[p. 85]
|85| and in the public papers. It may therefore suffice here to recall the chief points, namely that towns of small population, or also their magistrates – and indeed self-recruiting ones – to the exclusion of the burgesses, and even hamlets dwindled to two or three inhabitants (and these tenants), have retained the right to bestow seats in Parliament, while many flourishing towns risen in later times, of a hundred thousand inhabitants and more, are excluded from the right of such nomination, the greatest variety of other inequality being present besides between these extremes. As a proximate consequence it has resulted that the filling of a great number of seats in Parliament is in the hands of a small number of individuals (according to calculation, the majority of the House in the hands of 150 grandees), that, further, a still more considerable number of seats is venal, in part an acknowledged object of trade, so that the possession of such a seat is acquired by bribery, by formal payment of a certain sum to those entitled to vote, or altogether reduces itself, in manifold other modifications, to a monetary relation.
A similar symptom of political corruption in a people will hardly be found anywhere. Montesquieu declared virtue, the disinterested sense of duty towards the state, to be the principle of the democratic constitution; in the English constitution the democratic element has a considerable domain in the participation of the people in the election of the members of the House of Commons, – of the statesmen to whom falls the most important part of the power that resolves upon the most general affairs. It is well a fairly concordant view of the pragmatic historians that, when in a people private interest and filthy pecuniary advantage interfere predominantly in the election of the heads of the state, such a condition is to be regarded as the forerunner of the necessary loss of its
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