[p. 84]
|84| have their advantage in those privileges, – a feeling that received great support from the impression of apprehension which the neighbouring example of France produced among the Members of Parliament concerned; the almost universal voice that has declared itself in England on the need of a reform is wont to be made valid in Parliament as a most important motive. But even if the public voice of Great Britain were quite universally for reform, in the extension or restriction in which the Bill proposes it, it would still have to be permitted to examine the content of what such a voice demands, all the more since in more recent times we have not seldom experienced that its demands proved unfeasible, or disastrous in their execution, and that the general voice then turned just as vehemently against that which shortly before it had seemed vehemently to demand and to approve. The ancients, who in the democracies to which they belonged from their youth lived through a long series of experiences and at the same time applied their profound reflection to them, had other conceptions of the voice of the people than are current nowadays, more a priori.
The projected reform proceeds from the indisputable fact that the foundations according to which the share was determined that the various counties and communities of England had in the filling of Parliament have completely changed in the course of time, so that the “rights of such share” have thereby become completely divergent from the principles of the foundations themselves and contradictory to everything that in this part of a constitution is evident to the simplest common sense as just and fair. One of the most considerable opponents of the Bill, Robert Peel, admits that it may be easy to dilate upon the anomalies and absurdity of the English constitution, and the absurdities have been set out at length in all their details in the proceedings of Parliament
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