Reform League
개혁동맹 (영국)
A British franchise organisation founded in February 1865 to press for manhood suffrage and the ballot. Its leadership drew heavily on members of the International Working Men’s Association such as George Howell, George Odger, Randal Cremer and Benjamin Lucraft. Its mass meetings in London in 1866–1867 helped carry the Reform Act 1867, and it was dissolved in March 1869.
In depth
In the autumn and winter of 1864–65 members of the Universal League for the Material Elevation of the Industrious Classes planned a new organisation devoted solely to manhood suffrage, and the Reform League was founded on 23 February 1865. Karl Marx was delighted at first but soon disappointed by its outlook. The barrister Edmond Beales was its president, and George Howell served as full-time secretary, paid for by a few wealthy supporters, handling its newspaper publicity and the announcements of its Executive Committee. The journalist Peter Fox sat on its executive, and Charles Bradlaugh and Thomas Mottershead were also prominent in it. Trade unionists who had supported the South in the American Civil War were excluded.
When Gladstone’s Reform Bill of March 1866 fell with the Russell–Gladstone government in June, the League organised demonstrations across the country. A meeting in Trafalgar Square on 29 June refused support for any reform bill not based on the League’s programme. At the Hyde Park meeting of 23 July, banned by the Home Secretary Spencer Walpole, the crowd pushed down the park railings and poured in; the “Hyde Park Railings Affair” made the League’s leaders household names.
By 1867 the League had one hundred branches in London alone. When the government again banned a Hyde Park meeting, 200,000 people gathered there on 6 May and the government backed down. The Reform Act passed that year gave the vote to working-class men for the first time. When Gustave Paul Cluseret, who later went to Paris for the Commune, proposed to a dozen League members that they start a civil war in England, George Odger supported him but the League rejected the plan overwhelmingly.
After the act the League kept going to watch over the Scottish and Irish representation bills and to press for the ballot. Money from the wealthy Samuel Morley sent its deputations into the 1868 general election, and leaders such as Beales, Howell and Cremer stood themselves, though none succeeded. The League was dissolved in March 1869, and some of its members went on to become Liberal MPs or activists.