ent. Then Lord John
Russell changed his form of illustration. He took his stranger to some
of the great manufacturing and commercial cities and towns of England,
and described the admiration and the wonder with which the intelligent
foreigner regarded these living evidences of the growth and the
greatness of the nation. Here then, no doubt, the stranger begins at
last to think that he can really understand the practical value of the
representative principle. Thus far he has only been bewildered by what
he has seen and heard of the empty stretches of land which are {140}
endowed with a right to have representatives in the House of Commons,
but now he begins to acknowledge to himself that a people with such
great manufacturing communities can send up to London representatives
enough from their own centres to constitute a Parliament capable of
advising with any monarch. Then, to his utter amazement, the
distracted foreigner learns that these great cities and towns have no
right whatever to representation in the House of Commons, and have
nothing whatever to do with the election of members.

[Sidenote: 1831--The proposed reforms]

The imaginary foreigner who knew nothing about the principle of the
workings of our Constitution before his arrival in the country might
well have been amazed and confounded, and might have fancied, if he had
been a reader of English literature, that he had lost his way somehow,
and instead of arriving in England had stumbled into the State of
Laputa. He might well indeed be excused for such bewilderment, seeing
that an English student of the present day finds it hard to realize in
his mind the possibility and the reality of the condition of things
which existed in this country within the lifetime of men still living.
Lord John Russell then went on to describe the manner in which the
Government proposed to deal with the existing defects of the whole
Parliamentary system. He laid it down as the main principle of the
reforms he was prepared to introduce that a free citizen should not be
compelled to pay taxes in the imposition and levying of which he was
allowed to have no voice. The vast majority of free citizens could in
any case only express their opinions as to this or that financial
impost through their representatives in the House of Commons. This
principle had of late been allowed to fail so grossly and so widely in
its application that the House of Commons had almost entirely cease