Administration and Finance of the Reform League, 1865–1867

Abstract

In the first months of 1865 artisan and middle class Reformers in London established the Reform League with the publicly stated political goals of “manhood suffrage and the ballot”. Reflecting a new political awareness among artisan workingmen as well as a realization that workingmen and sympathetic bourgeois Reformers might achieve more when agitating together, the League resulted from experiences and associations in several recent working class and bourgeois campaigns, concerns, and agitations. London artisans, for instance, had been involved in trade unions (both amalgamated and local), the London Trades Council, Trades Union Manhood Suffrage and Vote by Ballot Association, Workingmen's Garibaldi Committee, Universal League for the Improvement of the Working Classes, and International Working Men's Association (“First International”). They also joined organizations and campaigns more closely associated with the middle classes: temperance groups, Liberation Society, National League for Polish Independence, Emancipation Society, and Ballot Society. Here the artisans met bourgeois Reformers who helped establish and finance the Reform League.