Here is the beginning of popular representation, as distinct from the gathering of the people in their own persons; but we need not think that those who first summoned them had any conscious theories of popular representation. The earliest object for which they were called together was probably a fiscal one; it was a safe and convenient way of getting money. The notion of summoning a small number of men to act on behalf of the whole was doubtless borrowed from the practice in judicial proceedings and in inquests and commissions of various kinds, in which it was usual for certain select men to swear on behalf of the whole shire or hundred. We must not forget, though it is a matter on which I have no time to insist here, that our judicial and our parliamentary institutions are closely connected, that both sprang out of the primitive Assemblies, that things which now seem so unlike as our popular juries and the judicial powers of the House of Lords are in truth both of them fragments of the judicial powers which Tacitus speaks of as being vested in those primitive Assemblies. It was only step by step that the functions of judge, juror, witness, and legislator became the utterly distinct functions which they are now(38). Thus we find the beginnings of the House of Commons, as we might have expected, in that class of its members which, for the most part, has most in common with the already established House of Lords. Thus far the developement of the Constitution had gone on in its usual incidental way. Each step in advance, however slight, was doubtless the work of the discernment of some particular man, even though his views may not have gone beyond the compassing of some momentary advantage. But now we come to that great change, that great measure of Parliamentary Reform, which has left to all later reformers nothing to do but to improve in detail. We come to that great act of the patriot Earl which made our popular Chamber really a popular Chamber. A House of knights, of county members, would have been comparatively an aristocratic body; it would have left out one of the most healthy and vigorous, and by far the most progressive, element in the nation. When, after the fight of Lewes, Earl Simon, then master of the kingdom with the King in his safe keeping, summoned his famous Parliament, he summoned, not only two knights from every county, but also two citizens from every city and two burgesses from every borough(39). The Earl had long known the importance and value of the growing civic element in the political society of his age. When, in an earlier stage of his career, he held the government of Gascony, he had, on his return to England, to answer charges brought against him by the Archbishop of Bourdeaux and the nobles of the province. The Earl’s answer was to bring forward a writing, giving him the best of characters, which was signed with the common seal of the city of Bourdeaux(40). As it was in Gascony, so it was in England.