THE UNREFORMED HOUSE OF COMMONS.* OBS may be permitted a

mild regret that it should have been left to an American scholar to accomplish a piece of valuable

research into the history of British Constitutionalism. At the same time, as Mr. Porritt is careful to tell us, he is an English. man by birth, and he insists that the political machinery of the Anglo-Saxon world is of British origin,—so much so that the laws which govern the British Constitution "have been duplicated almost to the last detail in the popularly- elected Chambers of all the self-governing British Colonies, and have also to a great degree shaped the organisation and procedure of Congress at Washington, and of the 45 American State Legislatures." These two volumes ought therefore to be welcomed as heartily on this as on the other aide of the Atlantic, although their author, as perhaps becomes a loyal American citizen, is not without, and does not disguise, certain Transatlantic prejudices. These must, however, be considered marvellously few when it is borne in mind that he admits, on the one hand, that "his standpoint has been affected by a close and continuous observation of the political systems of the United States and Canada," and, on the other, that " five-sevenths " of his researches "have been done in American libraries, such as those of Congress at Washington and the Dominion Parliament at Ottawa, the University libraries of Yale and Columbia, and the public libraries of Hartford, Boston, and New York." Of the prepara- tion of these volumes Mr. Porritt writes : "The actual writing is the work of one pen; but in the research, in the shaping of the plan, in the final form of the volumes, and in reading them for the press, I have had the constant collabora- tion and suggestive help of my wife, without whom, indeed, the work would not have been undertaken."

Mr. Porritt's treatise is admirably yet simply arranged ; it is the easiest thing in the world to understand his method, and to follow such reasoning as he allows himself to indulge in.

His first volume deals with England and Wales, his second with Ireland and Scotland. The first consists of four chief parts, dealing with the representation of the country in Parlia- ment, the relations between Members and their constituents, the Crown and the franchise, and the usages of the House. Perhaps if Mr. Porritt errs at all, it is in not giving due value to the doctrine that " whate'er is best administered is best." He is so much struck, for example, by the anomalies of the old unreformed system that he can hardly see any good—even to the extent that Macaulay saw good—in the system of " nomination boroughs" by which the aristocracy obtained, or retained, power over the House of Commons. And he places too much stress on the "gain and advancement" for which "borough owners of the type of Clive, Falmouth, Sand- wich, and Lowther" fought. Yet this bias—if it can be styled by so strong a word—enables Mr. Porritt to illustrate the good side of a bad time. Thus he writes of the Principality :—

"In some noteworthy particulars the Welsh boroughs were unlike many of the English boroughs. I have met with no instances in which the right to elect members of the House of Commons was so absolutely treated as property to be bought or sold, to be bequeathed or given as part of a marriage portion, or to be quarrelled over by families, as was the case in respect of the right to elect in so many of the smaller English boroughs. During the three centuries of the continuance of the representa- tive system of Wales on the basis on which it was established by the enactments of the reign of Henry VIII., there were developed narrowed borough constituencies such as Beaumaris and Mont- gomery, and there were such warpings of the franchise as brought into existence the honorary burgesses at Radnor, where in 1776 the right to make burgesses was sold at auction in connection with the lordship of Kevenllesce. But the Welsh representative system produced neither a Shoreham nor an Aylesbury ; neither a Grampound nor an East Retford. The electoral map of Wales was not marked by a hundred into which a borough had been thrown to punish and perhaps eradicate the deep-seated and long- standing corruption of the borough electorate. Nor was it ever marked by a Droitwich, with the electoral franchise based on nothing but parchment qualifications, or a Dawton with burgages which, although under water, continued for generations to serve as qualifications for a Parliamentary vote. Wales had no Old Sarum. It had no double representation boroughs like Weymouth. It had no boroughs dovetailed one into the other as were Bamber and Steyning, each miserable little borough returning two members. It had no free- man boroughs, long notorious for squalid and tumultuous • The Unreformed House of Commons: Parliamentary Representation before Ma. By Edward Porritt. Assisted by Annie G. Porritt. In 2 vols. Cam- bridge: at the University Press. [211.) municipal and Parliamentary electioneering, like Liverpool or Norwich. Nor has Wales a county historian who has had to make admissions like those of Borlase, the historian of Cornwall, concerning the social demoralisation due to the political con- ditions of that county of many boroughs."

Of Scotland, which from the Union to 1832 had only forty-five representatives, and which Lord Liverpool described in sinister fashion as "the best-conditioned country in the world," Fox said with too much truth in 1795 :— " When we look to the Kingdom of Scotland, we see a state of representation so monstrous and absurd, so ridiculous and revolt- ing, that it is good for nothing except perhaps to be placed by the side of the English in order to set off our defective system by the comparison of one still more defective."

Still, Mr. Porritt notes :—

" While the old representative system of Scotland is indefen- sible, and while it helped George III. to an unconstitutional control of the House of Commons and to results not for the good of national life, it has to be placed to the credit of the old Scotch system of representation, and to its manipulation by Dundas, that it gave Great Britain a long line of Indian and Colonial Adminis- trators whose names will ever stand out in the history of the period when the British Empire was in making."

