at the due
reduction of election expenses to their legitimate and necessary
proportions proved an utter failure. No reduction in the amount of
what may be called working expenses could have diminished, to any
satisfactory degree, the evil from which the country was suffering at
that time, and from which it continued to suffer for more than another
generation. Bribery and corruption were the evils which had to be
dealt with, and the Reform Bill of 1831 left these evils as it had
found them. The Bill, however, did, in its other provisions, do much
to establish a genuine principle of Parliamentary representation.

To begin with, it proclaimed the principle of representation as the
legal basis of the whole Parliamentary system. It abolished the
nomination of members, whether by individual persons or by
corporations. It laid down as law that representation must bear some
proportion to the numbers represented. It made actual, or at least
occasional, residence a qualification for a voter. These were the main
principles of the measure. The attention of readers will presently be
drawn to the manner in which the Bill failed to answer some of the
demands made upon the Government by the spreading intelligence of the
country, and left these demands to be more adequately answered by the
statesmen of a later generation. Enough to say that with all its
defects the Bill, as Lord John Russell explained it, was, for its time,
a bold and broad measure of reform, and that it laid down the lines
along which, as far as human foresight can discern, the movement of
progress in England's political history will make its way.

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CHAPTER LXXII.

THE GREAT DEBATE.

[Sidenote: 1831--Sir Robert Inglis and Reform]

The debate which followed Lord John Russell's motion for leave to bring
in the Bill contained, as well might be expected, some very remarkable
speeches. Three of these deserve the special attention of the student
of history. The first illustrated the views of the extreme Tory of
that day, and is indeed a political curiosity which ought never to be
consigned to utter oblivion. This speech was made by Sir Robert Harry
Inglis, who represented the University of Oxford. Sir Robert Inglis
was a living embodiment of the spirit of old-world Toryism as it had
come down to his day, Toryism which had in it little or nothing of the
picturesque, half poetic sentiment belonging to the earlier wearers of
the rebel rose, the