In 1832 the effect of the transfer was to increase the power of the town population.  In 1692 the effect would have been to make the power of the rural population irresistible.  Of the one hundred and forty-two members taken away in 1832 from small boroughs more than half were given to large and flourishing towns.  But in 1692 there was hardly one large and flourishing town which had not already as many members as it could, with any show of reason, claim.  Almost all therefore that was taken from the small boroughs must have been given to the counties; and there can be no doubt that whatever tended to raise the counties and to depress the towns must on the whole have tended to raise the Tories and to depress the Whigs.  From the commencement of our civil troubles the towns had been on the side of freedom and progress, the country gentlemen and the country clergymen on the side of authority and prescription.  If therefore a reform bill, disfranchising small constituent bodies and giving additional members to large constituent bodies, had become law soon after the Revolution, there can be little doubt that a decided majority of the House of Commons would have consisted of rustic baronets and squires, high Churchmen, high Tories, and half Jacobites.  With such a House of Commons it is almost certain that there would have been a persecution of the Dissenters; it is not easy to understand how there could have been an union with Scotland; and it is not improbable that there would have been a restoration of the Stuarts.  Those parts of our constitution therefore which, in recent times, politicians of the liberal school have generally considered as blemishes, were, five generations ago, regarded with complacency by the men who were most zealous for civil and religious freedom.

But, while Whigs and Tories agreed in wishing to maintain the existing rights of election, both Whigs and Tories were forced to admit that the relation between the elector and the representative was not what it ought to be.  Before the civil wars the House of Commons had enjoyed the fullest confidence of the nation.  A House of Commons, distrusted, despised, hated by the Commons, was a thing unknown.  The very words would, to Sir Peter Wentworth or Sir Edward Coke, have sounded like a contradiction in terms.  But by degrees a change took place.  The Parliament elected in 1661, during that fit of joy and fondness which followed the return of the royal family, represented, not the deliberate sense, but the momentary caprice of the nation.  Many of the members were men who, a few months earlier or a few months later, would have had no chance of obtaining seats, men of broken fortunes and of dissolute habits, men whose only claim to public confidence was the ferocious hatred which they bore to rebels and Puritans.  The people, as soon as they had become sober, saw with dismay to what an assembly they had, during their intoxication, confided the care of their property, their liberty