At a time when a ticklish division is expected, when the majority on either side is uncertain, the Whips are stimulated to herculean labours. Threats, entreaties, cajoleries, all must be employed to bring members up to the scratch. The waverers must be secured, the doubtful reassured. Nothing can be left undone to ensure that every available member shall be in his place when the decisive moment arrives. The byways and hedges are scoured for absentees, who are besought to return at once to Westminster to record their votes and perhaps save their party from defeat. When Pulteney, whom Macaulay considered the greatest leader of the Opposition that the House of Commons had ever seen, gathered his forces in 1742 to overthrow Walpole, the Opposition left no stone unturned to ensure a majority. They collected every man of the party, no matter what excuses he put forward. One was brought into the House in a dying condition, but contrived to defer his impending dissolution until he had recorded his valuable vote. Both sides produced a number of incurables, and the House looked (as Ewald says) more like the Pool of Bethesda than a legislative assembly. The Prince of Wales was an interested spectator of the scene. "I see," he remarked to General Churchill, "you bring in the lame, the halt and the blind!" "Yes," replied the General, "the lame on our side, the blind on yours!"[407] [407] Ewald's "Biography of Walpole," p. 419. A similar scene took place in 1866 when the Russell-Gladstone Cabinet was defeated over the Reform Bill. The Whips had achieved wonders in collecting their flocks together; they had haled to Westminster the sick, the senile, the decrepit, the doting and the moribund. The grave alone seems to have been sacred from their ravages. Some of the members, as we read in a contemporary account, "had been wooed from the prostration of their couches; one had been taken from the delights of his marriage-trip; and several from the bedsides of relatives in extremity."[408] [408] "Chambers' Journal," December 26, 1886, p. 819.