add members to the former at his pleasure. Accordingly the House of Commons impugned the validity of the so-called prerogative; their resistance was successful, and it was exercised no longer. In consequence, the old boroughs remained, and no new ones were added; and as, in a changing country like this, many places which were formerly large, gradually became small, and many small ones on the other hand became large, the distribution of wealth and numbers came in process of time, and by a process which no one watched, to be altogether different to the distribution of parliamentary influence. Nor was this the only way in which the inherent difficulty of finding good town constituencies in poor and rude times was artificially aggravated in our old system of representation. Not only were the best boroughs not chosen to be constituencies, but the best persons in those boroughs were not chosen to be electors. The old and complex rights of suffrage in different boroughs are antiquarian matters, on which we have not a single line of space to bestow; but they differed very much. Originally, perhaps, the right or duty had belonged or attached to all ratepaying householders; but this simple definition, if it ever existed, had long passed away, and the rights of suffrage had become most various. No short description, much less any single definition, would include them. We give those which existed in the boroughs of two counties, Somersetshire and Lancashire, to show how great the diversity was, and how many "permutations and combinations" it embraced. BRISTOL . BATH. WELLS TAUNTON BRIDGEWATER ILCHESTER MINEHEAD SOMERSETSHIRE. Freeholders of 40s. and free burgesses. Mayor, aldermen, and common councilmen only. Mayor, masters, burgesses, and freemen of the seven trading companies of the said city. Potwallers, not receiving alms or charity. . Mayor, aldermen, and twenty-four capital burgesses of the borough paying scot and lot. Alleged to be the inhabitants of the said town paying scot and lot, which the town called potwallers. The parishioners of Dunster and Minehead, being housekeepers in the borough of Minehead, and not receiving alms. MILBORN PORT. The capital bailiffs and their deputies, the number of bailiffs being nine, and their deputies being two; in the commonalty, stewards, their number being and the inhabitants thereof paying scot and two; lot. LANCASHIRE. LANCASTER . . Freemen only. WIGAN CLITHEROE LIVERPOOL PRESTON. . Free burgesses. Freeholders, resident and non-resident. Mayor, bailiffs, and freemen not receiving alms. Generally speaking, we may perhaps say that the original scot and lot (or rate-paying) qualification had been submitted to two opposite forces of alteration. By one it had been restricted to some inhabitants of the town who, by virtue of some corporate right or superintendence, assumed to themselves to be its most important and chief inhabitants. These principal persons were usually few, and they prudently contrived that their number should not be augmented. They formed themselves into self-renewing corporations: at every vacancy the remaining members filled up the place as they deemed best, and they took care no one should have votes but themselves. On the other hand, by a second process, the borough suffrage had been widened so as to include all freemen, or all inhabitant householders not paying alms; every body, in short, who could be included in it. The process of extension, as was natural, was of the two the older process. While the right of electing members was attended by the duty of paying them, it was an onerous burden, and the chief people in the place tried to extend it as far as they well could; in later times, when members were no longer paid, and political advantages were to be obtained by the skilful use of a vote, the influential people of a borough tried as much as possible to keep the parliamentary suffrage to themselves. In the last attempt they generally succeeded. The boroughs in which the people at large elected the members were, in the eighteenth century, far fewer than those in which a few persons of one sort or another elected them. The tendency of the House of Commons itself, from various causes, was rather to confine than to extend the right of suffrage. But in whichever direction the progress of time had altered what we may suppose to have been the original right of franchise, whether it had restricted it or had extended it, the effect upon the constituency was almost equally bad. If it was much narrowed, it fell into the hands of a very small number of persons, who used for their own benefit what had become a very marketable privilege; and if the franchise had been very much extended-especially if it became, as in several places it did, nearly equivalent to universal suffrage-we may readily conceive in what manner it was used, when we remember that many of the boroughs were small, that in that age corruption was thought far less disgraceful than at present, and that the poorer classes were much poorer and much more ignorant than they are now. We need not further explain the general causes which im paired the independence and purity of the ancient boroughs. As it would have been somewhat difficult to find in old times enough boroughs that were proper to choose representatives; as the best had not been chosen, perhaps had not been searched for; as in the actual boroughs the best people to be voters had not been selected as such; as in most of them the electing constituency was very small,-it is no wonder that most of these boroughs fell more or less under the control of some rich man or some rich men, who considered the franchise of the borough a part of their own property. With the counties the case was somewhat different; as yet there was no Chandos clause, the forty-shilling freehold was as yet the only title to a vote. Yeomen with such freeholds were as yet numerous, in many counties very numerous, and were still sturdy and independent. The inferior gentry were not always much disposed to submit to the dictation of lord or duke. In the last century, the county franchise was always considered as the free and independent element; those who wished to purify the legislature, always proposed to augment that element, and saw no other means of obtaining what they wished for. But even the counties were in former times far less independent than, from