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third of the house the

and forty-four were peers. Thus only a hundred and seventy- less than a one - less than a third of the house — remained as the free choice of such independent constituencies as were possessed free choice of the limited franchise then existing.1

of inde

pendent constit

Bribery as

minster;

peerages

It would have been strange indeed if the members of the uencies. representative chamber, chosen in the local communities as a employed general rule through an organized system of corruption and at Westundue influence, should have been insensible to all the blandishments of power to which they were subjected after their arrival at Westminster. From the accession of William III. it was necessary for the cabinet to control a majority of the house of commons, and from that time dates the lavish use of everything at the disposal of the crown to secure that end. Noblest among the bribes thus parcelled out were the coveted distinctions that flowed from the crown as the fountain of honor. During the administration of Lord North he either gifts of created or promoted about thirty British peers; the younger and baronPitt, more lavish still, created during the first five years of his etcies; administration nearly fifty peers; while between 1761 and 1821 the extraordinary number of four hundred and ninety-four baronetcies was added to the hereditary knighthood of the realm. While the crown thus pandered to the pride of the rich, gifts of places, the poor and necessitous were consoled by places, pensions, pensions, and money bribes, paid either in hard cash, or realized through and money shares in lotteries and loans, or through lucrative government contracts. As heretofore explained, William III., who was first called upon to manipulate the new ministerial system, attempted to do so to a great extent by a multiplication of offices, which were so lavishly bestowed upon members of the lower house that parliament, at the instance of that body, was forced to enact a series of statutes against placemen whose history has been drawn out already. The grosser expedient of using systemadirect pecuniary bribes, begun under Charles II. and continued Walpole under William III., after having been systematized by Sir and by Robert Walpole, reached its highest point under Henry Pel- Pelham ham and his wretched brother the duke of Newcastle.

bribes ;

tized by

per

fected by

and New

Lord castle;

1 Oldfield's Representative Hist., vol. pp. 277, 279, 323, citing as to the barvi. pp. 285-300.

2 Beatson's Political Index, vol. i. pp. 137, 140; Parl. Hist., vol. xxvii. p. 967 et seq.; May, Const. Hist., vol. i.

onetcies a paper by the late Mr. Pul-
man, Clarencieux King-at-Arms.

8 See above, pp. 441-444.

a shop opened at the Pay Office;

loans and lotteries;

abuse of

to decide

contested

elections;

Bute, who was no unworthy pupil of such masters, intrusted
Mr. Henry Fox 1 with "the management of the house of com-
mons," and in 1762 Horace Walpole tells us that when voters
were needed to support the preliminaries of the Peace of Paris,
"a shop was publicly opened at the Pay Office, whither the
members flocked, and received the wages of their venality in
bank bills, even to so low a sum as £200 for their votes on
the treaty."
."2 In the next year it was that Lord Bute invented
the new method of bribery by means of shares in loans and
lotteries.8

Political parties that succeeded by means of such expedients the right in securing majorities in the house of commons soon learned how to take away from hostile voters the right to chose representatives by an abuse of the sacred judicial function involved in the determination of contested elections. An account has heretofore been given of the process through which not only the right to pass upon the legality of returns and the conduct of returning officers, but also upon the qualifications of the electors themselves, became the exclusive possession of the lower house, and of the manner in which it was recognized and affirmed in turn by the peers, the courts of law, and by the act of 7 Will. III. c. 7.4 Originally the house exercised the right thus acquired by means of a select committee specially chosen for that purpose; and afterwards by that formally Committee designated as the Committee of Privileges and Elections, into leges and whose composition for a long time entered such privy counElections; cillors and eminent lawyers as were qualified to perform the

of Privi

by com

delicate judicial duties required of them. But in the course

of time, specially during the reigns of George II. and George III., the power to seat a party friend and to oust a party rival superseded was so grossly abused that in 1770 Mr. Grenville introduced mittee his famous measure that passed into law, by virtue of which organized the right to try election petitions was transferred from the Grenville's house itself to a committee of thirteen, armed with the right to decide without appeal, and selected by the petitioners and the

under Mr.

