To say that such a system is ancient is no defence. My honorable friend, the member for the University of Oxford, challenges us to show that the constitution was ever better than it is. Sir, we are legislators, not antiquaries. The question for us is, not whether the constitution was better formerly, but whether we can make it better now. In fact, however, the system was not in ancient times, by any means, so absurd as it is in our age. One noble Lord [Lord Stormont] has to-night told us that the town of Aldborough, which he represents, was not larger in the time of Edward the First than it is at present. The line of its walls, he assures us, may still be traced. It is now built up to that line. He argues, therefore, that as the founder of our representative institutions gave members to Aldborough when it was as small as it now is, those who would disfranchise it on account of its smallness have no right to say that they are recurring to the original principle of our representative institutions. But does the noble Lord remember the change which has taken place in the country during the last five centuries? Does he remember how much England has grown in population, while Aldborough has been standing still? Does he consider, that in the time of Edward the First the kingdom did not contain two millions of inhabitants? It now contains nearly fourteen millions. A hamlet of the present day would have been a town of some importance in the time of our early Parliaments. Aldborough may be absolutely as considerable a place as ever, but, compared with the kingdom, it is much less considerable, by the noble Lord’s own showing, than when it first elected burgesses. My honorable friend, the member for the University of Oxford, has collected numerous instances of the tyranny which the kings and nobles anciently exercised, both over this House and over the electors. It is not strange that, in times when nothing was held sacred, the rights of the people, and of the representatives of the people, should not have been held sacred. The proceedings which my honorable friend has mentioned no more prove that, by the ancient constitution of the realm, this House ought to be a tool of the king and of the aristocracy, than the benevolences and the shipmoney prove their own legality, or than those unjustifiable arrests, which took place long after the ratification of the Great Charter, and even after the Petition of Right, prove that the subject was not anciently entitled to his personal liberty. We talk of the wisdom of our ancestors; and in one respect at least they were wiser than we. They legislated for their own times. They looked at the England which was before them. They did not think it necessary to give twice as many members to York as they gave to London, because York had been capital of Britain in the time of Constantius Chlorus; and they would have been amazed indeed if they had foreseen that a city