opular body in the
eighteenth century, that fact would not of itself have made the English
government as a whole popular in form. While it would have constituted a
popular check on the King and the House of Lords, it would have been
powerless to express the popular will in legislation.

The House of Commons was not, however, a popular body in the eighteenth
century. In theory, of course, as a part of Parliament it represented
the whole English people. But this was a mere political fiction, since
by reason of the narrowly limited suffrage, a large part of the English
people had no voice in parliamentary elections. Probably not one-fifth
of the adult male population was entitled to vote for members of
Parliament. As the right to vote was an incident of land ownership, the
House of Commons was largely representative of the same interests that
controlled the House of Lords.

That the House of Commons was not democratic in spirit is clearly seen
in the character of parliamentary legislation. The laws enacted during
this period were distinctly undemocratic. While the interests of the
land-holding aristocracy were carefully guarded, the well-being of the
laboring population received scant consideration. The poor laws, the
enclosure acts and the corn laws, which had in view the prosperity of
the landlord, and the laws against combination, which sought to advance
the interests of the capitalist at the expense of the laborer, show the
spirit of the English government prior to the parliamentary reform of
1832. The landlord and capitalist classes controlled the government and,
as Professor Rogers observes, their aim was to increase rents and
profits by grinding the English workman down to the lowest pittance. "I
contend," he says, "that from 1563 to 1824, a conspiracy, concocted by
the law and carried out by parties interested in its success, was
entered into, to cheat the English workman of his wages, to tie him to
the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into irremediable
poverty."[3]

But it is not in statute law alone that this tendency is seen. English
common law shows the same bias in favor of the classes which then
controlled the state. There is no mistaking the influences which left
their impress upon the development of English law at the hands of the
courts. The effect of wealth and political privilege is seen here as
well as in statutory enactment. Granting all that can justly be said in
behalf of the wisdo