Westminster was thought of, and so was Middlesex; both constituencies in the hands of a narrow clique. It was, however, decided to fix upon Preston, as a town affording the desirable element of a very wide suffrage.[3] Accordingly, the prorogation of Parliament, on the 31st of May, found Mr. Cobbett canvassing the electors. A famous contest ensued: the other candidates being the Hon. E. G. Stanley (afterwards 14th Earl Derby), John Wood, merchant, and Captain Barrie, R.N.; the two first being elected. The numbers were, Stanley 3041, Wood 1982, Barrie 1657, Cobbett 995. There was comparatively little ruffianism, but sufficient impediment to fair voting.[4] Mr. Cobbett talked, for some time afterward, of a petition against the return, but the idea was relinquished. Indeed, he took this defeat in remarkably good humour; and proceeded to console himself and his friends, by recounting those triumphs which he could boast of. Those were not mean triumphs, although principally at the hands of the “lower orders.” Flags and music: shouting, exulting, and shaking of hands, attended his progress through Blackburn, Bolton, and Manchester, on his way homeward.[5] It was now quite obvious that popular candidates stood little or no chance, even in the most popular boroughs, in the existing state of the representation. But the prospect of any reform seemed more distant than ever. In Parliament, the question was practically shelved. Lord John Russell seemed, for the time, to have a persuasion that there was little encouragement to press the matter; and Mr. Canning, soon after becoming premier in 1827, declared that he would oppose parliamentary reform to the end of his life, under whatever shape it might appear. Burdett said that “putting aside all the great questions, including among the rest that of Parliamentary Reform,”[6] he saw sufficient reason to support Canning’s administration. And Brougham did not consider that “the late opposition” stood pledged in favour of the question! Is it any wonder that Whiggism is dead and buried? Call not the Russells and the Greys _Whigs_: they had deserted the practices (considered apart from the professions) of their party before becoming reformers. If Whiggism had been anything besides profession, parliamentary reform would have been undertaken twenty years before; and the Whigs, as a party, had nothing more to do with it, when it was at last undertaken, than to be the vehicle of the country’s earnest demand.