the nature of the legal franchise, from the paper description of it, we should suppose. Our county society has always been an aristocratic society; and in the last century aristocracy was a power of which it is difficult in these days of free manners and careless speech to realise the force. Society had then, far more than now, a simple, regular, recognised structure; each class had its place: it looked up to the classes above it; it would have thought it wrong to vie with them, or even to imitate them. Each class was to a certain extent independent; each went its own way on its own affairs, attended to the transactions of its own calling and the details of its own life: but each had a tendency, such as we can hardly now imagine, to be guided, impelled, and governed by those who were above them on all questions and in all matters which concerned or seemed to concern all classes equally. The real distinction between classes, too, was then an infinitely greater one than it is now. The aristocratic class was the most educated class, had access to the best society; was, as a whole, by far the most polished and cultivated class in the nation. For good and for evil, noblemen had a power then to which there is nothing comparable, scarcely any thing analogous, now. Amusing examples occur of it in the documents of the time. Thus Burke, in a memorandum on East-Indian affairs, addressed to the noblemen and gentlemen who composed the Rockingham party, proposes the following scheme: "With regard to the Bank [of England], which is the grand instrument of the court on this occasion, might it not be proper (if possible) that some of you of the greatest property should resolve to have nothing to do with their paper? There are five or six of you that would frighten them." If the territorial influence of the aristocracy was supposed to be so powerful in Threadneedle Street, we may easily suppose what it must have been in their own counties, at their own doors. The county contests of the last century had a continued tendency to become family conflicts between one noble house and another. The political questions of the day were merged in the intensity of the aristocratic, and perhaps hereditary feud. Such was the representation of England; and it seems restricted enough: but that of Scotland was even more restricted still, and more subject to illegitimate influence. Even the stoutest defenders of the old system of representation before 1832 used to own that the Scotch system could only be defended as "part of a whole," and that taken by itself it was absurd. There were in theory in Scotland thirty county members and fifteen borough members; but the franchise had in both of them been narrowed to an almost inconceivable extent. In 1812 the whole county constituency only amounted to 1235, and the whole borough constituency to 1253. The franchise in the counties was restricted to the tenants in chief of the crown; all proprietors (the feudal law in theory still prevailed) who held from a subject were disfranchised, though a very large portion of the country was owned by them. The result was much the same as if in England the county member had been chosen, not by the 40s. freeholders, but the lords of the manor. The franchise was practically as confined in Scotland as that restriction would have made it here. The borough franchise, too, was possessed by the members of the town-councils of the various boroughs exclusively; no other persons had a share in it. The burghs were, as now, divided into districts; in each district the town-council of each burgh contained in it named a delegate, and by the majority of these delegates the member for the district was chosen. Edinburgh alone had the honour of a separate representation; and its constituency amounted in number to thirty-three. What degree of independence such small constituencies may have possessed in England or in Scotland, we cannot now accurately know. Even to those who knew the places best, it must have been sometimes difficult to determine it with accuracy. Influence is in its very nature somewhat secret; we cannot tell whence it precisely comes, by what exact channels it acts, or in what direction it is tending. Any estimate which can be formed of the degree in which the constituencies of the last century, such as we have described them, were either dependent or independent, must be very vague. The public at large knew very little on the subject; and no one took the trouble to note down in detail, and with precision, that which they did know. A general notion of the practical results may, however, be easily formed. In the year 1773, Dean Tucker observed in a letter to Lord Shelburne: "Your lordship has the command of two boroughs already; and the public shrewdly suspect that you would have no qualms of conscience against commanding two more, or even twenty-two. Mr. Fox and Lord Holland's family command one; the late Marquis of Rockingham had at least two, which he might, and did, call his own; and were I to proceed after the same manner throughout the peerage and the great landed interest, also the commercial and the manufacturing interest of the realm, perhaps I might enumerate not less than two hundred, namely boroughs and cities, and even counties, whose voters choose representatives and return members to parliament more according to the good-will and pleasure of those who have the ascendency over them than according to their own private judgments or personal determinations." As there were at that time no Irish members, the number of members of parliament was 558; and as almost all constituencies had then two members each, this estimate would give about 400 to the class of nominated and dependent members, and about 158 to that of the independent. This calculation, rough as it evidently is, and imperfect as the data for making it evidently were, corresponds sufficiently well with a very elaborate calculation made forty years later: Members returned by 87 peers in England and Wales 21 36 Scotland 218 31 51 300 Members returned by 90 commoners in England and Wales 137 • The above estimate is taken from Er. Oldfield's Representative History, a work in many respects entitled to respect, but by no means impartial. The representation of Ireland, though not free from great defects, had been exceedingly improved at the time of the union with England. |