expended L777,429 in getting 3,579,345 votes; in 1906, 1,273 candidates for the same 670 seats expended L1,166,858 in getting 5,645,104 votes; in January, 1910, 1,311 candidates laid out L1,296,382 in getting 6,667,394 votes. A well-informed article is E. Porritt, Political Corruption in England, in _North American Review_, Nov. 16, 1906.] CHAPTER V (p. 097) PARLIAMENT: THE HOUSE OF LORDS I. COMPOSITION *101. Origins.*--With the possible exception of the Hungarian Table of Magnates, the British House of Lords is the most ancient second chamber among parliamentary bodies. It is, furthermore, among second chambers the largest and the most purely hereditary. Its descent can be traced directly from the Great Council of the Plantagenet period and, in the opinion of some scholars, from the witenagemot of Anglo-Saxon times.[138] To the Council belonged originally the nobility, and the clergy, greater and lesser. Practically, the body was composed of the more influential churchmen and the more powerful tenants-in-chief of the crown. In the course of time the lesser clergy found it convenient to confine their attention to the proceedings of the ecclesiastical assemblage known as Convocation; while the lesser nobles, i.e., the poorer and more uninfluential ones, found it to their interest to cast in their lot, not as formerly with the great barons and earls, but with the well-to-do though non-noble knights of the shire. From the elements that remained--the higher clergy and the greater nobles--developed directly the House of Lords. The lesser barons, the knights of the shire, and the burgesses, on the other hand, combined to form the House of Commons. [Footnote 138: "The House of Lords not only springs out of, it actually is, the ancient Witenagemot. I can see no break between the two." Freeman, Growth of the English Constitution, 62. Professor Freeman, it must be remembered, was prone to glorify Anglo-Saxon institutions and to under-estimate the changes that were introduced in England through the agency of the Norman Conquest. For the most recent statement of the opposing view see Adams, Origin of the English Constitution, Chaps. 1-4.]