of union, no habits of intercourse; their wives, if they care for society, want to see not the wives of other such men, but “better people,” as they say—­the wives of men certainly with land, and, if Heaven help, with the titles.  Men who study the structure of Parliament, not in abstract books, but in the concrete London world, wonder not that the landed interest is very powerful, but that it is not despotic.  I believe it would be despotic if it were clever, or rather if its representatives were so, but it has a fixed device to make them stupid.  The counties not only elect landowners, which is natural, and perhaps wise, but also elect only landowners of their own county, which is absurd.  There is no free trade in the agricultural mind; each county prohibits the import of able men from other counties.  This is why eloquent sceptics—­Bolingbroke and Disraeli—­have been so apt to lead the unsceptical Tories.  They will have people with a great piece of land in a particular spot, and of course these people generally cannot speak, and often cannot think.  And so eloquent men who laugh at the party come to lead the party.  The landed interest has much more influence than it should have; but it wastes that influence so much that the excess is, except on singular occurrences (like the cattle plague), of secondary moment.

It is almost another side of the same matter to say that the structure of Parliament gives too little weight to the growing districts of the country and too much to the stationary, In old times the south of England was not only the pleasantest but the greatest part of England.  Devonshire was a great maritime county when the foundations of our representation were fixed; Somersetshire and Wiltshire great manufacturing counties.  The harsher climate of the northern counties was associated with a ruder, a stern, and a sparser people.  The immense preponderance which our Parliament gave before 1832, and though pruned and mitigated, still gives to England south of the Trent, then corresponded to a real preponderance in wealth and mind.  How opposite the present contrast is we all know.  And the case gets worse every day.  The nature of modern trade is to give to those who have much and take from those who have little.  Manufacture goes where manufacture is, because there and there alone it finds attendant and auxiliary manufacture.  Every railway takes trade from the little town to the big town because it enables the customer to buy in the big town.  Year by year the North (as we may roughly call the new industrial world) gets more important, and the South (as we may call the pleasant remnant of old time) gets less important.  It is a grave objection to our existing Parliamentary constitution that it gives much power to regions of past greatness, and refuses equal power to regions of present greatness.