nd manufacturers in
Parliament are a motley race--one educated here, another there, a third
not educated at all; some are of the second generation of traders, who
consider self-made men intruders upon an hereditary place; others are
self-made, and regard the men of inherited wealth, which they did not
make and do not augment, as beings of neither mind nor place, inferior
to themselves because they have no brains, and inferior to lords
because they have no rank. Traders have no bond of union, no habits of
intercourse; their wives, if they care for society, want to see not the
wives of other such men, but "better people," as they say--the wives of
men certainly with land, and, if Heaven help, with the titles. Men who
study the structure of Parliament, not in abstract books, but in the
concrete London world, wonder not that the landed interest is very
powerful, but that it is not despotic. I believe it would be despotic
if it were clever, or rather if its representatives were so, but it has
a fixed device to make them stupid. The counties not only elect
landowners, which is natural, and perhaps wise, but also elect only
landowners OF THEIR OWN COUNTY, which is absurd. There is no free trade
in the agricultural mind; each county prohibits the import of able men
from other counties. This is why eloquent sceptics--Bolingbroke and
Disraeli--have been so apt to lead the unsceptical Tories. They WILL
have people with a great piece of land in a particular spot, and of
course these people generally cannot speak, and often cannot think. And
so eloquent men who laugh at the party come to lead the party. The
landed interest has much more influence than it should have; but it
wastes that influence so much that the excess is, except on singular
occurrences (like the cattle plague), of secondary moment.

It is almost another side of the same matter to say that the structure
of Parliament gives too little weight to the growing districts of the
country and too much to the stationary, In old times the south of
England was not only the pleasantest but the greatest part of England.
Devonshire was a great maritime county when the foundations of our
representation were fixed; Somersetshire and Wiltshire great
manufacturing counties. The harsher climate of the northern counties
was associated with a ruder, a stern, and a sparser people. The immense
preponderance which our Parliament gave before 1832, and though pruned
and mitigated, still gives