as through this smuggling. All the Members of Parliament of both houses, besides other officials, were possessed of this privilege, and they turned it to business and personal uses of wonderful variety and extent. In the first place, the Peers and Commons count up about 1,300 members between them, or more than four times the number of the Representatives and Senators at Washington. There are more stories told than printed of the manner and extent of their use of the franking privilege. Not that they perverted and abused it more shamefully than did the American Members of Congress, but that, outnumbering our legislators by four to one, they loaded the mail-bags with four times the number of "dead-heads," or free letters that the American Post Office had to bear and charge upon honest, paid correspondence. It would be unparliamentary and uncharitable to suspect or listen to the suspicion that any M.P. ever sold any stock in his franking privilege or ever yielded to the temptation of realizing an "honest penny" out of it directly in the way of trade, but it is said to be a fact that many great business firms in the large cities found it would pay to expend large sums in returning a senior partner to Parliament, not so much in reference to the general interests of the country as to the cheapening of their commercial correspondence. Frequently larger constituencies than a single
