matter if the measure placed before it were obviously proper and necessary, every obstacle is put in the way of carrying it. There never was a subject that more urgently demanded the attention of the Legislature than parliamentary reform, before Earl Grey carried his Reform Bill. The evils complained of were notorious and scandalous. A majority of the seats were in the nomination of ministers of the Crown, of the territorial magnates, or of the resident gentry. It was asserted that upwards of 97 members of the House of Commons were actually nominated, and 70 more indirectly appointed by peers and the Treasury, and that ninety-one commoners procured the election of 139 more. The facts were not disputed; they were almost universally acknowledged to be indisputable. Yet to abolish this iniquitous state of things required an amount of outside pressure, of moral and physical display of force on the part of the people, that is difficult to comprehend at the present day. Parliamentary reform had been forced on the notice of the Legislature by long and persistent agitation out of doors, and from the day when the Reform Bill was introduced into the Commons till it passed the Lords, the whole nation was kept in the wildest state of excitement. Public demonstrations in favour of the bill were unprecedented in extent and unanimity. It would

have been impossible for the people to declare more emphatically for any measure than they did for this. Everywhere the country was unanimously in favour of it, and gave expression to its feelings in no halfhearted way. There were mass meetings, tumultuous assemblies, and riotings all over the country. At Birmingham from 150,000 to 200,000 people assembled and declared unanimously in favour of the measure, and at other large centres of population public meetings were proportionately numerous, enthusiastic, and unanimous. A deputation, numbering 60,000, consisting of delegates from every parish in the metropolis, presented a petition to the king in favour of the bill; the City council petitioned the Commons to refuse supplies till the bill was passed through the Lords; the same prayer was received from Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, and almost every town in the kingdom. When the bill met with opposition in the Lords, public indignation vented itself in numerous acts of violence in various places. There were riots in Bristol, Derby, Nottingham, Bath, Worcester, Coventry, Warwick, and other places; the military were called out, and many lives were lost before the riotings could be suppressed. But nothing could damp the enthusiasm of the country. For a while the Reform question occupied public attention to the exclusion of almost everything else.

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Business was at a standstill; nothing was talked of but the prospects of the bill. Even women and children took up the question of reform. Every one felt as if a great national crisis were impending; and Mr. Molesworth, in his history of this period, has declared it as his conviction that if the Lords had rejected the Reform Bill, there would have been a revolution that would have changed the whole course of English history.

Nor has legislation proceeded much more smoothly under a reformed Parliament. The Chartist agitation of 1838-39 caused nearly as great a ferment in England for a while as did the Reform Bill. The mass meetings, strikes, and riotings of 1832 were repeated, though on a somewhat smaller scale. The agitators were thoroughly in earnest, and showed by many acts that they were capable of self-sacrifice. There can be no doubt that the great majority of the people were on the side of the reformers, and the movement might have succeeded had it been in abler hands. The agitation suddenly collapsed, and not one of the many reforms demanded was advanced a single step by a movement which produced an amount of excitement unparalleled in recent times. Yet there was nothing ridiculous or even unreasonable in the demands of the Chartists. Four out of the six reforms which they demanded have since been conceded, wholly or partially, by Parliament, namely,

vote by ballot, the abolition of property qualification for members, equalization of electoral districts, and manhood suffrage; and the shortening of the duration of Parliaments, or something equivalent thereto, will doubtless follow before the end of the century.

But the expenditure of labour in abortive attempts at reform has been small when compared with the time wasted upon them. At the present rate of progress it is questionable, indeed, if the generation now living under the British Constitution will be able to enjoy the fruits of any great measure they may set their hearts upon carrying. It is certain, at all events, that very few of those eminent men who devoted their lives to some great reform, lived to see it embodied in law. This may seem small encouragement to patriotic men to labour in the public service, but it is true nevertheless. It took a whole generation to accomplish Catholic emancipation. Mr. Wilberforce devoted a long life to the abolition of slavery, and hardly lived to see it accomplished. The reform of our brutal criminal code was the work of more than a quarter of a century. It took half a century to carry the abolition of religious tests at matriculation and graduation, and to establish a national system of education. Purchase in the army was a public grievance for more than half a century before it was abolished, and its aboli

tion was at last accomplished by a straining of the royal prerogative. A measure for legalizing marriage with a deceased wife's sister has been bandied between the two Houses of Parliament for over thirty years. Mr. Stuart Wortley's bill on this subject was introduced into the Commons in 1849, when it passed the same year; it was again introduced and passed the Commons in 1851. A similar measure has since been repeatedly passed in one chamber and as often rejected in the other, although there can be no manner of doubt as to the wishes of the country with regard to it. Parliamentary reform was a prominent subject of public and parliamentary discussion for more than a century before the first instalment of it was carried in 1832. As early as 1766, the elder Pitt denounced the system of parliamentary corruption that existed in his day. Four years later, he stated in Parliament that "before the end of the century either Parliament will reform itself from within, or be reformed with a vengeance from without," but the century ended without the much-needed reform. The question of vote by ballot was under discussion in the House of Commons as early as 1708. The subject was again and again brought up, but was only carried in 1872. Not a single new fact was brought to light, or a single fresh argument was presented, at the time it was carried that was not known and applied when