144

irLSTOHY OF ENGUlND.

CHAP.

XIX.

16 U 2 .

Parlia-

mentary

Reform.

denied that, in the largest view, the effect of this system hasbeen salutary. For it is manifest that all credit depends on twothings, on the power of a debtor to pay debts, and on hisinclination to payihem. The power of a society to pay debts isproportioned to the progress which that society has made inindustry, in commerce, and in all the arts and sciences whichilourish under the benignant influence of freedom and of equallaw. The inclination of a society to pay debts is proportionedto the degree in which that society respects the obligations ofplighted faith. Of the strength which consists in extent ofterritory and in number of fighting men, a rude despot whoknows no law but his own childish fancies and headstrongpassions, or a convention of socialists which proclaims allproperty to be robbery, may have more than falls to the lot ofthe best and wisest government. But the strength which isderived from the confidence of capitalists such a despot, sucha convention, never can possess. That strength, — and it is astrength which has decided the event of more than one greatconflict, — flies, by the law of its nature, from barbarism andfraud, from tyranny and anarchy, to follow civilisation andvirtue, liberty and order.

While the bill which first created the funded debt of Eng-land was passing, with general approbation, through theregular stages, the two Houses discussed, for the first time, thegreat question of Parliamentary Reform.

It is to be observed that the object of the reformers of thatgeneration was merely to make the representative body a morefaithful interpreter of the sense of the constituent body. Itseems scarcely to have occurred to any of them that the con-stituent body might be an unfaithful interpreter of the sense ofthe nation. It is true that those deformities in the structure ofthe constituent body, wdiich, at length, in our own days,raised an irresistible storm of public indignation, were far less