THE

BRITISH REVIEW,

AND

LONDON CRITICAL JOURNAL.

MAY, 1818.

ART. I.-ON PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.

1. The Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland, being a History of the House of Commons, and of the Counties, Cities, and Boroughs of the United Kingdom, from the earliest Period. By T. H. B. Oldfield. 6 vols. Baldwin and Co.

London, 1816.

2. Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the Form of a Catechism, with Reasons for each Article, with an Introduction, showing the Necessity of radical, and the Inadequacy of moderate Reform. By Jeremy Bentham, Esq. 8vo. pp. 406. Hunter. London,

1817.

“IT is true,” says the great Bacon, "that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit. And those things which have long gone together, are, as it were, confederate within themselves: whereas new things piece not so well; but though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity. Besides, they are like strangers, more admired and less favoured. All this is true if time stood still; which, contrariwise, moveth so round, that a froward retention of custom is as turbulent a thing as an innovation; and they that reverence old times are but a scorn to the new. It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself, which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, and by degrees scarce to be perceived; for, otherwise, whatsoever is new is unlooked for.-It is good also not to try experiments in states, except the necessity be urgent, or the utility be evident; and well to beware that it be the reformation which draweth on the

change, and not the desire of change that pretendeth the reformation. And lastly, that the novelty, though it be not rejected, yet be held for a suspect; and as the Scripture saith, that we make a stand upon the ancient way, and then look round about us, and discover what is the straight and right way, and so to walk in it."

These were the sentiments of the man who looked at least as wisely and deeply into human affairs as any before or after him. And in the preamble to the Bill of Rights, is registered the declaration of the great men who composed the councils of that era of our liberties to this effect: "That the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons then assembled at Westminster (the parliament being then composed as it is now composed) did lawfully, fully, and freely represent all the estates of the people of this realm.

When from these aphorisms of abstract and practical wisdom we turn to the pages of Mr. Oldfield's voluminous work, wherein the dogmas and propositions of modern reformers expand themselves in all their dulness and all their fury, we feel like travellers descending from a summit, from which the eye commands nature in all her real forms of substantial variety, into a lower region of mist and vapour, where false lights and deceptious magnitudes distract the vision and bewilder the fancy. Mr. Oldfield's book does at least one service to the community; it brings together, under one view, all the forms of argument which have been used against the representative system as it at present exists in prac

All the decantata, whatever has been said or sung a thousand thousand times from the Revolution to the present juncture, by political regenerators or reformers, philosophers or patriots, orators or empyrics, the deluders or the deluded, in, favour of universal suffrage and annual parliaments, aided by an aggregation of facts and particulars all conspiring, as it is presumed, to the same end, are here produced in full confidence of settling a question, which has waited for its final solution for the birth of such a genius as that which has furnished to us the subject of our present examination. How great will be Mr. Oldfield's contempt of us, when he hears, if he hears of it at all, that, with all this array of argument and fact before us, we not only remain unconvinced of the necessity or expediency of any such reform as he recommends to us, but that we deem his book so destructive of his own purpose in writing it, that, if the suspicion did not convey a compliment to his wisdom, which it does by no means deserve, we should guess the whole compilation to be intended as war in disguise against the whole host of modern reformers. If we were really enemies to all reform and all improvement,-to that reform which engrafts upon experience, and that principle of improvement which unites with the principle of con

servation, we might insidiously recommend this publication, the tendency whereof is, by its paramount silliness, to bring the very name of a thing into contempt, which, in its sober acceptation and sound application to the realities of human condition, ought to be for ever in our contemplation. But we will not make any indirect use of this author's imbecility. He might be used, to be sure, with great advantage against himself, by a wholesale recommendation of the work as it stands, with its dedicatory offering at the shrine of the Hampden Club, its denunciation of every act and thing obtruded upon us, in the course of our political history, between the Wittenagemote and Sir Francis Burdett; its derivation of our constitutional rights from the ancient Britons, and its contempt of Magna Charta, the Habeas Corpus Act, and Bill of Rights, as giving us only a portion of that liberty, which by birth and nature entirely belonged to us. But we do not wish to see too strong a counter-spirit excited against reform, or the term itself loaded with undistinguishing reproach. As the real interests of religion have deeply suffered by the use made of the term methodist, so the word reformist, by the arts and delusions practised under the pretence of reformation, may acquire a similar odium, and become equally decisive and denunciatory against every attempt at improvement. We, therefore, enter a sort of protest against this abuse of the term "reform," which is in truth as little descriptive of the real object which it is used to designate as the foolish phrase "Catholic emancipation."

