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Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 4 by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay
page 44 of 659 (06%)
me such an anomaly in the schedules which are now on the table.
But is it possible that you, that Tories, can seriously mean to
adopt the only plan which can remove all anomalies from the
representative system? Are you prepared to have, after every
decennial census, a new distribution of members among electoral
districts? Is your plan of Reform that which Mr Canning
satirised as the most crazy of all the projects of the disciples
of Tom Paine? Do you really mean

"That each fair burgh, numerically free,
Shall choose its members by the rule of three?"

If not, let us hear no more of the anomalies of the Reform Bill.

But your great objection to this bill is that it will not be
final. I ask you whether you think that any Reform Bill which
you can frame will be final? For my part I do believe that the
settlement proposed by His Majesty's Ministers will be final, in
the only sense in which a wise man ever uses that word. I
believe that it will last during that time for which alone we
ought at present to think of legislating. Another generation may
find in the new representative system defects such as we find in
the old representative system. Civilisation will proceed.
Wealth will increase. Industry and trade will find out new
seats. The same causes which have turned so many villages into
great towns, which have turned so many thousands of square miles
of fir and heath into cornfields and orchards, will continue to
operate. Who can say that a hundred years hence there may not
be, on the shore of some desolate and silent bay in the Hebrides,
another Liverpool, with its docks and warehouses and endless
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