Act of

1770;

1 Rockingham, Mem., vol. i. p. 127.
2 Walpole, Mem. George III., vol. i.
p. 199.

3 Parl. Hist., vol. xv. p. 1305; Lord
Mahon's Hist., vol. v. p. 20; May,
Const. Hist., vol. i. p. 382; Lecky, Hist.
Eng., vol. i. p. 368.

4 Vol. i. pp. 528-531.

5 As to the trial of controverted elections prior to 1770, see May, Parl Practice, p. 613; Const. Hist., vol. i pp. 363-369.

down to

superseded

sitting members from a list of forty-nine chosen by ballot, to which each party was entitled to add a representative of his own interests.1 That act, at first limited to one year and afterwards made perpetual,2 continued to regulate the proceedings renewed in election cases down to 1839, when Sir Robert Peel secured 1839, when the passage of a new measure designed to remove its admitted it was deficiencies. Under the Peel Act the trial committee, first by the Peel Act; reduced to six members and then to five,3 was selected by what was called an impartial body, the general committee of elections, in whose nomination one party or the other had necessarily a majority of one. In order to remove the lin- trial of all gering suspicion of partiality which that fact involved, the trial elections of contested elections was finally transferred in 1868 to the judges of superior courts of law, in accordance with a notable courts in precedent 5 drawn from the history of earlier time.

contested

transferred

to the

1868.

the lower

strangers

of its pro

No attempt to explain why the house of commons was not, Right of at the accession of George III., a free and representative organ house to through which the nation as a whole could impress its will exclude upon its rulers, would be at all complete, if no mention was and to prohibit the made of the secrecy of its proceedings, resulting from its right publication to exclude strangers and to prohibit the publication of its pro- ceedings; ceedings and debates. The first named, and the most ancient of these rights, grew, no doubt, out of the necessity felt by motives for members to protect their consultations from the intrusion of its exercise; emissaries who might come to report their doings and sayings either to the king himself, or to the courts of law. The privilege thus originating in a desire to protect the house against the arbitrary action of the crown was perverted, however, as time advanced, to the sinister purpose of concealing what occurred behind closed doors from the gaze of the constituencies. From the beginning the intrusion of strangers was punishable

1 The design was thus to constitute a tribunal composed of members of the house, and yet independent of it. Cf. Parl. Hist., vol. xvi. pp. 904-923. 2 Parl. Hist., vol. xvii. p. 1071. 8 2 & 3 Vict. c. 38; 4 & 5 Vict. c. 58; 11 & 12 Vict. c. 98.

4 31 & 32 Vict. c. 125. By that act, supplemented by the Parliamentary Elections and Corrupt Practices Act of 1879, and by 44 & 45 Vict. c. 68, the trial of controverted elections is con

fided, as regards England, to two
judges selected from the queen's bench
division of the high court of justice;
for Irish cases the judges are taken
from the court of common pleas at
Dublin; for Scotch cases, from the
court of session.

5 By 11 Hen. IV. c. I the justices
of assize were authorized to inquire
into the returns, and to fine the sheriffs
for returning persons not duly elected.
See vol. i. p. 528.

sion of

strangers

was

punished;

motion to close the

doors;

by their immediate commitment or reprimand; and when the how intru- interest excited by the debates finally induced a relaxation of that rule in favor of such as desired to attend, the right was reserved to dismiss them instantly whenever any member saw fit to call upon the speaker to enforce the orders of the house. effect of a Thus it became easy to cut off any orator who endeavored to make his influence felt beyond the walls of the chamber simply by a motion from his opponents to close the doors. When the press, as an organ of public opinion, attempted to invade the secrecy of parliament, the right to publish its proceedings and debates, without its consent, was strenuously resisted. Thus, in 1641, the Long Parliament, while permitting the publication of its proceedings under the title of "Diurnal Occurrences in Parliament," for the first time expressly prohibited the printing of speeches without leave of the house. Sometimes when a speech was acceptable to the dominant party its publication was permitted, but when it was not the offender Mr. Dering was liable to suffer the fate of Mr. Dering, who, for printing expelled for publishing a collection of his speeches, was expelled from the house and

