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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. {144} 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
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