at all; very few Englishmen are.
They were not influenced by ideas, but by facts; not by things
impalpable, but by things palpable. Not to put too fine a point upon
it, they were influenced by rank and wealth. No doubt the better sort
of them believed that those who were superior to them in these
indisputable respects were superior also in the more intangible
qualities of sense and knowledge. But the mass of the old electors did
not analyse very much: they liked to have one of their "betters" to
represent them; if he was rich they respected him much; and if he was a
lord, they liked him the better. The issue put before these electors
was, Which of two rich people will you choose? And each of those rich
people was put forward by great parties whose notions were the notions
of the rich--whose plans were their plans. The electors only selected
one or two wealthy men to carry out the schemes of one or two wealthy
associations.

So fully was this so, that the class to whom the great body of the
ten-pound householders belonged--the lower middle class--was above all
classes the one most hardly treated in the imposition of the taxes. A
small shopkeeper, or a clerk who just, and only just, was rich enough
to pay income tax, was perhaps the only severely taxed man in the
country. He paid the rates, the tea, sugar, tobacco, malt, and spirit
taxes, as well as the income tax, but his means were exceedingly small.
Curiously enough the class which in theory was omnipotent, was the only
class financially ill-treated. Throughout the history of our former
Parliaments the constituency could no more have originated the policy
which those Parliaments selected than they could have made the solar
system.

As I have endeavoured to show in this volume, the deference of the old
electors to their betters was the only way in which our old system
could be maintained. No doubt countries can be imagined in which the
mass of the electors would be thoroughly competent to form good
opinions; approximations to that state happily exist. But such was not
the state of the minor English shopkeepers. They were just competent to
make a selection between two sets of superior ideas; or rather--for the
conceptions of such people are more personal than abstract--between two
opposing parties, each professing a creed of such ideas. But they could
do no more. Their own notions, if they had been cross-examined upon
them, would have been found always most confused a