The extent to which Mr. Oldfield carries his ideas of reform he is not slow in giving his readers fully to understand. He is quite sure there used to be at one period or another, no matter how remote, the exercise of an universal right of legislative interference diffusively vested in the whole population; and, according to him, a right once exercised in the earliest and rawest state of a people is to pass through all succeeding eras, in absolute defiance of all the changes and chances of mortal condition. In contending for the right of legislation in the people on this ground of primeval usage, it is not easy to see how the line of his argument connects with what his book professes to illustrate -the representative history of Great Britain. In the commune concilium which he finds to have existed among the ancient Britons, or in the Wittenagemote of the Saxons, he does not pretend to see any regular representation of the people; but he deduces a satisfactory proof of the presence of the commonalty of the kingdom at these Saxon national assemblies (it is too ridiculous to discuss the composition of the commune concilium of the Britons or the Germans), from the language of the royal edicts. He concludes, that as these decrees import to have been

made in the presence of the people, the people must have not only been auditors, but participators in all that was done or resolved at these assemblies; and that, therefore, the artisans, the peasants, and the paupers are, no less than the peers, the hereditary counsellors of the Crown.

In the year 855, Ethelpholf, King of the West Saxons, gave the tithe of his kingdom to the church by an act, the preamble of which states it to have been done with the advice of the bishops and chief men (the archbishops and bishops of all England being present and subscribing thereto, as also Beorred King of Mercia, and Edmund King of the East Angles), and of the abbots, abbesses, thanes, aldermen, and great men of the kingdom, and an infinite number of other faithful people, who all applauded the act of the King, &c. Now, says the author of this patriotic publication," Aliorumque fidelium infinita multitudo" must, and can imply nothing but an unlimited number of the community. And in the same strain of argument he reasons from similar descriptive terms in a multitude of similar edicts; while no man but a stout reformer and patriot, like the author of this sapient work, can see any thing in the language of these ordinations to prove more than the simple fact that these laws so promulgated by our Saxon ancestors were made or confirmed in assemblies of the great men who signed what the prince proposed, while the privilege enjoyed by the attendant crowd was that of vociferating applause.

To us, and probably to most of our readers, this sort of commune concilium wears but little the appearance of a representative legislation; if it prove any interference at all by the common people, it was not an interference in the way of representation, but by acclamation; and indeed, in some parts of the work before us, it seems as if the author carried his respect for the original rights of the people beyond the privilege of speaking by a representative organ, to the assertion of a power in them of pronouncing in propriis personis their catholic consent or dissent to the laws. For our parts we verily believe that if for people we were to read "vassals," and for "faithful" obsequious, we should vary but little the substantial import of these

terms.

The sense in which this author understands "people," whenever he finds that auspicious term in any of the ancient annals, is such as to favour his spirited line of politics at the expense of all reason and probability. Having discovered in Henry of Huntingdon, that Sigebert, King of the West Saxons, was expelled by the chief men and people of the whole kingdom, and Kenewolf elected in his stead, he leaps exultingly to the conclusion, that the Saxon people concurred with the nobility in

deposing one king and electing another, not in a tumultuous manner, but with a parliamentary deliberation and consent; taking care at the same time by printing "elected" in Italics, to prevent a word so big with inference from being lost upon the reader. With the same complacency this learned writer finds the elements of our constitutional freedom, and a profound argument for universal suffrage, in the practice of the Germans, as recorded by Tacitus, who says "De minoribus rebus principes consultant, de majoribus oinnes; ita tamen ut ea quoque, quorum apud plebem arbitrium est, apud principes pertrac tentur." In high spirits from this discovery of the majesty of the people among the ancient Germans, and their superiority in council and cabinet deliberation, he proceeds in his learned career to the Commentaries of Cæsar, by whom he finds it said of the same nation that "Neither hath any one a certain field, or proper boundaries; but the magistrates and chief men in every year apportion to a tribe of people, who live together, a certain quantity of land, according to their number, and after a year remove them to another place. Ut animi equitate plebem contineant, quum suis quisque opes cum potentissimis æquari videat." From this passage it were natural for such a reasoner as Mr. Oldfield to argue for the agrarian principle of distribution; but by what process of ratiocination he deduces from it an argument for the representative system of annual parliaments and universal suffrage it is very difficult to comprehend; yet he thus sums up the evidence of these classical quotations: "Hence it is not only evident that the people at large had their representation, but that the commune concilium was held once at least in every year." It is by this sort of reasoning that our author proves what he undertakes in his preface to demonstrate "that the representative system is as ancient as the establishment of civil society in the world."

This "commune concilium" of the ancient Germans and Britons we are here informed was succeeded by the Wittenagemote, or Saxon National Council; and although, to be sure, there is little trace of a representative legislation from the time of Edward the Confessor to King John, still he observes that "during that period, as far as was practicable, when the assemblies of the nation were no longer convened in open plains, none of the inferior orders of freemen residing in or near the place where the parliament met were excluded from attending it in their own persons, the number of them being only limited by the capaciousness of the building or place in which they were assembled." The author's penetrating vision then discovers to him a scot and lot system of representation until the reign of Henry VI., when by the eighth of that Prince the nation was disfranchised by the