nation.1 Similar tactics were adopted with equal success in 1883.2 The member for Brighton ventured to introduce an amendment on the machinery of the closure; the amendment was unacceptable to the party as a whole, but there were certain Liberal members whose support it seemed likely to secure. The Federation accordingly took action. 'Resolutions, appeals, remonstrances, warnings, rained down upon the heads of the unhappy members who were thought about to stray,' and the amendment in question was thrown out."

Enough has been said to illustrate what is hardly open to dispute-the conversion of the representative of a constituency into its obedient and passive delegate. Admitted as a candidate only by the choice and approval of the Caucus, controlled by the opinion of his constituents instead of guiding them by his own, he is returned to support a programme to which he is previously pledged, and for any deviation from which he is held to be guilty of a breach of trust.

But this transformation, important as it is, is no more than an inevitable corollary of the whole process of development which it has been the object of this chapter to expound. By successive extensions of the franchise, and concomitant abolition of tests, both of property and of residence; by

1 Fourth Report, pp. 14, 15.

2 Nineteenth Century, vol. xi., p. 962; and Fifth Report (1882), pp. 10, 11.

the restriction of bribery; by the introduction of the ballot; and, lastly, by the party organisation which has been at once the cause and the effect of these, a House, which even after 1832, was mainly controlled by the landed aristocracy, has been converted into a democratic chamber, returned by something approaching to universal suffrage.. And so far is it from the fact that this conversion has been opposed by the governing class, that it may almost be said that they led the way. No doubt it would have become impossible, in time, to resist the movement of opinion; but they made no attempt to resist; on the contrary, they were eager to forestall it. It was at a season of general apathy that they introduced the first of their series of Reform Bills; and the Act of 1867, which finally determined the democratic policy, anticipated, rather than lagged behind, the opinion of the average man. Nothing, therefore, could be more mistaken than the idea that the aristocracy have obstructed reform, or that they have conceded it only under the pressure of an overwhelming popular demand. In 1884, it is true, such pressure was brought to bear; but it is 1867, not 1884, that is the turning-point of the movement; and the Bill of 1867 was introduced not so much in deference to public opinion, as in pursuance of a series of measures which had originated in the House itself, and in redemption of the voluntary pledges of a succession of governments.

On the other hand, it was never the intention of those who initiated reform that it should lead to the point at which we are actually arrived. То admit to the electorate competent citizens, and to the House representatives of all the interests of the country, was the only object of Whigs and Tories alike; and if in pursuance of that policy they are being led by degrees to manhood suffrage, that was by no means the end they desired to reach. Still less did they intend or anticipate such a preponderance of the representative House as would endanger the functions and the existence of the House of Lords. They believed in the theory of the constitution as a balance of the three powers, even while they were doing their best to render its realisation impossible; and what they really effected was not only not part of their plan, but was in direct antagonism to their principles and their will.

If, then, we review the process from 1832 to 1884, it may be presented briefly somewhat as follows:-A governing class in which the landed aristocracy is the preponderant influence, retaining its substantial power, but shaken in its tradition and its faith, without the deliberate intention to move, or at least to move towards a definite end, has yet by mere absence of conviction been unable to stand still. Torn up from its root of prescription it has not succeeded in fixing itself afresh. Confronted not by superior force, nor by irresistible popular pressure, but by a general trend of opinion

with which it was partly in sympathy, it yielded because it contained in itself no principle of resistance. Motion, in the abstract, it admitted; of the velocity and the direction it lost control. The limits and checks it was prepared to impose it was equally prepared to abandon; and without determination, without approval, almost without perception, it abdicated its functions to a democracy against which it had never ceased to protest.

And the revolution above described in the central government has been accompanied, as was naturally to be expected, by a similar transformation of local institutions. To attempt anything like a history of this process, or to describe in detail the conditions actually existing, would be beyond the purpose of the present work. It is necessary, however, to supplement what has been said about the development of the House of Commons by some account of the general character and result of the corresponding changes in local administration.

Under the aristocracy the whole internal government of the country (with the important exception of the towns incorporated under charters) centred about the office of justice of the peace. This office was confined to the rich by a property qualification, and was given on the recommendation of the lord lieutenant of the county. Practically, it was exercised by the country gentlemen, so that the same class who were supreme at Westminster were also supreme in the parish and the county; and it

is to this fact that certain historians have attributed the strength and efficiency of the eighteenth century system.

For the function of the justices of the peace was not only judicial but administrative; not only did they constitute then, as they do now, the tribunal for the trial of all minor offences, but they managed the whole of the public business of the county. Hospitals and prisons, highways, forests and fisheries, the regulation of wages, the grant of licences, the supervision of the police, and generally the care of public health and discipline, all this was entrusted to the commission of the peace; and on the whole was so creditably performed that it is rare to find, even in the bitterest attacks upon the government of the aristocracy, any serious and comprehensive indictment of the probity or the capacity of the unpaid magistrate. Abuses, no doubt, there were, especially in connection with the administration of the game laws; the Allworthys, as we know from Fielding, had their foil and their complement in the Westerns; but history, on the whole, has not challenged the ancient sentence of Coke that the authority of the justice of the peace is such a form of subordinate government for the tranquillity and quiet of the realm as no part of the Christian world hath the like if the same be duly exercised.'1 In confirmation of this verdict it

1 I do not think this estimate has been seriously disputed. But of course there is much to be said by way of modification, though