Sir, I rise to submit to you the Motion of which I have given notice, respecting the mode of taking votes at elections for Members of Parliament: and I do so with peculiar satisfaction and encouragement, after the very weighty petition which has just been presented. It is my intention to move that the votes be taken by Ballot, instead of openly.

Aware, as I am, of the interest which this question excites amongst many of your constituencies, in all parts of the country, I could have wished that it had been taken up by some gentleman abler and more practised in the business of this House, than I can boast of being. But though many persons might be found better qualified to do justice to the subject, there is none who takes in it a warmer or a deeper interest. My conviction of the necessity of a secret suffrage, and of the gross mischiefs inseparable from an open suffrage, is now of long standing: and all subsequent reflection upon the matter - all enlarged acquaintance with the detail of elections - has only tended to confirm and corroborate that opinion.

But, Sir, though I feel strongly the importance of the change which I am urging, I should have hesitated in bringing it forward, if it had violated or contravened in any way the principles of the great measure of Reform passed last year - a measure to which I cannot allude without my humble tribute of gratitude and admiration. The noble Lord who first brought forward the measure, in 1831, glanced in his opening speech at the question of the Ballot, with the express view of stating that he pronounced no opinion either for or against it, and that it must be reserved for consideration at some more appropriate season....

Sir, it was with reference to this end that you last year re-organized your constituent body; you gave it a new form, you increased it in number, and you distributed it into new classes and detachments. You discarded the ancient constituency, because it was not calculated to secure to you a Legislature possessing the confidence of the people; you created a new constituency, specially adapted for that express object. I call upon you now to review your mode of taking votes upon the same simple, precise, and momentous principle. I call upon you, no less in consistency with your own professed aim, than with a view to the settlement of a most important question, to consider - whether you are most likely to obtain a Legislature possessing the confidence of the people by taking the votes of electors secretly or openly? And further - whether the benefits promised by the Reform Bill may not be intercepted and nullified, by an unwise or mischievous method of taking; votes?

You are aware, that secret suffrage is preferred in France, and in twenty out of the twenty-four states of the American Union; open suffrage has been hitherto the practice in your un-reformed parliamentary elections. But, however happily an open suffrage may have chimed in with that borough-holding ascendancy, under which your unreformed Parliament was cast, I think I shall be able to show you, that secret suffrage is the only arrangement compatible with the genius and purposes of Parliament, as it has now been reformed.

Sir, the Reform Bill has given you a numerous and intelligent constituency, amounting perhaps to something near a million of voters.... What if the Bill had numbered all the tenants on a great man's estate, and all occupiers of houses under him, as so many lip-voters, necessary, indeed, as mechanical instruments for transmitting his will to the hustings, but legally incapable of expressing any other determination than his? What if it had imposed on all clerks, or journeymen, or labourers, the obligation of voting in the way that their masters prescribed, under the sanction of a pecuniary fine in case of disobedience?

Sir, if any one of such enormities had been comprised in the Reform Bill, it would have been torn in pieces amidst the execrations of the whole community. Tories, Whigs, and Radicals, would have denounced it with one unanimous voice; there would not have been one single hand held up, from any political party, in favour of this abolition of the right of private judgment even amongst the humblest portion of the electors. No one would then have talked of the right of the landlord to control the votes of his tenants, in recompense for the permission granted to them of residing upon his land. Every man would have been full of indignation at the bare thought of according a vote without formal liberty of disposing of it.

But it is not by law alone that the freedom of voting can be subverted. That same state of biassed, dependent, and subjugated voting now exists among you, in full malignity, by the mere force of natural causes. What need is there to enact by law, that the landlord shall have power over the vote of his tenant? The landlord has himself the power of enforcing his own dictation, and of inflicting a penalty on disobedience, much more serious than any which the law would provide rejectment from house and home. What necessity is there to decree, that customers shall have power over the votes of their tradesmen, and employers over the votes of their labourers? The power exists as surely, and the penalty is as imminent and as terrible, whether you legalise it or not...

Throughout the county elections, you have the landlord putting the word into the mouth of his tenants, for whom they shall vote, and against whom they shall vote. In the towns, you have the rich customers sending round circulars to their tradesmen, and exercising a similar constraint, by plain hints of the impending consequences, if the circular remains unheeded... In many cases, even the semblance of request is dispensed with; the employer promises away the votes of his labourers without the ceremony of asking them; or a large body of the population of a town are seen signing peremptory declarations of exclusive dealing, thus threatening poverty and ruin to any tradesman whose conscience may lead him to vote against them. All these are manifold results of the same great cause: interference and coercion left open by your present system. Many a voter, too, evades this collision between his duty and his interest, by refusing to register his name or by keeping away from the poll; and you have thus a large self-inflicted disfranchisement, resulting purely from the unguarded condition of the voter.

