disfranchisement really be robbery, the representative system
which now exists is founded on robbery. How was the franchise in
the English counties fixed? By the act of Henry the Sixth, which
disfranchised tens of thousands of electors who had not forty
shilling freeholds. Was that robbery? How was the franchise in
the Irish counties fixed? By the act of George the Fourth, which
disfranchised tens of thousands of electors who had not ten pound
freeholds. Was that robbery? Or was the great parliamentary
reform made by Oliver Cromwell ever designated as robbery, even
by those who most abhorred his name? Everybody knows that the
unsparing manner in which he disfranchised small boroughs was
emulously applauded, by royalists, who hated him for having
pulled down one dynasty, and by republicans, who hated him for
having founded another. Take Sir Harry Vane and Lord Clarendon,
both wise men, both, I believe, in the main, honest men, but as
much opposed to each other in politics as wise and honest men
could be. Both detested Oliver; yet both approved of Oliver's
plan of parliamentary reform. They grieved only that so salutary
a change should have been made by an usurper. Vane wished it to
have been made by the Rump; Clarendon wished it to be made by the
King. Clarendon's language on this subject is most remarkable.
For he was no rash innovator. The bias of his mind was
altogether on the side of antiquity and prescription. Yet he
describes that great disfranchisement of boroughs as an
improvement fit to be made in a more warrantable method and at a
better time. This is that better time. What Cromwell attempted
to effect by an usurped authority, in a country which had lately
been convulsed by civil war, and which was with difficulty kept
in a state of sullen tranquillity by military force, it has
fallen to our lot to accomplish in profound peace, and under the