contained as
many thousands of citizens as they could boast single burgesses. At the
same time it was equally undeniable that the aristocracy, generally
speaking, exerted their influence advantageously for the state. A peer
or great squire who could return the members for a borough took a worthy
pride in the abilities and reputation of those whom he thus sent to
Parliament; especially the leaders of the two parties sought out
promising young men for their seats; and it has often been pointed out
that, of the men who in the House of Commons had risen to eminence in
the country before the Reform Bill, there was scarcely one who had not
owed his introduction to Parliament to the patron of one of those
boroughs which were now wholly or partially disfranchised; while on one
or two occasions these "rotten boroughs," as, since Lord Chatham's time,
they were often derisively called, had proved equally useful in
providing seats for distinguished statesmen who, for some reason or
other, had lost the confidence of their former constituents. So, when
Bristol had disgraced itself by the rejection of Burke, Malton had
averted the loss with which Parliament and the country were threatened
by again, through the influence of Lord Rockingham, returning the great
statesman as their representative. So, to take a later instance,
Westbury, under the influence of Sir Manasseh Lopes, had provided a
refuge for Sir Robert Peel, when the course which he had taken on
Catholic Emancipation had cost him his seat for Oxford. And these
practical uses of these small boroughs--anomalies in a representative
system, as they were called in the debates on the subject, and as they
must be confessed to have been--were so important, that some even of
those who felt compelled by their principles to vote for their
parliamentary extinction have, nevertheless, confessed a regret for the
sacrifice, lamenting especially that it has, in a great degree, closed
the doors of the House of Commons against a class whose admission to it
is on every account most desirable, the promising young men of both
parties.

In one point of great importance the framers of the Reform Bill of 1832
proved to be mistaken. They justified the very comprehensive or sweeping
range which they had given it by their wish to make it a final
settlement of the question, and by the expression of their conviction
that the completeness with which it had satisfied all reasonable
expectations had effect