Now, Sir, whence arises this power of constraining the votes of others, exercised amongst us with such deplorable effect? We need not investigate its various sources, for there is one condition indispensable to its agency - I mean the publicity of votes. However hardly the hand of power may bear on a voter in other ways, it will not reach his vote, if he votes in silence and darkness. Secrecy of voting, and freedom of voting, are necessary and inseparable companions: where the one is, there will the other be also; and conversely, where the one is not, the blessings of the other will never be known...

Gentlemen do indeed argue, that though an elector's vote may be concealed, his political feelings will be known from other evidences. Suppose they are known: I contend that his vote will be just as much emancipated as if they were not known. He may be punished or rewarded for any overt expression of his sentiments; he cannot be punished or rewarded for his unseen vote. I, as a landlord, may, if I please, eject a tenant for real or suspected political sentiments; but I cannot eject him for an unknown vote, and, therefore, I cannot create in bun any motive to vote against his conscience. "This is the direct and specific virtue of the Ballot, that it destroys all motive for an elector to falsify his sentiments at the poll, because, under no circumstances can he attract favour or avert injury by doing so. Nobody will give him credit for a vote contrary to his sentiments, when nobody can possibly know how his vote was really given.

Others, again, there are who object to the Ballot, not on the score of inefficacy, but from pure dislike of secrecy in general. It leads (they tell you) to mendacity and promise-breaking: for a tenant, after having promised his vote to his superior, may break his promise with impunity, and vote against him at the poll.

Now, Sir, it is very true that a tenant, voting by Ballot, may thus break his promise: But why should you suppose that he will do so? There can be but one answer: because the promise has been given contrary to his genuine and conscientious feeling. In no other case can he be tempted to violate it. For had it been given of his own free-will, and coincident with his judgment and conscience, he would feel pleasure in performing it, and pain in violating it, whether performance were open or secret. The mere supposition, therefore, that the voter will be disposed to break his promise, implies that he has promised contrary to his genuine inclination, and therefore by some extraneous force or compulsion. It is from these compulsory promises alone that the chance of promise-breaking arises.

Mr. Grote said, that he should not detain the House long; nor should he have troubled it all had he not been intrusted with a petition praying for the repeal of the duties that were now the subject of discussion. He certainly entertained very strong feelings on the subject, for he attributed a great deal of the bad feeling that was at present abroad amongst the labouring classes, on the subject of wages, to the want of proper instruction, and correct information as to their real interests. From the absence of this useful knowledge, which could never be conveyed to the people while the present system of Stamp-duties prevailed, arose all the evils of the Unions that now disturbed that proper harmony that ought to subsist amongst the labouring classes in the relations of masters and workmen; and, he was sorry to say, that he feared those Unions were likely to increase and spread wider, rather than to subside. If there were proper channels through which the real interests of those men and the position in which they stood, could be fairly and candidly stated to them, they might very soon have their minds disabused of the erroneous notions as to wages which they now entertained and acted upon, but this could never be accomplished so long as the present Stamp-laws continued. He looked upon this as one of the most important subjects that could be brought under the consideration of the Government, not much less so than that very important measure respecting the Poor-laws which the noble Lord had introduced to the House. Nothing could be more important than instructing the people, and opening their minds to a proper view of their own and the country's interests. He should not prolong the discussion further than to observe, that he was sure, if the noble Lord would only exercise a little of that ingenuity which was supposed to belong to all Chancellors of the Exchequer - he would be able very readily to find the means of supplying any deficiency in the Revenue, arising from the repeal of the Stamp-duties, to which the present Motion applied.

Not since the death of Samuel Rogers, the poet, has the country had to record the loss of a banker and a literary man in one person. Mr George Grote died on Sunday in the seventy-seventh year of his age, at his residence in Saville Row.  An ardent politician in his younger days, a ripe scholar, a gentleman, whom to know was to love and respect, few men have lived and died in such general esteem. Mr Grote was born at Beckenham, Kent, and was a pupil at Thackeray's old school, Charterhouse. He represented the City of London from 1832 to 1841; and, as an advanced Liberal, laid the foundation of the vote by ballot agitation, to which Mr Henry Berkeley succeeded as leader. Mr Grote's fame rests chiefly on his History of Greece, and he was as fond of the Greek language as was the late Lord Derby when he translated his labour of love. Two years ago, the Premier offered Mr Grote a peerage, but the great historian declined the honour, stating that his time must be dedicated to his trusteeship of the British Museum and to his office of Vice-Chancellorship of the University of London. With his political convictions it was but natural that Mr Grote should take so great an interest as he did in the Gower Street institution where his loss will be greatly felt. Unfortunately, Mr Grote has passed away, leaving but one volume of his Aristotle completed. He married, in 1820, Miss Harriet Lewin, the authoress of a Lady of Ary Scheffer Mr Grote leaves no issue, his only child, a boy, having died young.

