I do not of course mean that the ten-pound householders were great admirers of intellect or good judges of refinement.  We all know that, for the most part, they were not so at all; very few Englishmen are.  They were not influenced by ideas, but by facts; not by things impalpable, but by things palpable.  Not to put too fine a point upon it, they were influenced by rank and wealth.  No doubt the better sort of them believed that those who were superior to them in these indisputable respects were superior also in the more intangible qualities of sense and knowledge.  But the mass of the old electors did not analyse very much:  they liked to have one of their “betters” to represent them; if he was rich they respected him much; and if he was a lord, they liked him the better.  The issue put before these electors was, Which of two rich people will you choose?  And each of those rich people was put forward by great parties whose notions were the notions of the rich—­whose plans were their plans.  The electors only selected one or two wealthy men to carry out the schemes of one or two wealthy associations.

So fully was this so, that the class to whom the great body of the ten-pound householders belonged—­the lower middle class—­was above all classes the one most hardly treated in the imposition of the taxes.  A small shopkeeper, or a clerk who just, and only just, was rich enough to pay income tax, was perhaps the only severely taxed man in the country.  He paid the rates, the tea, sugar, tobacco, malt, and spirit taxes, as well as the income tax, but his means were exceedingly small.  Curiously enough the class which in theory was omnipotent, was the only class financially ill-treated.  Throughout the history of our former Parliaments the constituency could no more have originated the policy which those Parliaments selected than they could have made the solar system.

As I have endeavoured to show in this volume, the deference of the old electors to their betters was the only way in which our old system could be maintained.  No doubt countries can be imagined in which the mass of the electors would be thoroughly competent to form good opinions; approximations to that state happily exist.  But such was not the state of the minor English shopkeepers.  They were just competent to make a selection between two sets of superior ideas; or rather—­for the conceptions of such people are more personal than abstract—­between two opposing parties, each professing a creed of such ideas.  But they could do no more.  Their own notions, if they had been cross-examined upon them, would have been found always most confused and often most foolish.  They were competent to decide an issue selected by the higher classes, but they were incompetent to do more.