It will be seen that, on the whole, Lord Durham was a more advanced reformer than even Lord John Russell. The entire scheme, as drawn out by Russell, consisted of ten paragraphs or clauses, and it was at once submitted to the consideration of the four men who formed the committee. There was much discussion as to the borough qualification for voters, and the committee finally agreed to recommend that it should be uniform, and thus get rid of what were called the freemen and the scot-and-lot voters, a class of persons endowed with antiquated and eccentric qualifications which possibly might have had some meaning in them and some justification under the conditions of a much earlier day, but which had since grown into a system enabling wealthier men to create in constituencies a body of thoroughly dependent or positively corrupt voters. The desire of the committee was to extend the voting privilege as far as possible consistently with due regard for the principle that the voters ought to be men of substance enough to insure their independence. This security they believed they could attain by establishing the ten-pound franchise. This seems, no doubt, to modern eyes a somewhat eccentric and haphazard line of demarkation; but it must be remembered that even until much later days the ten pounds rating principle in boroughs held its own, and was believed to be absolutely essential to the {131} maintenance of an independent and upright body of voters, and to the securing of such a body against the danger of being "swamped," according to the once familiar word, by the votes of the dependent and the corrupt.