who stood on their own private means.  It would make the electors more venal, and injure the whole body of the people who, whether they have votes or not, are concerned in elections.”  Finally, it would greatly impair the proper authority of the House itself.  “It would deprive it of all power and dignity; and a House of Commons without power and without dignity, either in itself or its members, is no House of Commons for this constitution.”

The applicability of some of his arguments—­those founded on the disorders at times of election—­has been greatly diminished, if not destroyed, at the present day, by the limitation of the polling to a single day.  The disfranchisement of the smaller boroughs has neutralized others; but the expense of a general election is not believed to have diminished, and that alone seems a strong objection to a system which would render them more frequent than they are at present.  Mr. Sawbridge could not obtain the support of a third of his hearers.[60] But his notions had partisans in the other House who were not discouraged by such a division; and three weeks later the Duke of Richmond brought forward a Reform Bill on so large a scale that, as the “Parliamentary History” records, “it took him an hour and a half to read it,” and which contained provisions for annual Parliaments and universal suffrage.  But he met with even less favor than the Alderman, and his bill was rejected without a division.

Still the subject was not allowed to rest.  Even after Lord North had been replaced by Lord Rockingham, the demand for Parliamentary Reform was continued; the young Mr. Pitt making himself the mouth-piece of the Reformers, and founding a motion which he made in May, 1782, on “the corrupt influence of the crown; an influence which has been pointed at in every period as the fertile source of all our miseries; an influence which has been substituted in the room of wisdom, of activity, of exertion, and of success; an influence which has grown up with our growth and strengthened with our strength, but which, unhappily, has not diminished with our diminution, nor decayed with our decay.”  He brought forward no specific plan, but denounced the close boroughs, and asked emphatically whether it were “representation” for “some decayed villages, almost destitute of population, to send members to Parliament under the control of the Treasury, or at the bidding of some great lord or commoner.”  He, however, was defeated, though by the small majority of twenty.  And it is remarkable that when, the next year, he revived the subject, developing a more precise scheme—­akin to that which his father had suggested, of increasing the number of county members, and including provisions for the disfranchisement of boroughs which had been convicted of systematic corruption—­he was beaten by a far larger majority,[61] the distinctness of his plan only serving to increase the numbers of his adversaries.  A kinsman of Pitt’s, Lord