bidden to

publish either pro

ceedings

or debates

without permission;

his own speeches;

after the Restora

tion, house

ordered publication of its

"votes and proceedings;"

committed to the Tower, while his book was ordered to be burned by the common hangman. The entire restriction was continued in full force after the Restoration down to 1680, when the house, to insure a correct report of its transactions, ordered its "votes and proceedings " " to be printed under the direction of the speaker. In order to avoid the prohibition still resting upon the publication of debates, resort was had down to the Revolution to news-letters and pamphlets as circulating mediums, which were supplemented by private memorandums and reports kept by members and published a long expedients time thereafter. Notwithstanding frequent resolutions passed employed after the Revolution to prevent news-letter writers from “givprohibition ing any account or minute of the debates," imperfect reports publication of the more important ones were published by the aid of notes taken by members, in Boyer's "Political State of Great Britain," the "London Magazine," and the "Gentleman's Magazine," with the names of the speakers omitted. How

to evade

against the

of debates;

1 Commons' Journals, vol. xxxiii. pp. 118, 417; Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 74, 433.

2 For the standing order that now regulates the withdrawal of strangers, see May's Parl. Practice, p. 201.

8 Commons' Journals, vol. ii. pp. 209,

220.

4 February 2, 1641; Ibid., vol. ii. p. 411.

5 Ibid., vol. ix. p. 74.

of Sir R.

accurate and impartial such clandestine reports were we may infer not only from the humorous complaint made by Sir complaint Robert Walpole, of the ridiculous account published of a de- Walpole; bate that took place in 1738, but also from the confession of Dr. Johnson, who was then engaged in the manufacture of confession such reports, that "he took care that the Whig dogs should Johnson. not have the best of it." 1

of Dr.

Whitefield

Wesleys;

During the period in which the various causes which have Public opinion as now been briefly reviewed were making the house of com- a factor in mons"the representative of nominal boroughs, of ruined and politics; exterminated towns, of noble families, of wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates," a new political force was being rapidly evolved out of the moral consciousness of the people that was destined after a prolonged and bitter struggle to abolish alike the antiquated customs and the modern corruptions that rendered it impossible for the representative chamber to be, as Burke expressed it, "the express image of the feelings of the nation." While Whitefield and the Wesleys were bringing influence of about by their asceticism and their stirring eloquence a revival and the of religious enthusiasm, William Pitt, the grandson of a wealthy William governor of Madras, and the fiery spokesman of that younger Pitt group of public men generally known as "the patriots," undertook to break the political torpor, the studied indifference to all nobler political aims, so long and so carefully nourished by the cold cynicism of Walpole. Pitt was the first to see that out of the progress of English commerce and industry there had been born a great middle class that was fast becom- born of the ing the dominant force in the nation, and yet without adequate middle growing representation in the legislature. It was from that growing class inelement that Pitt had sprung, and it was by virtue of its power represented and sympathy that he hoped to rule. When he attempted legislature; to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of parliament, George II. taunted him with the reminder: "You have taught me to look for the voice of my people in other places than within the house of commons ;" and when upon the acces

1 Upon the whole subject, see Prefaces to Cobbett's Parl. Hist., vols. ix.-xiii.; Walpole's Mem., vol. iv. p. 278; Parl. Hist., vol. x. pp. 300, 800; Cavendish, Deb., vol. ii. pp. 244, 257; May, Const. Hist., vol. ii. pp. 34-60.

"2

2 These were reinforced by the younger Whigs, whom Walpole called the "boys."

3 Green, Hist. of the Eng. People, vol. iv. p. 180.

adequately

in the

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