96 PUBLICATION OF PARLIAMENTARY REPORTS. CH. XV. profession an attorney. But he must be mentioned as an exception to the ordinary quality of the civic dignitaries of the period. Close of the session. The dispute between the House of Commons and the City ended with the session of Parliament. The House, sensible at last that they had gone too far, disregarded the advice of their committee to renew the prosecution against the printers. Privilege was relinquished; and, from that day forth, the proceedings of Parliament were regularly reported in the public journals. Thus a quarrel, originally provoked by a demagogue for the purpose of feeding his gainful popularity, and to which the Commons had been, in the first instance, committed by the levity of one of their most insignificant members, resulted in an event which must ever be referred to as a most important epoch in the constitutional and political history of the nation. There was something like poetical justice in the termination of this business. The parties who had engaged in it from sinister designs were severally disappointed. Wilkes failed to turn it to his pecuniary profit: Onslow, instead of crushing the printers, became a humble instrument, in the hands of Providence, for extending the liberty of the press. The King, by his blind obstinacy, as usual, secured the triumph of those whom he wished to oppress. With this affair, the feud which had raged between the House of Commons and the City, for in the City. two years, on the question of privilege, finally ceased. The popular party, released by the concession of the Commons, from the strong bond of union which had held them together, immediately gave way to the dissensions which had, for some time, been growing up among them. Disgust at the profligacy and total want of public principle which the conduct of Wilkes plainly disclosed, had already detached almost all his respectable supporters, and 1771. BAD REPUTE OF WILKES. 97 had alienated many from a cause, of which such a prostitute patriot affected to be the leader. In vain. did Chatham and Shelburne, while shunning his society, endeavour to keep him up as a rallying-point for opposition to the Court. In vain did Junius, while admitting his worthlessness, entreat the citizens, as a matter of policy, not to abandon a man, whose name was still valuable from the associations with which it was connected. The consequence of this disunion was that the Court stept in and recovered their influence in the City. Crosby, by his firm and spirited conduct in the contest with the House of Commons, had acquired popularity hardly inferior to that of Wilkes. The compliment ordinarily paid to a chief magistrate who has distinguished his mayoralty is to re-elect him to the chair; and, if ever such a compliment was merited, there could hardly be a second opinion that Crosby was eminently entitled to it. But Crosby, like his coadjutor Oliver, and many other persons of weight and character in the City, thinking that the cause in which they had been engaged gained no strength or credit by the unnecessary co-operation of Wilkes, had not disguised that opinion. The partisans of Wilkes, therefore, determined to oppose the re-election of Crosby; and, with factious spite, transferred their votes to the Court candidate Nash, who was accordingly returned as the choice of the livery by a large majority. Discord was not confined to the City. The Whigs, untaught by the experience of the last Dissension of twelve years, were still as far from united the Whigs. action as they had been at their first schism sixty years before. Chatham proposed a bill for the reform of Parliament, reducing its duration to the triennial period, and embodying his favourite plan of an extended county representation. But he received so little encouragement from those to whom he looked for support, that he reluctantly abandoned the 98 CHARACTER OF THE CONSTITUENCIES IN 1771. CH. XV. attempt. Some objected, not altogether without reason, that, in the existing state of the electoral system, to shorten the duration of Parliaments would only have the effect of exposing more frequently the nakedness of the constitution. The scheme of extending the county representation did not meet with greater favour. Yet, without reference to a thorough reconstruction of the House of Commons, which would have been impracticable, the measure proposed by Chatham appears to have been better calculated to meet the immediate exigency than any other that could have been devised. The evil, which, commencing with parliamentary government, had gone on impairing its credit, and at last imperilling its existence, was the increase of venal constituencies. The representatives elected by such constituencies were partly adventurers and self-seekers, and partly members or nominees of those rival combinations of great families who were intent only on grasping power and patronage, though they all claimed the common title of Whig. The only mode of counteracting these cabals was by strengthening the landed interest. There were not in 1771, as there were in 1830, great commercial and trading communities, enlightened, energetic, and enterprising, in close correspondence with the capital and with each other, and readily adapted to political organisation. The middle classes hardly existed as a power in the State. The lower orders were sunk in ignorance and brutality. The country party alone remained to represent English independence and integrity. Most of the counties, it is true, were under the influence of the greater nobility and gentry, of whom many were members of the political factions. Still there was a large body of the minor landowners and yeomanry, who, however rude and uninformed, and however much they might be cajoled by the names of loyalty and patriotism, had still intelligence Former character of the constituencies. 1771. CHATHAM'S PLAN OF REFORM. 99 and honesty enough to repel the advances of mere courtiers and impostors. The Dysons and the Rigbys were never introduced by their patrons to county constituencies. Large landed property, or affinity to great landed proprietors, have always been held by the territorial aristocracy as an indispensable qualification for a knight of the shire. And as to the adventurers who wandered about the country with no other credentials than bags of gold, they never presumed to alight upon a county. The increase of the county representation, therefore, was the only available mode at that time of counteracting the Court party, which comprised, for the most part, the jobbers and adventurers who were the disgrace and the weakness of the House of Commons. There was, of course, no chance of carrying such a plan as Chatham had sketched out. But the whole Opposition should have united in support of a measure calculated, as far as legislation could effect such an object, to provide some remedy for a distemper which was fast destroying the noblest parts of the constitution. There was no other question so important, so pressing, as this of parliamentary reform; there was none which, to the same extent, could have rallied popular support to a sincere and united Opposition. The country had long beheld with grief and shame the debasement of the representative system, the open debauchery of the elector, the hardly-concealed venality of the elected. It was to no purpose that they had remonstrated both with the Crown and the Commons upon an iniquity which the Crown and the majority of the Commons were plainly interested in maintaining. They looked up to their great men and were told to petition. They did petition; and when their petitions were treated with contempt, they looked in vain for more vigorous counsels from leaders who loved to boast themselves the successors of the men who had once and again conquered the 100 AMENDMENT OF THE LAW OF LIBEL. CH. XV. religion and liberties of their country. But the Whigs would neither take a decided course themselves, nor allow others to do so. They denounced the Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights with a virulence of which the courtiers never were the object; and rather than obtain victory by the aid of such allies, they were content to yield the triumph to the Court. Dowd swell's the law of libel. The disunion and jealousy of the Opposition were again exhibited on another remarkable occasion during this session. Dowdeswell had brought in a bill for the purpose of confirming the right of the jury to return a general verdict in cases of libel. There might well have, been a difference of opinion as to the propriety of the course pursued by Camden and Chatham, in conjunction with the City party, relative to the law laid down by judges sitting at Nisi Prius, and confirmed by the Court of King's Bench, in trials for libel. But every section of the Opposition, whether represented by Lord Camden, by Lord Rockingham, or by Serjeant Glynn, were agreed upon the expediency of settling this question by act of Parliament. The question of libel was, in its nature, a question of mingled law and fact. But, by restricting the province of the jury to the bare inquiry as to the fact of publication, and referring the quality of the writing to the determination of the Court, the liberty of the press, which is subsidiary to the liberty of the subject, was deprived of the protection of trial by jury. A single enactment was sufficient to effect this great constitutional change. Yet a dispute arose in the ill-assorted popular party on a point at once so plain and so important. Dowdeswell's Bill ascertained the right of the jury by express enactment: Chatham vehemently contended for its assertion in the declaratory form. Whether the bill was drawn in the one form or the other was obviously a matter |