that town, or district, or county,
according as he thought fit, and this arrangement had gone on from
generation to generation. Now it sometimes happened that a place that
had been comparatively popular and prosperous at the period when it
obtained the {100} right of representation had seen its prosperity and
its population gradually ebb away from it, and leave it little better
than a bare hill-side, and yet the bare hill-side retained the right of
representation, and its owner could send any one he pleased into the
House of Commons. There were numberless illustrations of this curious
anomaly all over the country. The great families of landed proprietors
naturally monopolized among them the representation of the counties,
and many of them enjoyed also the ownership of the small decaying or
totally decayed boroughs which still retained the right of returning
members to Parliament. On the other hand, the development of
manufacturing energy had caused the growth of great and populous towns
and cities, and most of these towns and cities were actually without
representation or the right of representation in the House of Commons.
Thus a condition of things had arisen which was certain to prove itself
incompatible with the spread of education and the growth of public
interest in all great questions of domestic reform.

[Sidenote: 1830--The Princess Victoria]

We have already seen in this history how the Whig party in Parliament,
and the popular agitators out of Parliament, had long been rousing the
national intelligence and the national conscience to a sense of the
growing necessity for some complete change in all that concerned the
representation of the people. The Duke of Wellington was at the head
of the Administration when George the Fourth died and William came to
the throne. The new King, as has been said, was supposed to have
Liberal inclinations as regarded political questions, and there was a
common expectation that he might begin his reign by summoning a new set
of ministers. The King, however, did nothing of the kind. He sent
messages to the Duke of Wellington telling him, in his usual familiar
and uncouth way, that he had always liked the Duke uncommonly well, and
did not see any reason why he should not keep him on as his Prime
Minister. This was, to begin with, a disappointment to the majority of
the public. The first royal speech from the throne contained other
matter of disappointment. There was gr