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Another came about a prebend for his son. A third whispered that he had always stood by his Grace and the Protestant succession; that his last election had been very expensive; that potwallopers had now no conscience; that he had been forced to take up money on mortgage; and that he hardly knew where to turn for five hundred pounds.

But it did nothing for the working classes in town or country; indeed, by the abolition of potwallopers and scot-and-lot voters in a few boroughs, they forfeited such fragmentary representation as they had possessed.

A gentleman who has made an exhaustive study of the insurance problem sends me some valuable data which I propose to draw upon from time to time, not with the expectation of making high-toned thieves ashamed of themselves and thereby effecting their reformation, but to keep their newspaper panders and potwallopers snarling and snapping until general attention is attracted to the consummate meanness of their masters and thereby curtail somewhat their powers of despoilation.

The elective franchise in counties, hitherto confined to freeholders, was to be conferred on £10 copyholders and £50 leaseholders; the borough franchise was to exclude "scot and lot" voters, "potwallopers" and most other survivals of antiquated electorates, but to include ratepaying £10 householders.

The defeat of Stanley by "Orator" Hunt at Preston was a warning against undue reliance on popular confidence, for Preston was already a highly democratic constituency, largely composed of ignorant "potwallopers". A similar but more emphatic warning came from Ireland, where O'Connell did his utmost to insult and defy Anglesey, the new lord-lieutenant, in spite of his sacrifices for catholic emancipation, and his well-known sympathy with the cause of reform.

Such, finally, is the struggle which the middle classes in England are maintaining against an aristocracy of mere locality, against an aristocracy the principle of which is to invest a hundred drunken potwallopers in one place, or the owner of a ruined hovel in another, with powers which are withheld from cities renowned to the furthest ends of the earth, for the marvels of their wealth and of their industry.