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Updated: May 14, 2025
There was much discussion as to the borough qualification for voters, and the committee finally agreed to recommend that it should be uniform, and thus get rid of what were called the freemen and the scot-and-lot voters, a class of persons endowed with antiquated and eccentric qualifications which possibly might have had some meaning in them and some justification under the conditions of a much earlier day, but which had since grown into a system enabling wealthier men to create in constituencies a body of thoroughly dependent or positively corrupt voters.
Not in those days had mankind ever heard of a sanitary reform! and, to judge of the slow progress which that reform seems to make, sewer and drain would have been much the same if they had. Scot-and-lot voters were the independent electors of Lansmere, with the additional franchise of Freemen.
Not in those days had mankind ever heard of a sanitary reform! and, to judge of the slow progress which that reform seems to make, sewer and drain would have been much the same if they had. Scot-and-lot voters were the independent electors of Lansmere, with the additional franchise of Freemen.
The representatives for the pot wallopping boroughs, for the scot-and-lot boroughs, and for the single borough of Preston, where the franchise is vested in the inhabitants at large, represent the lowest orders of the people; and in this manner this borough representation represents all classes and descriptions of persons, who have any thing to do with the business transacted in the House of Commons.
But the question is now as dead as the scot-and-lot freeholder, the road waggoner, and the mail coachman who disputed it; and probably not a single inhabitant of Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two roads which part in his town ever meet again; for nobody now drives up and down the great western highway dally.
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.
Their Life and whole personal Environment has melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street; but where now is its scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, potbellied Landlord; its rosy-faced, assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone!
Universal suffrage could scarcely more efficiently swamp the franchises of men who care a straw what becomes of Great Britain! To catch a Scot-and-lot voter by such frivolous arguments Randal Leslie might as well have tried to bring down a rhinoceros by a pop-gun charged with split peas! The young man who so firmly believed that "knowledge was power" was greatly disgusted.
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