One, at least, of Haslemere's members was more than a mere party politician. General James Edward Oglethorpe, who was defeated on the occasion of the Cow's remarkable parturition, was the son of a former member, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, and sat for Haslemere from 1722 till he was beaten at the poll. He was the great philanthropist of his day; he was the generous and active friend of imprisoned debtors; he was the founder of the colony of Georgia, and a general who held a position with 650 men against 5,000 Spaniards. It was General Oglethorpe who obtained an inquiry by Parliament into the management of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons. A friend of his named Castell had been thrown into the Fleet for debt, and because he could not pay the warder's dues had been shut in a house where the small-pox was raging: he took the disease and died. Oglethorpe was thoroughly roused, and the inquiry held into the gaol system of the country was the beginning of his work for debtors and prisoners. Later, he got Parliamentary sanction and large sums of money to found a colony of emigrant debtors in the New World, made friends with the Creek and the Choctaw Indians, fought the Spaniards, and planted the roots of his little settlement so firmly that he lived to see Georgia acknowledged by the Mother Country as a sovereign independent State. Some years ago there was an exhibition of Old Haslemere held at the Museum, of which Mr. Swanton very kindly gave me particulars. One of the pictures lent by Mr. J.W. Penfold, an old, if not the oldest, inhabitant, shows General Oglethorpe with the accompanying note:-"General James Oglethorpe. Died 30th June, 1785, Aged 102, said to be the oldest General in Europe. Sketched from life at the sale of Dr. Johnson's books, February 18, 1785, where the General was reading a book he had purchased without spectacles. In 1706 he had an Ensign Commission in the Guards, and remember'd to have shot snipes in Conduit Mead, where Conduit Street now stands." The compiler of the note may have been right about the snipes, but he was wrong about the General's age, for he was no more than 96. But the admirable caution of the phrase "said to be" remains on record. When Haslemere was finally deprived of its two members, the local reformers were jubilant. One of them, in _The Burial of the Boroughs_, printed at Petersfield in 1832, burst into verse:-- "Old Borough-bridge is broken down, In spite of its proud pier; And Seaford, too, is just dry'd up, And so is Hasle-mere. It is not strange they've damn'd Newport, It is such cursed trash; And where's the gourmand would complain For kicking out Salt-ash. Toll, toll: these Boroughs ne'er will be By us through life forgotten; Nor will their patrons when they lie, Just like their Boroughs, rotten."