Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/110

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The formation of electoral districts has been a subject of discussion from almost the earliest time at which the question of parliamentary reform began to be agitated. Various plans have been suggested for forming such districts or divisions. In the year 1780, the Duke of Richmond propounded, in the House of Lords, a comprehensive scheme of reform, in a bill which the brief record of that day states occupied an hour and a half in reading. This measure, after declaring the right of suffrage to be in male persons of twenty-one, went on to prescribe that a list should be taken in every parish of the number of voters, and returns of them made to the Lord Chancellor. "The numbers to be told-up, and divided by 558 (the number of members then in the house), and the quotient to be the number by which one member of parliament was to be elected. Every county to be divided into as many districts as they contain quotients of this nature, and these districts to be called boroughs.

The course adopted in the Reform Act of 1832, is so well known that it will be unnecessary to do more than refer to a few of its features. As an alternative to avoid the disfranchisement of some small boroughs, the area of such boroughs for parliamentary purposes was extended to much of the surrounding country,—embracing, in some cases, a circuit of