This afternoon there will be interred in Westminster Abbey, among the illustrious dead of many generations, the remains of a great English worthy, whose reputation has fairly entitled him to that noble sepulture. A year ago there was laid in Poet's corner all that was mortal of the greatest of our English humourists. Twelve years ago there was consigned to his honoured grave in St Peter's Abbey the greatest of our English essayists; and now, on the 24th of June, 1871, a last resting-place hard by is fittingly allowed to one who ranks as high as any among the numerous throng reposing there under those grand old roof beams as a scholar, a historian, and a philosopher, George Grote, who attended eminence in those three capacities, passed a long life, nevertheless, here, in the midst of us, as a wealthy banker of London, taking the keenest interest in the affairs of his own immediate generation. While his fame rests chiefly on the fact that he told anew, as no other has ever so well related it, the history of Ancient Greece, he was a Liberal so advanced in politics, a reformer so daring and thorough, that forty years ago he stood forward as the champion of the Ballet, when secret voting was a byword, and he was regarded then by all but a very few in the House of Commons or indeed, for that matter, out of it, as a sort of Pariah among Radicals! Yet now, at the very time when, upon his expiring full of years and of honour, he is accorded the distinction of a public funeral in Westminster Abbey, that very innovation of the Ballot has been submitted at last to the consideration of Parliament in the form of a measure emanating directly from the councils of her Majesty's Government.

George Grote was born in 1794, that is, as many as seventy-six years ago, at Clayhill, near Beckenham in Kent. His father was then one of the firm of bankers originally established, more than a century past, in Threadneedle Street, where it has ever since been carried on most prosperously.

The grandfather of the historian of Greece had been one of the founders of the establishment. He had arrived in this country from Germany for the purpose of seeking his fortunes, to which end he at once became naturalised as an Englishman. His family were German, but his descendants, British born and British bred, have long ago become thoroughly Anglicised.

He studied, hardly less earnestly, finance, politics generally, and in an especial manner political economy. He thus became an advanced Liberal, a radical innovator, and a philosophic reformer. The changes he advocated were of the most daring description, and had particular reference to the expansion of the whole scheme of the national representation.  

We cannot say that we are altogether satisfied with the execution of a task so interesting, so worthy, in every way of every excellence of style that the most diligent care and the purest taste could bestow upon it, as the biography of Mrs Grote will easily understand that, speaking of a work of this kind, we feel reluctant to enter into anything that might look like carping or ungenerous criticism. There is something sacred, something of the double sanctity attached to love and to sorrow, about a wife's memoir of a husband; and when the husband is one like George Grote and the wife a lady so deeply and so deservedly respected on her own account, so doubly entitled to respect as the worthy and beloved partner of such a man, there is a peculiar difficulty in expressing any thing that sounds like censure. Still, for our own credit's sake, and in justice to our readers, we are bound to say that there are faults in their volume which jar upon us now and then with a sensation that more unpleasant that they present so remarkable a contrast to the style and tone of Mr Grote's own letters and life, to his perfect simplicity and manly abhorrence of everything affected and theatrical; little tricks of phrase, adapted apparently to enhance the importance of the subject of the memoir by reminding us at every page what a great man he was and what a great work he had achieved -  as if any one who had read the work could ever forget it - and were other errors of the same calibre, which seem to us hardly in accord either with the dignity of the subject or the general spirit of the memoir. At the same time, these are things which in a work of less merit we should have passed over as trifles unworthy of mention, making allowance for the sex and circumstances of the writer; and if we make no allowance for Mrs Grote it is because she has need of none, but  writes with an clear expression, an vigorous facility, and generally in pure a taste, as the wife and biographer of Grote ought to write…

Not only does it contain many interesting facts concerning Mr Grote's own earlier career and later opinions; the struggles and disadvantages through which he found his way to the first place among the historians of the age and country, and the ripening process ever active in his native from boyhood to old age; not only does it exhibit in an instructive light the steps by which the banker's clerk became the politician and scholar, and the charms of character and manner which made him an estimable in private life as he was honoured in politics and admired in literature.