triennial. Mr. Bentham has given the weight of his authority to annual parliaments, recommending, however, to secure the continuity of business, a clumsy enough contrivance, which he calls continuation committees, to consist of members who have important bills on hand. Reformers, who attach more importance to responsibility than to legislation, will prefer annual to triennial parliaments; and certainly, a single year is eleven months too long of the members who obtain seats by popular pretences, which they use for their personal aggrandizement. But annual parliaments would prove either to be perpetual seats, or annual interruptions of legislative business. However, the difference between annual and triennial parliaments is, according to the People's Charter, too important a matter for reformers to agree to differ about it. There is another mistake in the wording of the charter, of greater practical importance than any of the others, a mistake which is very extensively copied by reformers, equal electoral districts.' This phrase does not express the meaning of the persons who use it. They mean an equal distribution of electoral power. They mean, that the vote of every elector shall have precisely an equal weight in the vote lists with the vote of every other elector. Equal electoral districts suggest the idea of cutting the country up into squares, like a chess-board. What justice requires is, that every man should be a voter, and every vote equal in legislative influence. The charter, therefore, by using the phrase, electoral districts, does not express what its framers meant, and what justice requires, and needlessly rouses against the cause the hostility of all the amiable associations, ancient prejudices, and practical utilities, connected with the present divisions of the country into counties, cities, and boroughs. There is a practical advantage lost by calling a just distribution of electoral power, equal electoral districts, because reformers are obliged to assume a defensive position, instead of occupying the best aggressive position from which the present representative system can be assailed.

Upon

The defenders of the existing system have to prove, that an elector of a small borough ought to have manifold more electoral power, in proportion, than the elector of a large borough. The Reform Act has been uniformly passed off, as a real enfranchisement of the middle classes of the three kingdoms. this false impression, the working classes have been taught by mischievous men to hate them, as their greatest enemies. The middle classes, themselves, until recently believed in their own vast consequence. In truth they are vastly insignificant. But, to persuade them that they would henceforth be supreme, was the great object of Whig eloquence, in the days of the bill,

the whole bill, and nothing but the bill.' They were told they were the safest depositories of political power. Their mental activity, their sterling virtues, their happy attachment both to order and to progress, entitled them to be predominant; and they were lifted into the place of power by the Reform Act. An investigation of the distribution of electoral power will destroy the mischievous belief which the working classes hold, that the middle classes have acted treacherously by them. They say, 'We assisted them at the time of the Reform Bill to gain their rights, and now they combine with the oligarchy to keep us out of our rights.' This erroneous impression is a source of much bad feeling. The middle classes have been admitted into only the most insignificant and fractional share of the electoral power. When the working classes walked in great processions, making demonstrations of their physical and numerical strength in favour of the bill, they knew that the Reform Bill did not profess to represent them, and deprived them of the franchises they had from the days of old. But they believed the deception, that the bill would really enfranchise the middle classes, in whose generosity to themselves they placed a noble confidence. Who can now look back to the flatteries and the gullibility of the time. without a bitter smile? We have heard the ten-pound householders publicly prayed for, and specifically described from the pulpit as the powers that be.' They began to believe themselves somebodies, and have even been known to make jokes upon dukes. Parliamentary orators told them they were neither the froth at the top, nor the dregs at the bottom, of the social pewter pot, but the good liquor in the middle. There was a monarch of the middle classes set up in France. There was a parliament of the middle classes chosen in England. The shopocracy were declared to be supreme. The reign of the middle classes had commenced. From the highest to the lowest quarters, the word of command passed to all,-Off hats to his Highness, Prince Counter, and his Majesty, King Till.'

The most extravagant notions prevailed respecting the feat of statesmanship, accomplished by the Reform Act in those days. Deluded patriotism inspired the eloquence of partizanship. Whig wisdom had saved the country. Grey, Russell, and Brougham, had averted the horrors of revolution. The Lord Advocate Jeffrey compared the settlement of the representation to the act of creation' which divided the waters under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.' Beautiful, indeed, henceforth was to be the political sky, and placid henceforth the political sea. Thanks to the Whigs, there would be storms no more!

The enfranchisement of the middle classes, the false pretence

of 1832, is displayed in its true colours when the distribution of electoral power under the Reform Act is carefully considered. By using the phrase 'equal electoral districts,' the Radicals enabled the Whigs to declaim against 'a geographical reform.' A just distribution of electoral power, according to population, was scouted as the rule of three representative system.' But, in fact, in so far as it embodied any notions of justice and improvement, the Reform Act professed to defer to the rule of three. Prescription, privilege, and vested right, were abandoned as the basis of the suffrage. Sixty boroughs were disfranchised, because their population was under 2000. Forty-seven boroughs were disfranchised of half their members, because their population was under 4000. Members were given to several new boroughs, because they had large populations, of many thousands. The authors of the Reform Act, therefore, went upon the rule of three, and worked their questions badly.

