scant L8 of the sum that might legally have been
laid out. Divided among the 3,221 votes that Mr.
Lloyd-George received, his outlay per vote was 2s.,
10d. At the same election Mr. Asquith's expenditure
was L727; Mr. Winston Churchill's, L844; Mr. John
Morley's, L479; Mr. Keir Hardie's, L623; Mr. James
Bryce's, L480. In non-contested constituencies
expenditures are small. In 1906 Mr. Redmond's was
reported to be L25 and Mr. William O'Brien's, L20.
In 1900 a total of 1,103 candidates for 670 seats
expended L777,429 in getting 3,579,345 votes; in
1906, 1,273 candidates for the same 670 seats
expended L1,166,858 in getting 5,645,104 votes; in
January, 1910, 1,311 candidates laid out L1,296,382
in getting 6,667,394 votes. A well-informed article
is E. Porritt, Political Corruption in England, in
_North American Review_, Nov. 16, 1906.]

CHAPTER V (p. 097)

PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF LORDS

I. COMPOSITION

*101. Origins.*--With the possible exception of the Hungarian Table of
Magnates, the British House of Lords is the most ancient second
chamber among parliamentary bodies. It is, furthermore, among second
chambers the largest and the most purely hereditary. Its descent can
be traced directly from the Great Council of the Plantagenet period
and, in the opinion of some scholars, from the witenagemot of
Anglo-Saxon times.[138] To the Council belonged originally the
nobility, and the clergy, greater and lesser. Practically, the body
was composed of the more influential churchmen and the more powerful
tenants-in-chief of the crown. In the course of time the lesser clergy
found it convenient to confine their attention to the proceedings of
the ecclesiastical assemblage known as Convocation; while the lesser
nobles, i.e., the poorer and more uninfluential ones, found it to
their interest to cast in their lot, not as formerly with the great
barons and earls, but with the well-to-do though non-noble knights of
the shire. From the elements that remained--the higher clergy and the
greater nobles--developed directly the House of Lords. The lesser
barons, the kni