Excerpt from A History of Constitutional Reform in Great Britain and Ireland: With a Full Account of the Three Great Measures of 1832, 1867, and 1884 Now that the Reform Act of 1884 - one of the charters of British freedom, has been secured, it may not be unfit ting to inquire what it means, what it is worth, who have fought for it, and how it has been won. It is not much more than half a century since this great empire was really' governed by a few thousands - by a mere oligarchy and now we find that the political power of the country has been transferred to five millions of our fellow-countrymen, being perhaps three-fourths of the manhood of the nation. It is the object of these pages to present a short review of the successive reforms by which this emancipation was effected. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.