The following scheme for securing the representation of the ma-
enfranchised classes without investing them with the preponder- ant power in the State, is the suggestion of an able and influential thinker, whose name, if we were at liberty to give it, would en- sure attention. His principle is to divide England and Wales into forty electoral districts of nearly equal population, in which every adult male, not being pauper or convict, and having resided in the district for six months, should have a vote at district elec- tions; and each of which districts should return one member. The included boroughs would retain their franchises (except so far as disfranchisement would be needed to make vacant seatafor the district members), and so would the counties ; and the same person might vote at once for district, county, and borough, if he united the three qualifications. It is computed that each district would not be likely to haver more than 42,000 voters, a number which would be much reduced if each were required to register himself and write his claim with his own hand, so as to exclude all who could not read and write. It is farther proposed to pro- vide the requisite number of seats by disfranchising the smallest borough in each district. Without committing ourselves to the advocacy of this scheme, we must say that there is less in it to offend English prejudices as being novel, anomalous, or doctrinaire, than in any other which has been brought forward with similar objects. It seems at first sight to be an objection to it that the agricultural departments would add another element to the repre- sentation of the landed interest, which is enough represented • already, but as every agricultural department would only take thee place of an agricultural borough, no harm would come of this, while it would probably turn out in practice that the plan of dis- franchising one borough in each department would not be adhered to, and that the great manufacturing departments would take the place of agricultural boroughs situated elsewhere.
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