Lord John Russell opened his speech by a vindication of the representative principle as the first condition of the English constitutional system. He made it clear that in the early days of our Parliaments this principle had been distinctly acknowledged, and, to a certain extent, had been carried out in practice. Then he showed how the principle had come to be less and less recognized in the arrangement of our constituencies and the allotment of representatives, until at last there had ceased to be any manner of proportion between representatives and population or any practical acknowledgment of the main purpose for which representatives were to be selected. Everything had tended, in the mean time, to make the owners of the soil also the owners and masters of the representation. Lord John Russell employed a series of illustrations, at once simple and striking, to impress upon his audience a due understanding of the extraordinary manner in which the whole principle of representation had been diverted. {139} from its original purpose. He assumed the case of some inquiring and intelligent foreigner, a stranger to our institutions but anxious to learn all about them, who had come to England for the purpose of obtaining information on the spot. The stranger has the nature and the purpose of our Parliamentary system explained to him, and he is assured that it rests on the representative principle. He is told that the House of Commons is assembled for the purpose of enabling the sovereign to collect the best advice that can be given to him as to the condition, the wants, and the wishes of his subjects.