“At once all law, all settlement control, And mend the parts by ruin of the whole. The tampering world is subject to this curse, To physic their disease into a worse.”[29] What shall we gain by it? I have not, I think, quibbled with the question. I have striven to do what the Government have evaded doing--to extract great principles out of this medley, for medley it is, composed partly out of veneration for numbers and partly out of a sort of traditional veneration for old boroughs, which are to be preserved after what is beneficial in them has been taken from them. Then we have to consider the proposed county franchise, founded, as it has been said, upon utter ignorance. It is quite evident that this Bill has been framed without information, because the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as is well known, has told us that the only copy he had--I may be right; at any rate I cannot be wrong until I have stated it somehow--the Chancellor of the Exchequer told us that the only copy he had of those statistics was the one which he was obliged to lay on the table of the House. If I am wrong, let the Right Honorable Gentleman contradict me. THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER: I spoke of the last absolutely finished copy. The substance of those statistics, as far as regarded the general bases of the measure, had been in our hands for weeks before that time, but was not in a state to be placed on the table of the House until all the columns had been filled in. MR. LOWE: Well, sir, that finished document is what I call a copy. It may be that the Bill was originally drawn for £6 and £12, and that at the last moment £7 and £14 were substituted, and that it was regarded as a matter of little consequence what the exact figures were. As to the element of time, I suppose, however, I must not say anything, or the Right Honorable Gentleman will be angry with me. The twelve nights that he gave us for the Franchise Bill are pretty well gone, and we have now got what he never contemplated we should have, a Redistribution Bill as well. I suppose I had better say nothing about the support the Government will have, or I had better veil it in a dead language and say, _Idem trecenti Juravimus_.[30] I would ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how he can expect to get the Bill through the Committee under those circumstances, bearing in mind that most of the newspapers that lay claim to intelligence and write for educated persons, having begun with rather vague notions of liberality, have written themselves fairly out of them, and that educated opinion is generally adverse to this measure. These, sir, are the prospects we have before us. We have a measure of the most ill-considered and inadequate nature, which cannot be taken as it is, and which, as I understand it, is based on principles so absolutely subversive and destructive--the grouping, for instance--that if we were ever so anxious to aid the Government we could not accept it.