between Newcastle; course of the year Newcastle returned to the treasury. After a brief struggle for supreme control, the rivals agreed to am- division of icably divide the powers of the cabinet between them, Pitt power assuming the general direction of affairs, and Newcastle the Pitt and management of parliament, the distribution of patronage,1 and the work of corruption. Upon that strange basis of a union of all that was highest and noble with all that was selfish and last of the purely ignoble was constructed the most brilliant and the last of the Whig adpurely Whig administrations. ministra tions. house of commons representa independ mechanism town com 4. In view of the preceding statement that the modern par- Why the liamentary system would have been substantially complete before the end of the reign of George II., if the house of com- was neither mons had been at that time both representative and inde- tive nor pendent, the effort must now be made to explain somewhat in ent; detail why it was neither the one nor the other. In the first chapter devoted to the origin and growth of parliament a careful examination was made, first, of the internal mechanism of internal the shire and town communities, with special emphasis upon of shire and their peculiar methods of election and representation; second, munities; of the process through which their elected representatives were drawn together in one house, -a process that reached its completion with the assembling of Edward's model parjament of 1295, whose representative chamber embraced seventy-four knights of the shire and two hundred citizens and burgesses.2 Of the two elements that entered into the representative sys- the elastic tem, as thus constituted, one was elastic by reason of the fact the system; that under the writ directing the sheriff to return members from every city and borough in his county, he possessed the power not only to extend the right of representation to any town he saw fit to recognize, but also to ignore others equally worthy, or even such as had once enjoyed the right of electing members. The immense power thus vested in the crown to abuse by control the composition of the house of commons does not of its power seem to have been abused, however, until a motive was given to control for such abuse by its increasing importance. Then it was that house; efforts began to be made by courtiers to influence the elections by recommendations in favor of particular candidates; 2 Vol. i. pp. 445-466. 1 Jesse, Life of George III., vol. i. p. 123; Earl of Shelburne's Life, vol. i. pp. 85, 91; Todd, Parl. Government, vol. i. p. 271. 8 Ibid., p. 470. element in the crown the lower body; and, as we learn from "The Paston Letters," when it was doubted whether such means would be efficacious to secure the return of a particular candidate, the suggestion was made that "there were many decayed boroughs in England which ought to return members to parliament, but did not; and that from one of those he might be returned." In the reign preceding that in which this suggestion was made, the crown had inaugurated a new policy for the control of the borough communities that was momentous in its consequences. In 1438 first charter (18th of Henry VI.) the first charter of incorporation to a muniof incorporation to a cipal body was granted to Kingston-upon-Hull. The effect of municipal like grants that followed was greatly to accelerate the process, already advancing by virtue of natural causes, through which the right of the burgesses - that is, "the inhabitant householders resident, paying scot and lot"-to govern the communities without the aid of town councils or other representative bodies was being gradually usurped by such bodies, whose members, originally elected, perpetuated themselves in power by self-election. Thus the tendency was for the more wealthy inhabitants to take away from the inferior townsmen municipal all municipal authority by vesting it in governing bodies whose authority composition was not controlled by the suffrages of burgesses taken away and freemen. In order to give legal sanction to this process many and through which the self-elected few were drawing to themselves the power to govern the borough communities, the elected few; crown inaugurated the policy of incorporation, whereby each community was given its own constitution, in which was confirmed the right of the selected few not only to carry on the local government, but also, in many instances, to return the thorized to borough members to parliament. "By the doctrines from return the time to time applied to the artificial creation of corporations, members to the control of the select bodies and the capricious election gradually from the vested in the self who were often au borough parliament; of corporators and non-residents were gradually introduced. Those abuses arose from slight beginnings in the reign of Elizabeth, increased in the reigns of James and Charles I., —were carried to the greatest extent by the violent acts perpetrated in the reigns of Charles II. and James II., and were finally confirmed in the time of William III. and Queen Anne."1 1 For the best exposition of the whole subject, see Merewether and Stephens' Hist. of Boroughs, Introd. return such vested in council, accession of last royal charter In the charters of incorporation, which began to be issued to municipalities after the accession of the house of Tudor, the right of electing representatives in parliament was usually right to vested in the governing body styled the mayor and common members council, nominated by the crown in the first instance, and then usually perpetuated by self-election. Thus those boroughs not already mayor and under the control of the great landed proprietors became sub- after the ject to the control of the crown, acting through the local mag- the house nates known as high stewards, by whom, in many instances, of Tudor; the royal and aristocratic influence was directly exercised.1 With such an instrument in their hands, it is not strange that the sovereigns of the houses of Tudor and Stuart should have systematically pursued a policy of creating petty parliamentary boroughs, in localities where the crown had the greatest influence, for the express purpose of packing the lower house with members obedient to the royal will. Thus between the reigns of Henry VIII. and Charles II. a hundred and eighty members were added to the house of commons by royal charter,2 the last being that granted to Newark in 1673, which declared that it to be "a borough town, with power to elect and send two granted to burgesses to serve in parliament, who should be chosen