176 THE DEEPER SIGNIFICANCE 
his mind, how to break down cabinet government and 
parliamentary supremacy and convert the British state 
into a true monarchy. In order to carry out this pur- 
pose he relied chiefly upon a kind of corruption in which 
the chief element was the fact that the representation 
in the House of Commons had got quite out of gear 
with the population of the country. During more than 
two centuries the change from medizval into modern 
England had come about without any redistribution 
of seats in that representative chamber. Some dis- 
tricts had been developing new trades and industries, 
while others had simply been overgrown with ivy and 
moss, until there had arisen that state of things so often 
quoted and described, in which Old Sarum without a 
human inhabitant had two members of Parliament, 
while Birmingham and Manchester had none. There 
were not less than a hundred rotten boroughs which 
ought to have been disfranchised without a moment’s 
delay. They were for the most part implements of 
corruption, either bought up or otherwise controlled 
by leading Whig or Tory families, or by the king. 
For more than seventy years, ever since the expulsion 
of the Stuarts, this sort of corruption had been univer- 
sally relied on in English politics. During that time 
the Tories had been mostly discredited because of the 
Jacobite element in their party. This was especially 
the case in the reigns of George I. and George II., 
each of which had its Jacobite rebellion to suppress. 
The Old Whig families were then all-powerful, the 
first two Georges were simply their wards, and under 
the long and epoch-making administration of Sir 
Robert Walpole the modern system of cabinet govern- 
ment was set quite firmly upon its feet. Under this 
