From Elizabeth's reign onwards until 1832, in some instances until 1867, lawyers had to accept nomination to the House of Commons from the landed aristocracy, in stead of getting the election direct from the municipal corporations, as was so often the case in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But whatever changes took place after Queen Elizabeth's time in respect to these boroughs, in the early race for them the lawyers often led. Their claims in those days often had priority over the claims of peers and other large landed proprietors anxious to secure borough influence, and the lawyers may be credited, I think, with showing the citizens and burgesses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, how their cities and bor oughs might respond to the precepts from the sheriffs commanding the election of mem bers to Parliament without inconveniencing any of their fellow-citizens, and without mak ing any calls on the municipal treasury. England to-day owes much of the pre eminence of her Parliament to the fact that the residential qualification was broken down, and that parliamentary wages long ago dis appeared. The House of Commons could not be what it is to-day; it could not tower as it does above the other representative chambers of the world, if the' statutes of the Middle Ages with respect to residence in a constituency and in respect to wages had been maintained and strictly enforced. The fact that wages were paid in the early days was of immense value at the time. With out them, it is extremely doubtful whether the House of Commons could have survived its first century; and as long as wages con tinued, it was essential that the residential qualification should also be maintained. While admitting this, and while not ignoring what the House of Commons was between the Restoration and the Reform of 1832, and how inadequately it represented the English people in the two centuries preced ing the great changes of 1832, it is still borne in on me that it would be easily possi
ble to name many great statesmen from Cromwell to Gladstone, whose career might have been cut short had the residential qualification always and in every instance been insisted upon. Cromwell was really a carpet-bagger when he sat for Cambridge, and in fact Cromwell's career might never have begun had there not been the non-residential freeman loop-hole ready for him. Gladstone's great career would have been checked time and again if the old residential qualification enact ment, repealed in the reign of George III, had continued through the century, and had been in force up to the present time. The continuance of this Act would have left the Liberals of the present day without either Sir William Harcourt or Mr. Morley as members of the House of Commons. Roth were defeated in 1895, in constitu encies they had represented in the 1892-95 Parliament, and both of them to-day are carpet-baggers in the American sense of the term, as are hundreds of other members of the present House of Commons. The lawyers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for their own advantage, broke down the payment of wages, and helped to break down the law as to residence. The disappearance of wages and of the residen tial qualification undoubtedly brought some evils in its train. But to-day those evils, I think, may be asserted to be at an end. They came to an end in 1832; and to-day the good remains, and is of untold value in the practical working of the English par liamentary system. Political life affords a career in the highest and best sense of the term; and a man who is in a position to de vote himself wholly to political life, knows that, under the English system as it now stands, the work he loves cannot be taken from him for good by the capriciousness of a single constituency. While the recorders were willing to serve without pay, it must not be inferred that they rendered their constituencies an indif
