The House of Commons is to be in that sense representative; it is to be the interpreter to the King of all that his people wish him to know. Then the stranger is naturally anxious to learn how the constituencies are formed, by whose selection the representatives are sent to Parliament, in order to render to the King a faithful message from his people. The stranger is taken to a grassy mound, let us say, in the midst of an expanse of silent, unpeopled fields, and he is told that that grassy mound sends two members to the House of Commons. He is shown a stone wall with three niches in it, and he is informed that those three niches are privileged to contribute two members to the representative assembly. Lord John Russell described with force and masterly humor a variety of such sights which were pointed out to the stranger, each description being an accurate picture of some place which long since had lost all population, but still continued to have the privilege of sending representatives to Parliament. Then Lord John Russell changed his form of illustration. He took his stranger to some of the great manufacturing and commercial cities and towns of England, and described the admiration and the wonder with which the intelligent foreigner regarded these living evidences of the growth and the greatness of the nation. Here then, no doubt, the stranger begins at last to think that he can really understand the practical value of the representative principle. Thus far he has only been bewildered by what he has seen and heard of the empty stretches of land which are {140} endowed with a right to have representatives in the House of Commons, but now he begins to acknowledge to himself that a people with such great manufacturing communities can send up to London representatives enough from their own centres to constitute a Parliament capable of advising with any monarch. Then, to his utter amazement, the distracted foreigner learns that these great cities and towns have no right whatever to representation in the House of Commons, and have nothing whatever to do with the election of members. [Sidenote: 1831--The proposed reforms]