It is difficult to describe and impossible to exaggerate the heat of public feeling which preceded the elections of ’31. Four-fifths of the people of this country believed that the Bill—from which they expected so much that a satirist has aptly given it the title at the head of this chapter—had been defeated in the late House by a trick. That trick the King, God bless him, had punished by dissolving the House. It remained for the people to show their sense of the trick by returning a very different House; such a House as would not only pass the Bill, but pass it by a majority so decisive that the Lords, and particularly the Bench of Bishops, whose hostility was known, would not dare to oppose the public will. But as no more than a small proportion of these four-fifths had votes, they were forced to act, if they would make their will obeyed, indirectly; in one place by the legitimate pressure of public opinion, in another by bribery, in a third by intimidation, in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth by open violence; everywhere by the unspoken threat of revolution. And hence arose the one good, sound, and firm argument against the Bill which the Tory party enjoyed. One or two of their other arguments are not without interest, if only as the defence set up for a system so anomalous as to seem to us incredible—a system under which Gatton, with no inhabitants, returned two members, and Sheffield, with something like a hundred thousand inhabitants, returned none; under which Dunwich, long drowned under the North Sea, returned two members, and Birmingham returned none; under which the City of London returned four and Lord Lonsdale returned nine; under which Cornwall, with one-fourth of the population of Lancashire, returned thrice as many representatives; under which the South vastly outweighed the North, and land mightily outweighed all other property. Moreover, in no two boroughs was the franchise the same. One man lived in a hovel and had a vote; his neighbour lived in a mansion and had no vote. Frequently the whole of the well-to-do townsfolk were voteless. Then, while any man with five thousand pounds might buy a seat, nor see the face of a single elector, on the other hand, the poll might be kept open for fifteen days, and a single county election might cost two hundred thousand pounds. Bribery, forbidden in theory, was permitted in practice. The very Government bribed under the rose, and it was humorously said that all that a man’s constituents required was to be satisfied of the _impurity_ of his intentions! An anomalous system; yet its defenders had something to say for it.