WIDENING ACTS, THE, the two statutes of 1832 and 1885 by which the Commonwealth's franchise, restricted since 1660 by property qualifications the Frame (q.v.) itself had left to ordinary statute rather than fixed in the constitutional text, was twice substantially enlarged. The First Widening Act, of 1832, lowered the property qualification in the Home Provinces to a figure this contributor's own tables find brought roughly two men in five of full age onto the rolls who had stood outside them before, breaking, in the same session, the planting interest's long grip upon the unreformed Senate apportionment and passing, by no coincidence this contributor is aware any historian has seriously disputed, in the same year as the Act of Relief of the Old Religion that completed the Public Profession (q.v.)'s own long widening. The Second Widening Act, of 1885, removed the property qualification very nearly altogether, establishing what this Commonwealth's own statute books still call, not quite accurately, "near- universal manhood suffrage" — near-universal because the qualification retained for paupers in receipt of parish relief excludes a small but persistent fraction of adult men, and manhood suffrage because the Act's own framers declined, after debate this contributor's colleagues in the Assembly's own archive describe as brief rather than exhaustive, to extend the franchise to women, a question examined at the length it deserves under TRIBESWOMEN'S PETITION, THE.
The general reader will occasionally encounter, in less careful accounts than this article proposes to be, a reference to three occasions on which the men's franchise has been enlarged rather than two, the third generally dated to 1867; the reference is not, on this contributor's close reading of the statute books, mistaken so much as imprecise. The Third Frame (q.v.) of that year declared the franchise of the freedmen of the southern provinces established on the same footing as any other subject's — a genuine enlargement of the franchise in law, and one this contributor does not think it right to pass over — but the declaration was carried as a clause of the Third Frame's own general reorganisation of the legislature rather than as a dedicated widening statute, and this Commonwealth's own clerks have accordingly never entered it in the register the Widening Acts properly occupy, whatever its practical kinship to the two Acts that do. The reader wishing the fuller and less flattering history of how faithfully that 1867 declaration has in fact been honoured in the provincial circuits it was chiefly meant to bind is referred, as this article's own two subjects more happily are not, to FREEDMEN'S CHARTER, THE. (E. H. V.)