voters, and six constituencies had less than four voters each. Bribery and corruption was thus made an easy task. Boroughs were bought and sold like landed estates, and Lord Chesterfield complained in {81} 1767 that the Indian adventurers had so raised prices that mere inherited wealth could not compete with them.[85] The expenses of elections were enormous, and in some cases reached L30,000 or L40,000.[86] Inside the House, members, who had thus acquired their seats either by nomination or by purchase, had nothing to fear from their constituents, and many of them could be bought by the Crown with little difficulty. In 1770 no less than 192 of them held offices under the Crown, and were directly under its influence.[87] A House of this sort could only be endured without complaint while it acted in harmony with public opinion. So long as politics were no more than a business for gentlemen, it mattered little how gentlemen acquired their interest in it, or how they employed their interest when they had got it. But the disputes about Wilkes made people think that politics concerned the electors as well as the legislators, and when the voters of Middlesex found that the gentlemen in the House refused to accept their representative, they, and other voters like them, began to inquire fiercely into the whole system. Wilkes actually made use of some of the logical Liberal or Radical terms of speech for his own purposes. In No. 19 of the _North Briton_, he wrote of the right of the people "to resume the power they have delegated, and to punish their servants who have abused it," and he invited his constituents to give him their "instructions." Whether Wilkes honestly held the Radical faith or not, he preached it with great popularity and success, and he stood for much more than he was. He was unquestionably a scoundrel. But he was expelled from the House because he was a demagogue. Persecution converted him from a blackguard into a standard of battle, and "Wilkes and Liberty" became the cry of all who valued free government. Liberty has always owed as much to the folly and extravagance of its enemies as to the wisdom and devotion of its friends.