Mr. Justice Denman delivered judgment on Wednesday in some cases
which seem likely to make an immense addition to the number of " householders " who possess the household franchise. The question was as to the qualification of persons occupying unfurnished rooms or a single unfurnished room in a tenement containing other families,—the occupants not depending on the services of any other inhabitant of the house ; and it was decided that such an occupation was a householder's occupation under the Act of 1878, and was not a lodger's qualification. The statement, however, of the Times, that this decision ex- pands the household qualification into something very like universal suffrage, is extravagant in the extreme. In the first place, no occupant who depends for his furniture and attendance on another family in the house is qualified as a householder, but must qualify as a lodger, and pay £10 annually. In the next place, none of the grown-up children of a father who rents the unfurnished rooms get any qualification to vote, either as householder or as lodger,—unless, indeed, they pay £10 a year to the father as a lodger. Nevertheless, the decision will add, it is said, very large numbers to the Register as household voters,—in St. Pancras alone, for instance, some 10,000 quali- fications.
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