with
instinctive dislike from Pitt's appeals to national feeling, and from
the popularity which rewarded them. They denied that members of the
Commons sate as representatives of the people, and they shrank with
actual panic from the thought of any change which could render them
representatives. To a Whig such a change meant the overthrow of the work
done in 1688, the coercion of the minority of sound political thinkers
by the mass of opinion, so brutal and unintelligent, so bigoted in its
views both of Church and State, which had been content to reap the
benefits of the Revolution while vilifying and opposing its principles.

[Sidenote: Need of Parliamentary reform.]

And yet, if representation was to be more than a name, the very relation
of Parliament to the constituencies made some change in its composition
a necessity. That changes in the distribution of seats in the House of
Commons were called for by the natural shiftings of population and
wealth which had gone on since the days of Edward the First had been
recognized as early as the Civil Wars. But the reforms of the Long
Parliament were cancelled at the Restoration; and from the time of
Charles the Second to that of George the Third not a single effort had
been made to meet the growing abuses of our parliamentary system. Great
towns like Manchester or Birmingham remained without a member, while
members still sat for boroughs which, like Old Sarum, had actually
vanished from the face of the earth. The effort of the Tudor sovereigns
to establish a Court party in the House by a profuse creation of
boroughs, most of which were mere villages then in the hands of the
Crown, had ended in the appropriation of these seats by the neighbouring
landowners, who bought and sold them as they bought and sold their own
estates. Even in towns which had a real claim to representation the
narrowing of municipal privileges ever since the fourteenth century to a
small part of the inhabitants, and in many cases the restriction of
electoral rights to the members of the governing corporation, rendered
their representation a mere name. The choice of such places hung simply
on the purse or influence of politicians. Some were "the King's
boroughs," others obediently returned nominees of the Ministry of the
day, others were "close boroughs" in the hands of jobbers like the Duke
of Newcastle, who at one time returned a third of all the borough
members in the House. The counties and the grea