Money carried the day at elections. According to a speech made by Mr. Bright at Glasgow in 1866, a member had told him that his election had cost him £9,000 already, and that he had £3,000 more to pay. At a contest in North Shropshire in 1876, the expenses of the successful candidate, Mr. Stanley Leighton, amounted to £11,727, and of the defeated candidate, Mr. Mainwaring, to £10,688. At the General Election of 1880, in the county of Middlesex, the expenses of the successful candidates, Lord George Hamilton and Mr. Octavius Coope, were £11,506. The cost of the Gravesend election, and the petition which followed and unseated the candidate returned, was estimated at £20,000. But the most expensive contest ever known in electioneering was that for the representation of Yorkshire. The candidates were Viscount Milton, son of Earl Fitzwilliam, a Whig; the Hon. Henry Lascelles, son of Lord Harewood, a Tory; and William Wilberforce, in the Dissenting and Independent interest. The election was carried on for fifteen days, Mr. Wilberforce being at the head of the poll all the time. It terminated in his favour and in that of Lord Milton. The contest is said to have cost the parties near half a million pounds. The expenses of Wilberforce were defrayed by public subscription, more than double the sum being raised within a few days, and one moiety was afterwards returned to the subscribers. When Whitbread, the brewer, first opposed the Duke of Bedford’s interest at Bedford, the Duke informed him that he would spend £50,000 rather than that he should come in. Whitbread replied that was nothing, the sale of his grains would pay for that. Now, John Elwes, the miser, knew better than that. Though worth half a million of money, he entered Parliament, by the interest of Lord Craven, at the expense of 1s. 6d., for which he had a dinner at Abingdon. From 1774 he sat for the next twelve years for Berkshire, his conduct being perfectly independent, and in his case there had been no bribery that could be brought home to him. He was a great gambler, and, after staking large sums all night, he would, in the morning, go to Smithfield to await the arrival of his cattle from his farms in Essex, and, if not arrived, would walk on to meet them. He wore a wig; if he found one thrown away into the gutter, he would appropriate and wear it. In those days members occasionally wore dress-swords at the House. One day a gentleman seated next to Elwes was rising to leave his place, and just at that moment Elwes bent forward, so that the point of the sword the gentleman wore came in contact with Elwes’s wig, which it whisked off and carried away. The House was instantly in a roar of laughter, whilst the gentleman, unconscious of what he had done, calmly walked away, and Elwes after him to recover his wig, which looked as if it was one of those he had picked up in the gutter.