of property, or members of corporate bodies, the line thus laid down was one which was not liable to be crossed.  But the moment that tenancy was added to ownership, and a line was drawn distinguishing electors from non-electors, not by the nature of their qualifications, but by the amount of their rent, detail was substituted for principle; and the proposer or maintainer of the rule that the qualification should be a yearly rental of L10 might be called on to explain why, if L10 were a more reasonable limit than L15, L8 were not fairer than L10.  Or again, if the original argument were, that a line must of necessity be drawn somewhere, and that L10 was the lowest qualification which seemed to guarantee such an amount of educated intelligence in the voter as would enable him to exercise the franchise conferred on him judiciously and honestly, such reasoning would from time to time invite the contention that the spread of education had rendered L8 tenants now as enlightened as L10 tenants had been some years before.  And thus the measure of 1832, instead of forever silencing the demand for Reform by the completeness of its concessions, did in fact lay the foundation for future agitation, which has been farther encouraged and fed by farther submission to it, and which its leaders, who have so far triumphed, show no purpose to discontinue.  To discuss whether such extensions of the franchise as have already been adopted, and those farther steps in the same direction which are generally understood to be impending, will eventually be found compatible with the preservation of our ancient monarchical constitution, is a fitting task for the statesmen and senators whose duty it is to examine in all their bearings the probable effects of the measures which may be proposed.  But the historian’s business is rather “to compile the records of the past” than to speculate on the future.[224] And the course which was too perilous or difficult for Mr. Hallam to undertake we will follow his example in avoiding.  But it cannot be denied that, if the Reform Bill of 1832 transferred the chief political power of the state from the aristocracy to the middle classes, a farther lowering of the qualification for the exercise of the franchise must transfer it from the middle to the lower classes; and that those who view such transfer with alarm, and deprecate it as fraught with peril to all our ancient institutions, maintain their opinions by arguments as old, indeed, as the days of the Roman republic,[225] but which have not lost strength by lapse of time, if indeed, they have not been fortified by events in the history of more than one modern nation.