by the 1673; mayor and aldermen, or the major part of them." From that time down to the Reform Bill of 1832 no new boroughs were created in England or Wales, for the reason that the house of commons then took the issuance of writs into its own hands. The house also undertook to determine, in the case of the determinaborough of Newark, that while the crown had the undoubted tion of the right to create boroughs, "upon which creation would follow as to right all the legal consequence," it did not have the right to say in that case; "who should be the voters for members of parliament." Upon that basis it held that the right of election in Newark, despite the terms of its charter, was vested in the mayor and aldermen, and "all the inhabitants who pay, or ought to pay scot and lot." And finally, in the hope of doing something to settle the endless conflicts arising out of the uncertain and confused last deterrights of election claimed in the different boroughs, the house, mination of "in the reign of William III., passed the act (7 Will. III. c. 7) should gov compelling the sheriffs to make returns from the elections cases; 1 Cf. May, Const. Hist., vol. iii. p. 279. 2 Glanville's Reports, cii.; May, Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 329, note 2. Newark in of election rule that commons ern in all tendency according to the rights which had last been determined by the house of commons. By which means the varying and anomalous usages of the different boroughs, and the contradictory decisions of committees, were sanctioned and confirmed." 1 contracting Contradictory and capricious as such determinations were, their general tendency was to still further restrict the ancient decisions; franchise, and to vest it in a still more limited number of persons. In some of the corporate towns the right to vote was vested exclusively in the governing body of the corporation, while in others, the inhabitants paying scot and lot, and freemen, or the freemen only, were permitted to vote. of such unjust distribution of borough representation; The short-sighted and selfish spirit which guided the crown in multiplying borough members precluded the possibility of that high prerogative being used for correcting deficiencies existing from the beginning in the representative system, or for adjusting the disproportion that necessarily arose as time advanced out of the unequal distribution of wealth and population. In order to make the control of the crown and nobles more complete, the rule was to give the right of sending members to parliament to inconsiderable places, afterwards notorious as nomination boroughs, without any importance of their own, and dependent for patronage and protection upon the great manu- great adjacent landowners, while cities like Manchester, Leeds, facturing and Birmingham, that rose into importance with the growth overlooked of trade and manufactures, were left entirely outside of the representative system. Thus places like Old Sarum, not larger than an ordinary hamlet, unblushingly returned the nominees of their proprietors, while many of the growing commercial cities were obliged to submit to taxation without representaCromwell's tion. The bold and statesmanlike attempt made by Cromwell reform. in 16532 to remedy such conditions by disfranchising many of the smaller boroughs, by increasing the number of the county members, and by enfranchising Manchester, Leeds, and Halifax, died with him, and thus the whole wretched scheme of inequality lingered on until it was finally corrected in the main by the Reform Bill of 1832. centres and insig nificant hamlets favored; attempt at However great may have been the evils arising out of the 1 Merewether and Stephens' Hist. ernment of the Commonwealth, Deof Boroughs, Introd. cember 16, 1653. 2 Act for the Settlement of the Gov ized system both to nomination failure to allot representatives to the counties, cities, and towns, An organaccording to their wealth and population, they shrink into in- of corrup significance when compared with the enormous abuses incident tion applied to an organized system of bribery and corruption, applied not electors and elected; only to those by whom the representatives were chosen in the local communities, but also to the representatives themselves after their arrival at Westminster. In dealing with the first branch of the subject some one has divided the constituencies into two classes: first, those who were sold by others; second, those who sold themselves. The first class embraced, of course, corruption the small nomination boroughs, in which certain lords and other in small wealthy patrons were able to dictate the choice of their nomi boroughs belonging nees, over whose political conduct their control was unques- to wealthy tioned. In that way the peers not only had a voice in their patrons, own house, but they were represented by their nominees in the lower. At one time the duke of Norfolk was thus represented by eleven members; Lord Lonsdale by nine; Lord Darlington by seven; and in 1821 Sydney Smith 2 writes: "The county belongs to the duke of Rutland, Lord Lonsdale, the duke of Newcastle, and about twenty other holders of boroughs. They are our masters." The control of such pa- whose controns dates back to the fifteenth century, and in Elizabeth's back to the time the commons were warned lest "lords' letters shall from fifteenth henceforth bear all the sway." The right of the patron was regarded as regarded as a part of his estate, which he could dispose of as interest; he pleased, but he was supposed to sell the nomination, as a general rule, to one of his own political faith; if he sold to an opponent, a greater price had to be given as a compensation for the sacrifice. While the price of boroughs ranged prices at from £2500 to £5000, George Selwyn, the owner of the certain boroughs representation of Ludgershall, sold it for £9000.1 In the case were sold; of Westbury, the property of Lord Abingdon, the two seats valued at £10,000 were even put in the hands of trustees for a generous the benefit of creditors.5 The one feature which is supposed patron to have somewhat redeemed this part of the system consists gave the of the fact that a generous patron, instead of selling the nomi- nomination nation, would sometimes give it to a worthy and rising man young man; 1 Oldfield's Rep. Hist., vol. vi. 4 Letters of Lord Chesterfield to his 2 Mem., vol. ii. p. 215; May's Const. Son (1767, 1768), vol. iv. pp. 269, 274. 5 Romilly's Life, vol. ii. pp. 200, Hist., vol. i. pp. 333, 361. 8 Romilly's Life, vol. ii. p. 202. p. 286. 201. trol dates century; a property which sometimes to a rising |