and two from each important town. But the
list of represented towns was still practically the same as it had
been in the fifteenth century, while intervening economic and other
changes had, as has been seen, made the most complete alteration in
the distribution of population. Great manufacturing towns had grown up
as a result of changes in commerce and of the industrial revolution,
and these had no representation in Parliament separate from the
counties in which they lay. On the other hand, towns once of
respectable size had dwindled until they had only a few dozen
inhabitants, and in some cases had reverted to open farming country;
but these, or the landlords who owned the land on which they had been
built, still retained their two representatives in Parliament. The
county representatives were voted for by all "forty shilling
freeholders," that is, landowners whose farms would rent for forty
shillings a year. But the whole tendency of English landholding, as
has been seen, had been to decrease the number of landowners in the
country, so that the actual number of voters was only a very small
proportion of the rural population.

Such great irregularities of representation had thus grown up that the
selection of more than a majority of the members of the House of
Commons was in the hands of a very small number of men, many of them
already members of the House of Lords, and all members of the
aristocracy.

Just as Parliament represented only the higher classes, so officers in
the army and to a somewhat less extent the navy, the officials of the
established church, the magistrates in the counties, the ambassadors
abroad, and the cabinet ministers at home, the holders of influential
positions in the Universities and endowed institutions generally, were
as a regular thing members of the small class of the landed or
mercantile aristocracy of England. Perhaps one hundred thousand out of
the fourteen millions of the people of England were the veritable
governing classes. They alone had any control of the national and
local government, or of the most important political and social
institutions.

The "Reform of Parliament," which meant some degree of equalization of
the representation of districts, an extension of the franchise, and
the abolition of some of the irregularities in elections, had been
proposed from time to time, but had awakened little interest until it
was advocated by the Radicals under the influence of the Fr