The statistical and arithmetical aspect of the Reform Act would be a rich and amusing subject to any one who should bring out all its anomalies. We can only show a few specimens. The populations of Tavistock and Glasgow, according to the Whig rule of three, both hold the same relations to 2, for both return two members. The population of Tavistock is 6000, and the population of Glasgow is 350,000, therefore, according to the Whig way of working the rule of three, as 6000 to 2, so is 350,000 to 2. The following are five of the largest boroughs returning two members, with the number of their electors on the roll of 1846:

The following are five of the smallest boroughs returning two members, with the number of their electors on the roll of 1846:

The five great and the five small boroughs equally count ten in their representatives, before the tellers in the vote lists, and

in the making of the laws! As 75,172 to 10, so is 1,317 to 10, according to the Whig rule of three! But we can only indicate the arithmetical sport, if the phrase is pardonable, which this distribution of electoral power affords to the student.

This iniquitous distribution of electoral power furnishes the election agents with a congenial element on which to work successfully.

The foundation of the criminal power of the agent is his attention to the Register. When Sir Robert Peel was building up the Conservative party, he cried, Register! register! register!' This cry is the motto of the agent. The Registration Court is his workshop. When we wish to look closely at the workings of the electoral system, and to obtain glimpses of its darker recesses, we must observe the agent in the Registration Court.

The superior class of attorneys will not be electioneering agents. These persons are, frequently, men possessed of great knowledge, great talents, and cunning, the natural element of whose souls is dirt. It is believed,' says the Times, that a biographical dictionary of that order of electioneering agents, who force their assistance upon the acceptance of a wealthy candidate, would afford as many examples of cunning and audacious frauds as any edition of the Newgate Calendar.' But, of this class of men, more than of any other, the House of Commons is the creature.

The electioneering agent forces himself upon the wealthy candidate. Indeed, he and the property qualification together, take care that no man shall be a candidate who does not pay black mail to him. The agent is the Rob Roy of the constituency, and his alternatives are black mail, or war to the knife. No man is such a stickler for a property qualification in candidates. In fact, the truest definition of this qualification, which could be adopted, would be-fleecibility to the attorneys. It is an act for ensuring a feathered class of candidates, for the benefit of those to whom their feathers are beneficial.

The Registration Court, professedly set up for the purification of the Register, is a great scene for the frauds of the Parliamentary agent. He appears in the Registration Court, to attack or to defend votes without any written authority, or being asked any questions. The purification of the Register is the pretext for his appearance, while he, a white-robed innocent, is the author of most of its pollutions. He objects to a vote when the list is made up, without any reference to the law, upon the chance that the vote will not be defended before the revising barrister. The sharpest of sharp attorneys, he speculates upon the legal difficulties. The Parliamentary agent is to the attor

ney, what the attorney is to the rest of the human race, and to his zeal and worth is intrusted the battle of the Constitution, as fought in the Registration Courts. He makes a hundred objections, on the chance of succeeding in twenty cases. His skill consists in selecting the votes which are least likely to be defended, owing to the age, infirmities, distance, or absence of the voters. He has been known to succeed in placing on the roll, the names of persons who not merely had no votes, but who had no existence. An accident may enable him to strike off the roll, and disfranchise, the most respectable and best qualified of citizens. A futile attempt has been made to stop his career, by imposing upon him the payment of costs for frivolous objections. However, his cunning soon surmounted this obstacle. Liabilities of this description are nothing to men wellknown to have often been cunning enough to enfranchise the non-existent and poll the dead! The decisions of the revising barristers are full of contradictions, and the Registration Law is full of disputed points—and he is the very imp of sharpness, trickery, and fraud.

The knowledge he possesses of the Register, and his attention to it, year after year, enables him to force himself upon the candidate, whose wealth he wishes to share. But the Parliamentary agent has a grander and darker aspect. He is the creator of a suffrage. He has brought into existence a class of voters, who live, and breathe, and have their being in him. To enfranchise the non-existent and poll the dead, were small and petty feats, compared with deciding the fate of cities and counties by a spawn of his own, an incubation of perjury, more strange and wonderful, than the marvels ascribed to the electricity of Mr. Crosse. The Registration Court is the scene of this marvellous iniquity. It is in no den of criminal resort, but in the temple set up by the Constitution for the purification of the electoral system, that he hatches his monstrous and obnoxious brood of perjury voters. We say perjury voters, advisedly and irrefutably.

The Whig and Tory parties have both employed the Parliamentary agent, in the creation of this perjury suffrage. It is a bootless, a Danaides crime. All parties have been guilty of it; but we submit, the guilt rests most on those men who have made the loudest professions of reform, while really engaged in a series of crimes; by means of frauds and perjuries. Almost since the year of the Reform Act, the electioneering agent has been at work in the fabrication of fictitious qualifications for votes, which thousands of men have used by swearing they were real, and themselves bona fide electors. It were hard to say if any party has gained by the iniquity. If the Tories have