comprehend, but, except in the vague phrase, ‘He be a sharp hand,’ their conception of the abstract intellect is feeble and inexpressible.

The existing system (as I have before shown) is a very curious one. The middle classes rule under the shadow of the higher classes. The immense majority of the borough constituencies at least belong to the lower middle class, and the majority of the county constituency is, I suppose, by no means of the highest middle class. These people are the last to whom any people would yield any sort of homage if they saw them. They are but the ‘dry trustees’ of a fealty given to others. The mass of the English lower classes defer to the English higher class, but the nominal electors are a sort of accidental intermediaries, who were not chosen for their own merits and do not choose out of their own number.

It is not pleasant to observe how artificial our system is, and to be convinced that no natural system would serve our turn. The result of our electoral system is the House of Commons, and that House is our sovereign. As that House is, so will our Cabinet be, so will our administration be, so will our policy be. We have vested, therefore, the trust of our supremest power in persons chosen upon no system, and who if they elected people like themselves would be unbearable. Yet a simple system would be fatal. Some eager persons, indeed, who are dissatisfied with what they call the imbecility of our present Parliament—meaning by that, not its want of sense or opinion, but its want of vigour in action—hope to get an increase of energy by a wholesale democratic reform. They give us metaphors about the Titan who touched earth, and I do not feel quite sure that this illustration does not, even with themselves, do duty as an argument. They think that as there are passions at the bottom of the social scale, so there is energy. But ideas are wanted as well as impulse, and there are no ideas among our ignorant poor. Let us examine the matter carefully.

Suppose household suffrage all over England with the present constituencies. The result would be that the counties would be still as much, even if not more than now, in the hands of the landowners. They would be able by means of the labourers—who never had a reasonable political opinion and who have no pretence of independence and intelligence—to control the entire constituency. The lower you go in the agricultural counties, under some limiting line, such as £20 or £15, the more you strengthen the present rulers; the tighter you bind the yoke of quarter sessions.

Then as to the small boroughs, the lower you go in them the more you aggravate the force of money. There are not in the enormous majority of country towns any working men who have much opinion about politics, or sufficient self-respect to abstain from selling their vote. Not twenty men in ten thousand in those classes can comprehend in the least why any one thinks votes should not be sold. They know, of course, that ‘gentlefolks’ say so, but they regard it as an error engendered by high living, and part of the nonsense the rich talk about the poor. Very good judges assure me that these feelings are not declining but growing. Not only is more and more wealth brought to bear on the constituencies year by year, but the class of questions which a poor person can understand is become exceedingly small. If Ritualism could be made a political question, it might be different. I have no doubt a candidate who could say anywhere that he was for anti-Ritualism, and his opponent for Ritualism, would be elected by acclamation. He would be the genuine representative of the actual electors on, perhaps, the only question they care for. In many places it would be worth a man’s life to take a bribe to ‘vote for the Pope.’ But if a person will try to explain administrative reform, or law reform, or even parliamentary reform, to a chance audience in a small borough, he will only find a dull languor. No common working man there really thinks of them by himself, or is able to enter into them when stated rapidly or orally by others. Persons, of course, interest the multitude more. A candidate new to the business not long since asked an old hand what he should speak about. The answer was ‘Gladstone and Garibaldi. Stick to them as long as possible, and get back to them as quick as you can.’ There is so little to interest poor electors now-a-days, and so much money is all but thrown at them, that instead of wondering at their vice in being bribed, we should think them political anchorites if they were not so. The lower you go in the minor towns, the more sure and the more inflexible you make the dominion of wealth.