malies.
Looe, East and West, which contained not half the population or half the
wealth of the smallest of the hundred parishes of London, returned
as many members as London. [372] Old Sarum, a deserted ruin which the
traveller feared to enter at night lest he should find robbers lurking
there, had as much weight in the legislature as Devonshire or Yorkshire.
[373] Some eminent individuals of both parties, Clarendon, for example,
among the Tories, and Pollexfen among the Whigs, condemned this system.
Yet both parties were, for very different reasons, unwilling to alter
it. It was protected by the prejudices of one faction and by the
interests of the other. Nothing could be more repugnant to the genius of
Toryism than the thought of destroying at a blow institutions which
had stood through ages, for the purpose of building something more
symmetrical out of the ruins. The Whigs, on the other hand, could not
but know that they were much more likely to lose than to gain by a
change in this part of our polity. It would indeed be a great mistake
to imagine that a law transferring political power from small to large
constituent bodies would have operated in 1692 as it operated in 1832.

In 1832 the effect of the transfer was to increase the power of the town
population. In 1692 the effect would have been to make the power of the
rural population irresistible. Of the one hundred and forty-two members
taken away in 1832 from small boroughs more than half were given to
large and flourishing towns. But in 1692 there was hardly one large and
flourishing town which had not already as many members as it could, with
any show of reason, claim. Almost all therefore that was taken from the
small boroughs must have been given to the counties; and there can be
no doubt that whatever tended to raise the counties and to depress the
towns must on the whole have tended to raise the Tories and to depress
the Whigs. From the commencement of our civil troubles the towns had
been on the side of freedom and progress, the country gentlemen and
the country clergymen on the side of authority and prescription. If
therefore a reform bill, disfranchising small constituent bodies and
giving additional members to large constituent bodies, had become law
soon after the Revolution, there can be little doubt that a decided
majority of the House of Commons would have consisted of rustic baronets
and squires, high Churchmen, high Tories, and half Jacobites. With