as sometimes been called a new Revolution, and
to some extent it deserved the name; for it was not, like the Catholic
Emancipation Act, a mere restoration of privileges to any class or
classes of the people which had once been enjoyed by them, and had
subsequently been withdrawn, but it was a grant of a wholly new
privilege to places and to classes which had never enjoyed it; while it
was manifest that the political power thus conferred on these classes
involved a corresponding diminution of the powers of those who had
hitherto monopolized it. It was also the introduction of a new
principle. The old doctrine of the constitution had been, that the
possession of freehold property, as the only permanent stake in the
country, was the only qualification which could entitle a subject to a
voice in the government and legislation of the kingdom. The new doctrine
was that, as others besides owners of land contributed to the revenue by
the payment of taxes, those who did so contribute to a sufficient amount
had a right to a voice, however indirect or feeble, in the granting of
those taxes; and so far it was the extension and application to subjects
at home of the principle for which Lord Chatham and Burke had contended
sixty years before in the case of the American Colonies, that taxation
and a right to representation went together; a principle which, many
ages before, had been laid down by the greatest of our early kings as
the foundation of our parliamentary constitution and rights. But this
principle, however generally it may have been asserted, had hitherto
been but very partially carried out in practice, and the old borough
system had been skilfully devised by successive kings and ministers to
keep the political power in the hands of the crown and the aristocracy.
It was with that object that most of the boroughs which were first
allowed to return members under the Tudors had been enfranchised,[222] a
great noble or landholder, whose affection to the government could not
be doubted, being often able to obtain the promotion of some village or
petty town in the neighborhood of his estates to the dignity of a
parliamentary borough, and thus acquiring a great addition to his
political and social importance by his power of influencing the
election. No one could deny that the existence of such boroughs was an
abuse, or at least an anomaly, rendered the more conspicuous as time
went on by the denial of representatives to towns which