Faced with the degradation of their institution, the House of Lords blinked. In the midst of debate fifty to sixty Tory peers walked out, Wellington in their lead, giving the Whigs their majority; and so the Great Reform Act at last was passed.64
The Reform Act extended the franchise, but stopped well short of giving everyone the vote. Only male householders living in properties worth at least £10 a year were enfranchised; even so, this increased the British electorate threefold. The new voters were the members of the middle class whom Lord Brougham memorably described as:
the genuine depositaries of sober, rational, intelligent, and honest English feeling. . . . If they have a fault, it is that error on the right side, a suspicion of State quacks—a dogged love of existing institutions—a perfect contempt of all political nostrums. . . . . Grave—intelligent—rational—fond of thinking for themselves—they consider a subject long before they make up their minds on it; and the opinions they are thus slow to form, they are not swift to abandon. 65
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