[79] In olden days members used to return from Westminster to London through lanes infested with robbers. This cry enabled them to assemble and leave the House in one another's company. Socrates was right when he said that whereas no man undertook a trade that he had not thoroughly learnt, everybody considered himself sufficiently qualified by nature to undertake the trade of government, probably the most difficult in the world. There are, however, certain disqualifications which prevent the most ambitious man from serving in Parliament.[80] [80] It is curious to reflect that a man may be a member of Parliament even though he is not entitled to a vote as an elector. The Rt. Hon. Austen Chamberlain was not only a member, but even a Cabinet Minister, at a time when he had no vote. Infants and minors may not be elected to the House of Commons. But though they have always been excluded by custom or statute, their presence was winked at until the end of the eighteenth century. The members of those bygone times seem generally to have been more youthful than the members of to-day. Even the Chair was occupied by men comparatively young, Seymour, Harley, and Sir Thomas More each being elected Speaker before he had reached the age of forty. The last-named speaks of himself as a "beardless boy resisting greybeards and Kings themselves," referring no doubt to the time when Cardinal Wolsey came to the House of Commons in 1523, to ask for money for his royal master, and he actively opposed the grant. In Queen Elizabeth's time the Lower Chamber was not weakened by the admission of too many infants; but during the reign of James I. the ancient custom for old men to make laws for young ones seems to have been inverted, there being as many as forty members of Parliament who were minors, and several who were not more than sixteen years old.[81] The poet Waller sat in the Commons before he was seventeen, while Lord Torrington (afterwards Duke of Albemarle) took part in debate when he was only fourteen, and at that age addressed the House in 1667, on the subject of Clarendon's impeachment.[82] The infant members of that day were singularly precocious and well able to look after themselves. When, for instance, some one urged that Lord Falkland was too young to sit in Parliament, as he had not yet sown his wild oats, that young nobleman rudely replied that he could imagine no more suitable place for sowing them than the House of Commons, where there were so many geese to pick them up.[83] [81] Naunton's "Fragmenta Regalia," p. 21. [82] Shaftesbury's "Life," vol. i. p. 30 n. [83] Townsend's "History," vol. ii. p. 400.