Although Mr. Porritt makes no pretence to brilliancy of style, and prefers to say quietly rather than impressively whatever he has to say, his subject-matter lends itself to humour of the unconscious sort in treatment. Take his account of one of the most glaring anomalies in Parliamentary. representation :—

" The potwalloper boroughs formed the subdivision among the boroughs in which the franchise was in the possession of the in- habitants generally, as distinct from burgage holders, corpora- tions, or freemen; for the potwalloper's vote depended on proof that he provided his own sustenance, that he was master of a fire- place in which he could cook it, and that he was in control of a doorway leading to his dwelling. An eighteenth-century Parlia- mentary definition of a potwalloper was 'every inhabitant in the borough who had a family and boiled a pot there,' and in the ease of Honiton, the borough in respect of which this definition was made, it was held that the inhabitants who came within this definition had a right to vote equal with the rest of the inhabi- tants, whether they paid or did not pay scot and lot.' The pot- walloper was the quaintest of the old borough franchises, and in its seventeenth and eighteenth century modes of claim and proof was the most picturesque and the most reminiscent of mediaeval borough life. It went back to the days of serfdom when serfs and freemen mingled in the. urban communities, and when free- men occasionally took their meals in public, in some places in the kitchens which before the Reformation were attached to the churches, to prove to their neighbours that they were free and self-sustaining and ate as dependents at no lord's table. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when votes had become of value, in some boroughs the claimants of the potwalloper franchise set out tables in the street in front of their houses to prove that they were self-sustaining and entitled to the franchise."

The simplicity and earnestness of " corruption " are admirab1x. illustrated by the purchase of " nomination " boroughs :—

"In the reign of George III., and until the Reform Act of 1832 cut so many nomination boroughs out of the electoral system, it was usual for administrations, Tory or Whig, to go into the market and purchase the right to nominate members for a Parliament. George III.'s and North's transactions in boroughs at the General Election of 1774 illustrate the business-like way in which these purchases were made. 'Lord Falmouth,' wrote North to Cooper, 'must be told in as polite terms as possible that I hope he will permit me to recommend to three of his six seats in Cornwall. The terms he expects are two thousand fiye hundred pounds a seat, to which I readily agree ' t was in this transaction of 1774 that Lord Falmouth earned notoriety by insisting on guineas, not pounds, in his bargaining with the Treasury. My noble friend,' wrote North, is rather shabby in desiring guineas instead of pounds. If he persists, I would not have the bargain go off upon so slight a dliterence."

And again :—

"When, in 1722, the Corporation of Bunsbury was asked for its . suffrages, it replied that most other Corporationeemade a consider- able advantage of their elections, and they kntev no reason why they should not do it as well as their neighbours ; that they wanted to have their streets paved, an augmentation to their vicarage, and a school built ; and that the person who should be chosen should be at that expense."

Perhaps, too, the good old unreformed days are worth sighing for for another reason:— " For lay members of the House of Commons there are to-diy far fewer prizes than there were when the Treasury Whips had commissionerships and other highly-paid offices in the Civil Service for distribution among adherents of the Government. But for the lawyers there are far more prizes than ever ; more recorderships, more appointments as stipendiary magis- trates, more county court judgeships, and more judgeships in the higher courts ; while in the nineteenth century, as in the eighteenth, a seat in the House was usually a makeweight in favour of a barrister who applied for the rank of Queen's Counsel."

Among the happiest—in every sense—of Mr. Porritt's chapters are those in which he deals with what in the pseudo-scientific slang of the day is known as the "evolu- tion" of various Parliamentary institutions. Such is the reporter, who has, of course, triumphed in his struggle—if it can so be styled—for the freedom of the Press, although it is always well to remember that the great Speaker Denison spoke not only for his own time, but for all time, when he said that "the House does not recognise the reports of debates. A correct or an incorrect report is out of its cognisance." The tracing of the "evolution" of what Mr. Porritt terms "the non-partisan Speaker" is still more interesting and readable. The Speaker used to be nominated by the King, and was the representative of the Crown in the Commons. Then he was elected by the House, but was the partisan of the Government. Finally, he became the impartial arbiter of the House. A secondary aspect of the Speakership is thus interestingly dealt with "Hooker, when he wrote his description of the House of Com- mons, made no mention of the vesture of the Serjeant-at-Arms, nor gave the least hint that in the last half of the sixteenth cen- tury the Speaker and the Clerks at the table were in any way distinguished in dress from the members of the House. The Journals contain no orders on these matters; and it is solely from extra-official records, and usually only incidentally from these, that anything can be ascertained regarding the date of the dress of the Speaker and the Clerks. There is an incidental allusion in Dr. Ewes's Journals which shows that Speakers of Queen Eliza- beth's Parliament wore gowns. This is the earliest mention that I have found of the Speaker's gown. Nowhere have I discovered when it became customary for the Speaker to wear it. It may be conjectured that the gown was introduced by the lawyers who were of the chair. The wig which the Speaker now wears was not permanently part of his attire until after Onslow's time ; for there is a picture of the House in which both Walpole and Speaker Onslow are shown wearing high hats of the shape in vogue early in the Hanoverian dynasty. A guide to London, published in the early years of the reign of George III., describes the Speaker and the Clerks as wearing gowns, and this is the earliest of the few mentions of the attire of the Clerks at the table which I have been able to discover."

The " patriotism " of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons is also worth noting :—

" The political relations between Speakers and administrations in the later periods of the Irish Parliament are well illustrated by some of the letters from Dublin to Lord North in 1779 when Ireland was greatly agitated over the question of free trade. In 1778 and 1779 Pery was openly in favour of free trade; and the situation of Buckinghamshire, the Lord Lieutenant, in July, 1779, was, to quote his own words, scarcely to be endured.' 'I have,' he wrote to an intimate in England, no confidential communica- tion with the Cabinet, nor an Irishman to consult who has not a bias to this kingdom.' A month later Buckinghamshire laid his troubles with regard to the Speaker and the position in the House of Commons before North. 'The Speaker,' he then wrote, 'pushes warmly the commercial interests of Ireland ; and there is too much reason to apprehend that all the friends of Government may observe the same conduct. I believe the gratifying of him at this time a measure most essential to Government.' The declara- tion for free trade which Buckinghamshire so much dreaded was carried in the House of Commons."