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ON THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES

OF

POLITICAL REPRESENTATION.

INTRODUCTION.

SECTION I.

On the Progress and Present State of Political Representation.

THE subject of the following Treatise is daily becoming of higher importance. The successful operation of representative governments as exhibited in England, and in a still more striking manner in the United States of America, promises to lead in the course of time to the establishment of the same system in other countries, where at present the will of the monarch, instead of being under the salutary influence of constitutional checks, is irregularly controlled by variable views of private benefit, or apprehensions of personal danger.

The system of political representation, now

B

matured into admirable usefulness, was not the offspring of any comprehensive policy, but simply of the exigencies of the time in which it arose. It was called into action, in its first rude shape, by those in power, because it appeared to them the readiest and least troublesome mode of raising pecuniary supplies; and it was continued for a long period with the same design. In England, the first deputies sent from the boroughs, at the summons of the crown, were assembled together, because it was easier for the government to treat with them as a body, than to negotiate separately with the agents of every borough for the supplies which were wanted. The sole business of these deputies, this rudiment of a House of Commons, appears originally to have been to hear the proposals of the king and council regarding the subsidies required from the people; and after due deliberation, and perhaps demurs on one part and concessions and modifications on the other, to give their consent to the taxes to be imposed. It was a very natural step for the deputies to avail themselves of the opportunity of being thus assembled together at the seat of government, to complain of any injuries which the people were suffering, or to petition for any privileges which their constituents were anxious to possess.

These petitions when granted, seem gradually to have acquired the character of laws; and it is easy to conceive how the deputies, thus rising into importance, were transformed from mere agents, whose office was limited to the negotiation of pecuniary levies, into legislators, whose business it was to attend to the general welfare of the people. One after another, every measure which affected the state was comprehended in their deliberations, and brought within the vortex of their power; not, however, without continual struggles on the part of the monarch,—struggles rendered ultimately ineffectual by the tenacity of the Commons in grasping the exclusive privilege of granting or withholding those pecuniary supplies, without which all governments are help

less.

The instinct of power in the executive during these successive struggles, in which it became more and more manifest how vain it was to expect success in an open contention with the Commons, soon prompted a recourse to the arts of corruption, by which, for a long period, the authority of the crown was upheld against the just claims of the people. The supplies which the Lower House, as a body, tenaciously held it to be their peculiar privilege to grant, were em