to foreign affairs. Domestic legislation was at a standstill. With one important exception--an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade--scarcely any measure of note, apart from military matters and international questions, had passed the House of Commons. Parliamentary government, so far as it was supposed to be representative of the people, was a delusion. The number of members returned by private patronage for England and Wales amounted to more than three hundred. It was publicly asserted, and not without an appeal to statistics, that one hundred and fifty-four persons, great and small, actually returned no less than three hundred and seven members to the House of Commons. Representation in the boroughs was on a less worthy scale in the reign of George III. than it had been in the days of the Plantagenets, and whatever changes had been made in the franchise since the Tudors had been to the advantage of the privileged rather than to that of the people. [Sidenote: FALLEN BOROUGHS AND FANCY PRICES] Parliament was little more than an assembly of delegates sent by large landowners. Ninety members were returned by forty-six places in which there were less than fifty electors; and seventy members were returned by thirty-five places containing scarcely any electors at all. Places such as Old Sarum--consisting of a mound and a few ruins--returned two members; whilst Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, in spite of their great populations, and in spite, too, of keen political intelligence and far-reaching commercial activity, were not yet judged worthy of the least voice in affairs. At Gatton the right of election lay in the hands of freeholders and householders paying scot and lot; but the only elector was Lord Monson, who returned two members. Many of the boroughs were bought at a fancy price by men ambitious to enter Parliament--a method which seems, however, to have had the advantage of economy when the cost of some of the elections is taken into account. An election for Northampton cost the two candidates 30,000_l._ each, whilst Lord Milton and Mr. Lascelles, in 1807, spent between them 200,000_l._ at a contested election for the county of York.