Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/96

 is to be placed on a rational or satisfactory basis. It has been a common thing for the representatives of such places, and the advocates of the system under which they hold their privileges, to refer to the smaller boroughs, as favourably contrasted with the metropolitan and other larger constituencies, by the more independent tone which their members are able to assume. Those who know they are indebted for their seats to influences which personally affect themselves and the electors, and in which any public principles enter but in a very small degree, are of course more free in their public conduct. They know that they have other securities for their seats than a servile adoption of any popular cry. The preservation of the last remnant of political independence in France, in the early part of the eighteenth century, was the vested interest of the principal members of the provincial parliaments in their offices, and which was due to such offices being vendible, and therefore partaking of the security of individual property. It is stated to have been once somewhat coarsely said by an independent member—that what he had bought he would also sell. It must be allowed, however, that so far as regards the national interests, even the effects of this independence are often to be preferred to the slavish sub-serviency of the delegate of some of the more numerous electoral divisions.

In order to raise the more populous of the unrepresented and inadequately represented towns to their just position, two plans have been suggested—first, the combination of several of the smaller boroughs into single electoral districts, or as it is called, the formation of groups of contributory boroughs; and, secondly, and which with many writers seems to be the favourite course, the disfranchisement of many of the smaller towns at present represented. The latter course, the disfranchisement of boroughs at present in the possession of the electoral privilege, all forming parts of the great body of the people, in their degree equally valuable and necessary to the