in this petition-for the variety of right of election.' And so able a man and so convinced a reformer as Francis Horner writes (1809): 'I see a good deal of practical benefit result, even to the interest of liberty and popular rights, from the most rotten parts of the constituent body.' 2

The House of Commons then, upon the aristocratic view, was not, and never had been intended to be, a sort of arithmetical machine for counting heads; and, upon the same principle, its members were not conceived as mere symbols of such and such a quantitative value. A member was not a delegate;/he was a representative. This House,'

said Sir Robert Inglis in 1832, 'is not a collection of deputies, as the States-General of Holland and as the assemblies in some other continental countries. We are not sent here day by day to represent the opinions of our constituents. Their local rights, their municipal privileges we are bound to protect; their general interests we are bound to consult at all times; but not their will, unless it shall coincide with our own deliberate sense of right.' 3 It followed that, even supposing the House of Commons should find itself for a time in opposition to the people, this was not necessarily either a contradiction or an evil. It proceeded, naturally enough, from the true theory of

1 Speeches, ed. 1836, vol. iv., p. 343.

2 Mem. and Corr. of Francis Horner, vol. i., p. 494.
Hansard, vol. ii., pp. 1095-6.

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the constitution, and might well be an advantage rather than the reverse.1 The House was representative of the people, but only in the long run; meantime, temporary discrepancies would occur, but these there was no particular reason to regret.

So far we have been considering the view held by the aristocracy of the relation of the House of Commons to the people; but the Commons had a further relation to the other branches of the Government, to the Crown and to the House of Lords. And here, too, what appeared as an anomaly, when considered by itself and apart, was regarded as necessary and normal, when considered in its relation to the whole. The influence of the Crown and of the Peers in the elections to the Commons would, indeed, have been an absurdity had the latter been supposed to be an independent body. But, in fact, it was not; it was one member of a trinity; and its partial determination by the other factors in the scheme was precisely the condition of harmony between what would otherwise have been conflicting and discordant powers. As the Duke of Wellington expressed it with his habitual common sense : There is no man who considers what the government of King, Lords, and Commons is, and the details of the manner in which it is carried on, who must not see that government will become

impracticable when the three branches shall be separate, each independent of the other, and uncontrolled in its action by any of the existing influences.'1

The theory which has thus been briefly analysed was that held by all sections of the governing class,2 and it was only within its limits that the divergence on the question of reform came in. To Tories, on the one hand, the system, exactly as it was, was as good as a system possibly could be; it was 'our present happy constitution-the happiest, the best, and the most noble constitution in the world, and I do not believe it possible to make it better.' 3 Any change must be a change for the worse, nay, it must be the prelude to a radical subversion, for there was no principle authorising reform which would not also authorise revolution. Even Canning here is substantially at one with the rank and file of the party. If this House,' he says, 'is not all that we could wish it, I would rather rest satisfied with its present state than, by endeavouring to remedy some small defects, run the hazard of losing so much that is excellent.'* And this attitude of the Tories was also that of

1 Hansard, vol. vii., p. 1202.

2 No doubt there were individual exceptions. The Duke of Richmond, for example, proposed in 1780 a measure of manhood suffrage.

3 The Lord Justice Clerk in the Trial of Muir, 1793. State Trials, vol. xxiii., p. 132.

one school of the Whigs. Burke, on this point, may be classed with Wellington and Peel. For though he admitted, it is true, that if ever the time should come when the people should really be set upon reform, it would then be necessary to concede it, yet, clearly, he considered such a contingency to be as improbable as it would be disastrous. Of administrative reform, within the limits of the established system, he was an avowed and active champion; but to any alteration in the franchise he was consistently opposed. 'Our representation,' he said, 'has been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or devised. I defy the enemies of our constitution to show the contrary.' And so profoundly was he convinced not only of the perfection but of the finality of the institutions of his time, that he does not hesitate to add: We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.'1

But, on the other hand, there was another school of Whigs who, without impugning the general theory of the constitution, yet conceived that it might be possible and even necessary to modify it in detail. Institutions, in their view, must change with the change of circumstances ; such had, in fact, been the maxim of the past, and Reflections on the French Revolution.

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they were the true Conservatives who applied it to the present. The greatest innovation,' according to Fox, that could be introduced in the constitution of England, was to come to a vote that there should be no innovation in it. The greatest beauty of the constitution was, that in its very principle it admitted of perpetual improvement, which time and circumstances rendered necessary. It was a constitution, the chief excellence of which was that of admitting a perpetual reform '1 (1792).

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To Whigs who examined from this point of view the practical working of the constitution, it appeared, not indeed that its structure was vicious or unsound, but that in the course of time it had developed certain definite abuses which admitted of equally definite remedies. The evil as it was analysed by the Whig reformers centred about one. point, the influence of the crown and the ministry. It was during the latter years of the American war that this abuse began to make itself felt. The war, in its later development, was at once unpopular and calamitous; it was continued, against the clear sense of the nation, by the personal influence of the king, exercised through the minister and his bought majority; and it ended in the loss of the American colonies. These were the facts that gave rise to the reform agitation of 1780. The executive had been clearly at variance with the nation, and equally clearly it

1 Speeches, vol. iv., p. 410.

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