is tastes.
But his plain, rough sincerity was not unacceptable, and his immediate
espousal of the Reform Act, then pending, won him popularity at once.

The efficiency and integrity of the House of Commons had long been
impaired by an effete system of representation, which had been
unchanged for 500 years. Boroughs were represented which had long
disappeared from the face of the earth. One had for years been covered
by the sea! Another existed as a fragment of a wall in a {157}
gentleman's park, while towns like Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and
nineteen other large and prosperous places, had no representation
whatever. These "rotten boroughs" as they were called, were usually in
the hands of wealthy landowners; one great Peer literally carrying
eleven boroughs in his pocket, so that eleven members went to the House
of Commons at his dictation.--It would seem that a reform so obviously
needed should have been easy to accomplish. But the House of Lords
clung to the old system as if the life of the Kingdom depended upon it.
And when the measure was finally carried the good old Duke of
Wellington said sadly, "We must hope for the best; but the most
sanguine cannot believe we shall ever again be as prosperous."

By this Act 56 boroughs were disfranchised, and 43 new ones, with 30
county constituencies, were created.

It was in the contest over this Reform Bill that the Tories took the
name of "Conservatives" and their opponents "Liberals." Its passage
marks a most important transition in England. The workingman was {158}
by it enfranchised, and the House of Commons, which had hitherto
represented _property_, thenceforth represented _manhood_.

Nor were political reforms the only ones. Human pity awoke from its
lethargy. The penalties for wrongdoing became less brutal, the prisons
less terrible. No longer did gaping crowds watch shivering wretches
brought out of the jails every Monday morning, in batches of twenty and
thirty, to be hung for pilfering or something even less. Little
children were lifted out of the mines and factories and chimneys and
placed in schools, which also began to be created for the poor.
Numberless ways were devised for making life less miserable for the
unfortunate, and for improving the social conditions of toiling men and
women.

While white slavery in the collieries and factories was thus mitigated,
Wilberforce removed the stain of negro slavery from England in securing
the passa