t commercial towns could
alone be said to exercise any real right of suffrage, though the
enormous expense of contesting such constituencies practically left
their representation in the hands of the great local families. But even
in the counties the suffrage was ridiculously limited and unequal. Out
of a population of eight millions of English people, only a hundred and
sixty thousand were electors at all.

[Sidenote: Pressure of opinion.]

"The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons," said Burke, in
noble words, "consists in its being the express image of the feelings of
the nation." But how far such a House as that which now existed was from
really representing English opinion we see from the fact that in the
height of his popularity Pitt himself could hardly find a seat in it.
Purchase was becoming more and more the means of entering Parliament;
and seats were bought and sold in the open market at a price which rose
to four thousand pounds. We can hardly wonder that a reformer could
allege without a chance of denial, "This House is not a representative
of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nominal
boroughs, of ruined and exterminated towns, of noble families, of
wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates." The meanest motives
naturally told on a body returned by such constituencies, cut off from
the influence of public opinion by the secrecy of Parliamentary
proceedings, and yet invested with almost boundless authority. Walpole
and Newcastle had in fact made bribery and borough-jobbing the base of
their power. But bribery and borough-jobbing were every day becoming
more offensive to the nation at large. A new moral consciousness, as we
have seen in the movement of the Wesleys, was diffusing itself through
England; and behind this moral consciousness came a general advance in
the national intelligence, which could not fail to tell vigorously on
politics.

[Sidenote: The intellectual advance.]

Ever since the expulsion of the Stuarts an intellectual revolution had
been silently going on in the people at large. The close of the
seventeenth century was marked by a sudden extension of the world of
readers. The developement of men's minds under the political and social
changes of the day, as well as the rapid increase of wealth, and the
advance in culture and refinement which accompanies an increase of
wealth, were quickening the general intelligence of the people at large;
and the wide