Let us observe one point, which is instructive: the rabble had no votes; the butchers, those patriotic thinkers, who paraded the streets with clubs to the music of marrow-bones and cleavers; the chairmen, equal patriots of opposite convictions, who marched to the Way of War and the breaking of heads with their poles--formidable as pike or spear; the jolly sailors, convinced as to the foundations of order, who came along with bludgeons, thirsting for the display of their political principles--none of these brave fellows had any vote. Yet the share they took, the part they played, the influence they exercised in every election, cannot be disputed. The vote, you see, about which nowadays we make such a fuss, is by no means everything; in those days one stout fellow with a cudgel at the bottom of the steps of the hustings might be worth to his party fifty votes a day; he might represent as many voters sent home discouraged, or even persuaded, by a broken head, to a radical change of political principles. [Illustration: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AND WESTMINSTER HALL FROM THE RIVER IN 1798 (FROM A CONTEMPORARY DRAWING).] In the year 1710, Swift says that the rabble surrounded his coach, and he was afraid of having dead cats thrown in at the window, or getting his glass broken. The part played by the dead cat in all eighteenth-century functions, elections, pillories, and outdoor speeches, was quite remarkable. In times of peace and quiet we hear of no dead cats. The streets did not then, and do not now, provide a supply of dead cats to meet all demands. It would seem as if all the cats of all the slums were slaughtered for the occasion. Throughout the last century the elections of Westminster became more and more riotous; there were riots and ructions in 1711 and in 1721; in 1741 these were quite surpassed by the contested election in which Lord Sundon and Sir Charles Wager were candidates on the one side,--the Court side,--and Admiral Vernon and Mr. Charles Edwin on the other. Lord Sundon, a newly created Irish peer, took upon himself to close the poll by the help of a detachment of Guards before it was finished. One vote an hour was supposed to keep the poll open. The returning officer, however, disregarding this convention, and, by Lord Sundon’s order, declared the poll closed and Lord Sundon with Sir Charles Wager duly elected. There was indignation; there was a question, which led to a debate in the House; and finally the election was declared illegal. The victory thus obtained by the populace against the Court party was celebrated long afterward by an annual dinner of the “Independent Electors.” It marks the change in our management of these things that there should have been a Court party, and that the Court should think it consistent with its dignity to take an active part in any election. That the king should openly side with this or that candidate shows that the sovereign, a hundred and fifty years ago, stood on a much lower level than the