. The Crown, which had been restrained by Parliament in the course of the eighteenth century, but still wielded considerable real power into the nineteenth, had by the start of the twentieth been converted into the essentially ceremonial office we know today.
The political evolution of nineteenth century Britain thus spanned the range from a political order not altogether unlike that of pre Revolutionary France to one not altogether unlike that of the present day United States. The most extraordinary fact about this vast transformation is that it took place in almost entirely an orderly, legalistic fashion: while attitudes underwent a more or less steady change, institutional structures were changed in a series of specific reforms, particularly those of 1832, 1867, and 1884. Not only was the progression a peaceful one, but it was at times brokered by precisely those elements of the political Establishment that were formally most wedded to the old order: the conservatives. The notion of "progressive conservatism," or Tory Reform, was a product of this era, and most of all, perhaps, of the Reform Act of 1876.
The first great nineteenth century British parliamentary reform, that of 1832, reduced property qualifications, and eliminated some "rotten boroughs" (legal constituencies completely dominated by a single family), but only modestly extended the overall franchise. It is estimated that the 1832 reform increased the franchise by some fifty percent. By contrast, the 1867 reform, and the 1884 reform that followed, each increased the voter rolls by about eighty percent (Feuchtwanger, 1985, p. 2). In addition, in the course of the development of the Reform Act of 1867, an abortive attempt was made, led...