Page:Studies in constitutional law Fr-En-US (1891).pdf/165

Rh and independent. The House of Commons, for instance, at the outset certainly represented some hundreds of corporate bodies, counties, towns, boroughs, and later the universities. The original sense of the word “commons,” according to a plausible etymology, is communities, corporate bodies, and not, as we might easily suppose, the common people. These corporate bodies have remained, almost up to the present day, the only persons really entitled to the electoral power. A few individuals have been empowered to vote on their behalf. But the law has taken little cognizance of these individual voters, has scarcely cared to know who they are, and still less to decide who they ought to be. In all boroughs it is local custom which has till recent times decided who are to be the voters. The legal idea of the citizen as a man, who as such is entitled to certain political rights, was for the first time partially recognized in 1832. Up to that date this idea was not so much misapprehended by, as actually unknown to, English law. The entrance on the political scene of citizens as such was at first hardly noticed, but certainly was, on account of its present no less than of its future results, the great political event of the century in England. The Ballot Act, and the statutes against bribery, passed in order to keep the citizen free and uncorrupted in the exercise of his public duty, show that his existence is at last recognized, that he has emerged from the ranks of the corporate bodies, and that he has forced himself on public