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May not this Irish encore explain the success with which Mr. O’Connell consoles our “poverty” by attacks on the clergy, and relieves our years of scarcity by creating forty-shilling freeholders. We ask for bread; and he tells us we are a great people we beg for work, and he replies, that we must have repeal of the union we complain of our poverty, and his remedy is subscribe to the rent.
The disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders and the substitution of a ten-pound suffrage was the price to be paid for catholic emancipation, and no time was lost in completing the bargain.
Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, and Sorel got each two members in the new parliament, an allotment which ensured a certain representation of the 'British' merchants. The franchise was the same in both provinces: in the country parts a forty-shilling freehold or its equivalent, and in the towns either a five-pound annual ownership value or twice that for a tenant.
A certain actor, for instance, made as many guineas as Moran did shillings by mimicking his sayings and his songs and his getup upon the stage. One night this actor was at supper with some friends, when dispute arose as to whether his mimicry was overdone or not. It was agreed to settle it by an appeal to the mob. A forty-shilling supper at a famous coffeehouse was to be the wager.
It is quite true, that when the late Government brought forward the Catholic question, they were supported by many noble Lords who were usually opposed to the Government; but it is not correct that the disfranchisement of the forty-shilling freeholders was made a sine qua non to ensure the support of the noble Lords to the Relief Bill.
Three days later the bill received the royal assent, and became law. The only drawbacks on this great measure of long-withheld justice, were, that it disfranchised the "forty-shilling freeholders" throughout Ireland, and condemned Mr. O'Connell, by the insertion of the single word "hereafter," to go back to Clare for re-election.
Forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland and forty-shilling freeholders in England were quite different classes.
Political corruption, in the shape of the forty-shilling franchise, was another cause, and one of the very worst, which led to the prostration of the country by poverty and moral degradation, and for this the proprietors of the soil are solely responsible.
It was accompanied by another bill, disfranchising the forty-shilling freeholders in Ireland. They were a class of voters sunk in the deepest poverty, and such as certainly could not well be supposed capable of forming, much less of exercising, an independent judgment on political matters.
Ponsonby proposed, in the spirit of Flood's plan ten years earlier, to unite to the boroughs four miles square of the adjoining country, thus creating a counterpoise to the territorial aristocracy on the one hand, and the patrons of boroughs on the other; he also proposed to extend the suffrage to every tradesman who had served five years' apprenticeship, and gave each county three instead of two members, leaving intact, of course, the forty-shilling freehold franchise.
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