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It would be easy to crush up a peccant borough or two, a borough that had been discovered in its sin. And a few boroughs now blessed with two members might consent to be blessed only with one. Fifteen small clauses might settle the redistribution, in spite of Mr. Turnbull, if only Mr. Daubeny would be good-natured.
The Reform Bill, which was ultimately forced through by popular pressure and threat of civil war, abolished the rotten boroughs, gave representation to the large manufacturing towns and increased representation to the counties, and the suffrage to all men who had 'paid ten pounds a year rent in boroughs, or in the counties owned land worth ten pounds a year or paid fifty pounds rent.
And its report brought to light an organized system of corruption, which there was too much reason to fear was but a specimen of that which prevailed in many other boroughs as yet undetected.
The country districts represented by the small boroughs of the agricultural counties of Brecon, Cardigan, Pembroke, and Anglesey, were wholly or partly disfranchised. But the slate county of Carnarvonshire had an additional member; and in the coal and iron country, Swansea and Carmarthenshire and Monmouthshire had one additional member each, and Glamorgan three.
Meanwhile the organization of the Irish National party had been developed to a point of perfection in anticipation of the New Reform Bill. That bill promised nothing in particular either to Gladstone or Salisbury, and it has given to neither any particular advantage over the other. In the counties the Liberal interest has advanced; in the boroughs it has markedly declined.
No effort however was spared. The Lord-Lieutenants were directed to bring about such a "regulation" of the governing body in boroughs as would ensure the return of candidates pledged to the repeal of the Test, and to question every magistrate in their county as to his vote.
Stephen's became their preserves. My Lord wormed himself into a berth in the Treasury, robbed the country systematically for a dozen of years, and sold the places and reversions under him to the highest bidder. Boroughs were to be had somewhat dearer than a pair of colours. And my Lord spent his spare time he had plenty of it in fleecing the pigeons at White's and Almack's.
Cobbett could join the reformers in so far as, like them, he thought that the rotten boroughs were a vital part of the system. He meets a miserable labourer complaining of the 'hard times. The harvest had been good, but its blessings were not for the labourer.
The ministry proposed not to alter the limits of the franchise, but to introduce into boroughs a new kind of franchise founded on personal property. Mr. Disraeli characterized the government measure as "wise, prudent, adequate, conservative, and framed by men who reverence the past, are proud of the present, and confident of the future."
In that memorable struggle, the issue of which to some extent prefigured the shape that the government of the United States was to take five hundred years afterward, the cities and boroughs supported Simon de Montfort, the leader of the popular party and one of the foremost among the heroes and martyrs of English liberty.
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