[372] Old Sarum, a deserted ruin which the traveller feared to enter at night lest he should find robbers lurking there, had as much weight in the legislature as Devonshire or Yorkshire.
[373] Some eminent individuals of both parties, Clarendon, for example, among the Tories, and Pollexfen among the Whigs, condemned this system.
Yet both parties were, for very different reasons, unwilling to alter it.

It was protected by the prejudices of one faction and by the interests of the other.

Nothing could be more repugnant to the genius of Toryism than the thought of destroying at a blow institutions which had stood through ages, for the purpose of building something more symmetrical out of the ruins.

The Whigs, on the other hand, could not but know that they were much more likely to lose than to gain by a change in this part of our polity.

It would indeed be a great mistake to imagine that a law transferring political power from small to large constituent bodies would have operated in 1692 as it operated in 1832.
In 1832 the effect of the transfer was to increase the power of the town population.