When bribery was thus avowed and flagrant, no limit could be placed to the possible cost of a seat in the House of Commons. Success was won, or defeat sustained, in many an election at the price of bankruptcy and ruin. The most expensive contest in the annals of electioneering was the fight in 1807 for the representation of Yorkshire. The candidates were Lord Milton, son of Earl Fitzwilliam (Whig); the Hon. Henry Lascelles, son of Lord Harewood (Tory); and William Wilberforce, the famous advocate of the abolition of slavery (Independent). The poll was taken in the Castle yard at York in thirteen booths, which, in accordance with the existing law, were kept open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for fifteen days. Wilberforce and Milton were returned. The total number of electors polled was 23,007, and the three candidates spent between them £300,000, or about £13 for each vote polled. Wilberforce’s bill ran into £58,000, which had to be defrayed by public subscription. A good deal of this money went into the pockets of the electors. Therefore it is hardly surprising to read in the debates on the Reform Bill of 1832 the contention advanced that a seat in the House was private property, that the possession of a vote was a source of income, and consequently that to take one or the other from a man without compensation, by the abolition of small boroughs and fancy franchises, was as much robbery as to deprive a fundholder of his dividends, or a landlord of his rents. 4 All this but emphasizes the purity of the wooing of the electors to-day. The various stringent Acts against bribery and corruption carried in the latter half of the nineteenth century have not been passed in vain. In 1854 bribery was made a criminal offence by the Corrupt Practices Prevention Act. Election petitions by defeated candidates claiming seats on the ground that there had been corrupt practices were formerly tried by committees of the House of Commons. Often the decisions were partisan, and directly in the teeth of the evidence. Yet the House of Commons for centuries so jealously guarded its own jurisdiction over all matters relating to the election of its members that it rejected proposals of a judicial tribunal. At length in 1868 the Parliamentary Elections Act was passed, and since then two Judges of the King’s Bench Division try petitions, and report the result to the Speaker. After the General Election of 1880 there were no fewer than ninety-five petitions impugning returns on various grounds, including bribery, intimidation, personation of dead or absent voters, and most of them were sustained. After the General Election of 1885 there was not a single petition. Between these electoral contests a statute was passed—the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of 1883—which has done much to make parliamentary elections pure. Its main purpose was the fixing of a maximum scale of electioneering expenditure, varying in amount