people, but the fashion and commonplace of the moneyed class. Now we cannot—I for my part do not—blame the proprietors and editors of the daily newspapers for endeavouring to make money out of journalism: we cannot expect them to publish their newspapers at a loss, but I do most emphatically repudiate their claim to represent either popular thought, or the best thought: and I found upon the misrepresentative character of high class journalism, an additional argument for bonâ fide parliamentary representation.
There has always been so much cant among our public men about our Glorious Constitution and privileges that the popular delusion has been established that the people of this country have already got political representation. But as no amount of self-glorification can establish the claim of an individual to be considered virtuous, so no amount of national self panegyric indulged by cabinet ministers at a Mansion House banquet can establish true national greatness or representative institutions. There has never been in this country so perfect a master of rhetoric as Edmund Burke. He declared our institutions of 1792 to be as perfect as human nature would permit. Yet at the time he spoke there was a place called Old Sarum, which consisted of three or four houses, and yet returned two Members of Parliament; and seventy members were returned by thirty-five places where there were hardly any voters at all. While he boasted of England's representative institutions, of her freedom, her liberty, and her law, six peers appointed (as they appointed the stewards of their establishments) forty-five members of the House of Commons—boroughs were put up to auction to the highest bidders, and Government was deliberately carried on by a system of bribery, the money being frequently provided by the king.
Now all Burke's specious rhetoric and agreeable flattery did not affect the fact that the Parliament of his time was—as a representative institution—a mere fraud, and owed its existence to the ignorance or helplessness of the people; and all Mr. Disraeli's eulogy of a system which has placed him in power does not affect the existing fact that the people of this country have not yet got, and, under the present electoral system never can have, genuine Parliamentary representation. Various reform acts have been obtained—^unfortunately only under menace—from the governing classes, but it would seem to have been the effort of every Parliament hitherto, so to manipulate Reform Bills, as to prevent the majority of electors from having their rightful share of political power,—nay, more than this—it has
