days of our
Parliaments this principle had been distinctly acknowledged, and, to a
certain extent, had been carried out in practice. Then he showed how
the principle had come to be less and less recognized in the
arrangement of our constituencies and the allotment of representatives,
until at last there had ceased to be any manner of proportion between
representatives and population or any practical acknowledgment of the
main purpose for which representatives were to be selected. Everything
had tended, in the mean time, to make the owners of the soil also the
owners and masters of the representation. Lord John Russell employed a
series of illustrations, at once simple and striking, to impress upon
his audience a due understanding of the extraordinary manner in which
the whole principle of representation had been diverted. {139} from
its original purpose. He assumed the case of some inquiring and
intelligent foreigner, a stranger to our institutions but anxious to
learn all about them, who had come to England for the purpose of
obtaining information on the spot. The stranger has the nature and the
purpose of our Parliamentary system explained to him, and he is assured
that it rests on the representative principle. He is told that the
House of Commons is assembled for the purpose of enabling the sovereign
to collect the best advice that can be given to him as to the
condition, the wants, and the wishes of his subjects.

The House of Commons is to be in that sense representative; it is to be
the interpreter to the King of all that his people wish him to know.
Then the stranger is naturally anxious to learn how the constituencies
are formed, by whose selection the representatives are sent to
Parliament, in order to render to the King a faithful message from his
people. The stranger is taken to a grassy mound, let us say, in the
midst of an expanse of silent, unpeopled fields, and he is told that
that grassy mound sends two members to the House of Commons. He is
shown a stone wall with three niches in it, and he is informed that
those three niches are privileged to contribute two members to the
representative assembly. Lord John Russell described with force and
masterly humor a variety of such sights which were pointed out to the
stranger, each description being an accurate picture of some place
which long since had lost all population, but still continued to have
the privilege of sending representatives to Parliam