influence
of freedom and of equal law. The inclination of a society to pay
debts is proportioned to the degree in which that society respects the
obligations of plighted faith. Of the strength which consists in extent
of territory and in number of fighting men, a rude despot who knows
no law but his own childish fancies and headstrong passions, or a
convention of socialists which proclaims all property to be robbery, may
have more than falls to the lot of the best and wisest government. But
the strength which is derived from the confidence of capitalists such a
despot, such a convention, never can possess. That strength,--and it
is a strength which has decided the event of more than one great
conflict,--flies, by the law of its nature, from barbarism and fraud,
from tyranny and anarchy, to follow civilisation and virtue, liberty and
order.

While the bill which first created the funded debt of England was
passing, with general approbation, through the regular stages, the
two Houses discussed, for the first time, the great question of
Parliamentary Reform.

It is to be observed that the object of the reformers of that generation
was merely to make the representative body a more faithful interpreter
of the sense of the constituent body. It seems scarcely to have
occurred to any of them that the constituent body might be an
unfaithful interpreter of the sense of the nation. It is true that those
deformities in the structure of the constituent body, which, at length,
in our own days, raised an irresistible storm of public indignation,
were far less numerous and far less offensive in the seventeenth century
than they had become in the nineteenth. Most of the boroughs which were
disfranchised in 1832 were, if not positively, yet relatively, much more
important places in the reign of William the Third than in the reign
of William the Fourth. Of the populous and wealthy manufacturing towns,
seaports and watering places, to which the franchise was given in the
reign of William the Fourth, some were, in the reign of William the
Third, small hamlets, where a few ploughmen or fishermen lived under
thatched roofs; some were fields covered with harvests, or moors
abandoned to grouse; With the exception of Leeds and Manchester, there
was not, at the time of the Revolution, a single town of five thousand
inhabitants which did not send two representatives to the House of
Commons. Even then, however, there was no want of startling ano