Burdett as carrying with it the
redress of all other grievances. But Canning was by no means the only
liberal statesman who heartily dreaded it, and even the advanced
reformers had not fully grasped the comprehensive meaning of the idea
which they embraced, or the far-reaching consequences involved in it.
The palpable anomaly of Old Sarum returning members to parliament, while
Birmingham was unrepresented, was shocking to common sense, and so was
the monopoly of the franchise by a handful of electors in some of the
larger boroughs, especially in Scotland. But few appreciated how
seriously constitutional liberty had been curtailed by the growth of
these abuses (unchecked by the Commonwealth) since the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, how effectually home and foreign policy was
controlled by a small circle of noble families dominant in the lower as
well as in the upper chamber, how vast a transfer of sovereignty from
class to class would inevitably be wrought by a thorough reform bill,
and how certainly men newly entrusted with power would use it for their
own advantage, whether or not that should coincide with the advantage of
the nation. Such general aspects of the question are seldom noticed in
the earlier debates upon it, and economical reform sometimes appears to
occupy a larger space than parliamentary reform in the liberal
statesmanship of the Georgian age.

With Wellington's declaration against any parliamentary reform, this
apathy vanished, and the movement, gathering up into itself all other
popular aspirations thenceforward filled the whole political horizon.
Reform unions sprang up everywhere, and instituted a most active
propaganda. So rapid was its spread and so wild the promises lavished by
radical demagogues, that Grey and his wiser colleagues soon felt
themselves further removed from their own extreme left wing than from
the moderate section of the conservatives. It is abundantly clear that
Grey himself, faithful as he was to reform, never dreamed of
inaugurating a reign of democracy. He often declared in private that
such a bill as he contemplated would prove, in its effect, an
aristocratic measure, and he doubtless believed that it would be
possible to bring the new constituencies and the new electoral bodies
under the same conservative influences which had been dominant for so
many generations. He did not foresee, as Palmerston did thirty years
later, that, even if the political actors remained the