122

THE CONDEMNED BOROUGHS.

XXX.

WHENEVER Lord John Russell read out the name of a condemned borough, there was a laugh. The representatives of the condemned borough laughed perhaps in defiance, perhaps to scoff at the simplicity of the little gentleman who seemed to think he could destroy the thing menaced. Hitherto the prevalent notion had been that, whenever a borough-monger slipped into scandal, the franchise would be transferred to a big town. It now seemed quixotic to bind these sticks into a faggot and try to break it. There is safety in numbers, and a hundred sham burgesses herding together seemed to assure one another. Although Mr. Smith was eager to sacrifice Midhurst, and Lord Radnor snapped his fingers at his nominees, who came from the sheepcotes of Wiltshire, and were called the burgesses of Downton, it was not to be imagined that 'society' would humour a parcel of theorists so far as to tamper with the rights of property where owners were not eccentric. The further Lord John Russell advanced, the louder was the taunting merriment of a certain titled person who sat over against him, to whom no doubt he seemed a mere butt for men of the world. When he had done with his list or schedule of boroughs to be wholly destroyed, and the shorter list of boroughs which were to be half abolished, his grave statements and his stiff peroration were taken like a sermon, and he sat down in profound silence. Then most of the

SIR ROBERT INGLIS'S ARGUMENT.

123

members went out of the House to talk over the details.1

No attempt was made to follow up the scoffing by a peremptory refusal to let the Bill be read. It was probably thought by Sir Robert Peel improper to baulk the gentleman who had turned him out of Oxford. Sir Robert Inglis had prepared a decorous and plausible speech, and he was the first to argue against Reform. He said that in earlier ages, when the representative system was from time to time altered by the Government, some populous towns were passed over. But no Reformer had ever been so strong an admirer of antiquity as to say that there ever was an age in which writs were issued on a fixed principle, or with minute attention to the growth of towns. It was known that in the stupid centuries rough, honest attempts had been made to gather for council fair samples of the king's lieges, and that the Crown trusted to the sheriff's to levy a Parliament just as an army was levied; that the harder heads and more compact governments of the sixteenth century assigned places in the House of Commons, like monopolies or garrisons, to courtiers and their friends; that the Stuarts tried to get manageable burgesses through corporations; that the Hanoverians cherished the close boroughs as a counterpoise to the Tory counties; that the Liberals who strove against Lord North perceived that liberty was endangered by the scarcity of represented towns and

1 He sat down in a profound silence.' So says Sir Denis le Marchant (Althorp's Life, p. 298, published in 1876). He sat down amidst loud and prolonged cheering from all sides.' So says Mr. Molesworth (History of England, vol. i. p. 85, edition published in 1876).

124

PEERAGE BY TENURE RIDICULED.

of sufficiently represented counties; and that the next generation swallowed borough-mongering as an antidote to Jacobinical democracy. It was known that in former times the nation meant, and believed itself, to be represented; but no one pointed to any Parliament as being free from gross anomalies.

Sir Robert Inglis amused himself and the readers of newspapers with scraps of archæology. He 'believed' that a writ had been issued to Old Sarum by Edward I. 'to please some Earl of Salisbury.' He said there was a tradition' that Manchester contained five thousand four hundred inhabitants two hundred years before the year 1580, when it certainly contained that number; as if statistics were a matter of tradition; as if a town were likely to have exactly the same population at both ends of a period of two hundred years. He spoke without apology of hereditary membership by tenure. The Pitt, who was famous for owning a diamond to which he gave his name, had bought the fictitious borough of Old Sarum; therefore Pitt's heir was to sit in the Commons, as the owner of Arundel Castle sat with the Peers. Now this peerage by tenure was not quite safe to rest on; for Lord Eldon, not long ago, when he heard Lord Segrave claiming the Berkeley peerage by tenure of Berkeley Castle, had asked contentiously what would be the result if the lord, being in debt, assigned the castle to his tailor; would the tailor sit with the Peers? And Lord Eldon's question was soon to be cited by way of analogy against the holding of a seat in the Commons by

POLITICAL IGNORANCE OF SIR ROBERT INGLIS. 125

tenure; nor was there an authority to be compared with Lord Eldon's.

Sir Robert Inglis, though he represented one of the three learned bodies which had representatives, was so ignorant of the rationale of politics as to say that Lord John Russell, on his own principles, was bound to consider a hundred voters as justified in refusing taxes if a hundred and one voters in the same place disagreed with them in choosing a member. Since such was the ignorance of a great Protestant churchman, allied with scholars, and himself tinctured with learning, it may be, fifty years later, worth while to point out that Lord John Russell would, on his own principles, be bound to say to the minority, when beaten by what Sir Robert Inglis erroneously called a casting vote: You have no grievance; the man chosen by those who have outnumbered you is your representative; make the best of him; if he votes sometimes against your opinion, argue with him and his supporters; if you cannot convince them that they err, wait for the next election, and take care you are not the minority then; meanwhile pay taxes cheerfully, as you pay when you have lost a game of cards. The majority which has beaten you must for this turn be taken to be your town; it is not a fixed, unchangeable body. You have had a fair chance of making your opinion prevail. Some one will die, some one will come of age, some one will change his mind. But if you are beaten all your lives, yet you have no grievance.' 1

1 See Part I. p. 198, note.

126

INCAPACITY OF LAWYERS AS STATESMEN.

Sir Charles Wetherall denounced the scheme as 'corporation robbery.' Being a lawyer he probably knew that at common law,' that is in the absence of statutes, the franchise in a borough belonged to every householder, and that the limitation to a select and perpetual college or corporation had not been anywhere given by statute; that no charter given to a corporation, before the Stuart age, contained a grant from the Crown of power to control parliamentary elections. Being a lawyer he could not be asked to look at tendencies like a statesman. It may be said that England differs from France, Italy, and the United States, in that her Bar has not been a nursery of statesmen, and that in the age which proved and displayed her political sagacity, habits of legal reasoning actually disqualified her advocates for guiding her Parliaments.1

Sir Robert Peel asserted that the main tendency of borough-mongering was to give the fittest men the earliest opportunities of showing their legislative capacity; that by their conduct when sitting for close boroughs some twenty members, the most conspicuous in sixty years, earned the confidence of popular bodies of voters, and, when they lost their favour, escaped deprivation by taking refuge in the sanctuaries from which they had emerged. These examples, he thought, were so numerous as to be not accidents but regular consequences.

1 Mr. O'Connell examined the list of sixty boroughs marked for destruction, and found that in sixteen only was the franchise engrossed by corporations. He might as well have added that corporations were maintained to carry on the small business of their towns, not for purposes of wider range.