CH. XI. TRIUMPH OF THE GOVERNMENT. 169 its freedom; Chatham spoke of him with warm admiration, and the Whig party imagined that another Camden had arisen in their ranks. Wedderburn, however, was only working with great shrewdness and more than common effrontery to raise his price, and in January 1771 he concluded a secret negotiation with North by becoming Solicitor-General, justifying himself on the ground that he belonged to the Grenville connection. The Tory party, who in the earlier stages of the Government had given it only a partial and hesitating support,' rallied in all their strength around Lord North, while the furious quarrels of the City demagogues divided, weakened, and discredited the popular cause. Though the grievance of the Middlesex election was unredressed, the excitement which had blazed so high in 1768, 1769, and 1770, gradually subsided, and it was followed by a long period of ignoble apathy. The confidential letters of the leaders of the Opposition are full of complaints of the change that had taken place. England at this day,' wrote Chatham in January 1771, 'is no more like Old England or England forty years ago, than the Monsignori of modern Rome are like the Decii, the Gracchi, or the Catos.'' 'I do not see,' he afterwards wrote, 'that the smallest good can result to the public from my coming up to the meeting of Parliament. A headlong, self-willed spirit has sunk the City into nothing. The narrow genius of old-corps connection has weakened the Whigs, and rendered national union on revolution principles impossible.' 'The public has slept quietly upon the violation of electors' rights and the tyranny of the House of Commons. Fuit Ilium! the whole constitution is a shadow.'5 'After a violent ferment in the nation,' wrote Burke, 'as remarkable. a deadness and vapidity has succeeded.' 'The people have fallen into a total indifference to any matters of public concern. I do not suppose that there was ever anything like See a remarkable passage in one of Dr. Johnson's pamphlets in favour of the Government. Every honest man must lament that it [the Government] has been regarded with fixed neutrality by the Tories, who, being long accustomed to signalise their principles by opposition to the Court, do not yet consider that they have at last a king who knows not the name 2 Chatham Correspondence, iv 83. this stupor in any period of our history.' 'In the present state of things,' wrote Junius in the last letter he addressed to Woodfall, if I were to write again, I must be as silly as any of the horned cattle that run mad through the City, or as any of your wise aldermen. I meant the cause and the public Both are given up. I feel for the honour of this country when I see that there are not ten men in it who will unite and stand together upon any one question. But it is all alike, vile and contemptible."2 6 Yet the consequences of the struggle that has been recounted were by no means so transient as might be supposed. New questions, new lines of party division, new political forces were called into being, and the condition of the representative body assumed a prominence in English politics which had never before been equalled. At the time of the Revolution the question at issue lay mainly between the Crown and the Parliament, and it was the great effort of Whig statesmen and of the Whig party to check the encroachments of prerogative and to strengthen the popular branch of the Legislature. It was not yet foreseen that Parliament could itself become the oppressor of the people, and that in and through the representative body the Crown could regain a great part of the power which it had lost. The power of the Crown,' wrote the great Whig statesman in 1770, almost dead and rotten as prerogative, has grown up anew, with much more strength and far less odium, under the name of influence. An influence which operated without noise and without violence, an influence which converted the very antagonist into the instrument of power; which contained in itself a perpetual principle of growth and renovation, and which the distresses and the prosperity of the country equally tended to augment, was an admirable substitute for a prerogative that, being only the offspring of antiquated prejudice, had moulded in its original stamina irresistible principles of decay and dissolution.' We have seen the appalling extent to which parliamentary corruption rose under the first two Georges, but the Whig Government usually succeeded so well 346. Burke's Correspondence, i. 256, 2 Woodfall's Junius, i. 255. 3 Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents. TH. XI. GROWTH OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION. 171 in avoiding collisions with public opinion that the outbursts against it were rare, transient, and feeble. The most formidable was at the close of the ministry of Walpole; but the evil, though for a time seriously diminished by the legislation of 1743, soon displayed a renewed vigour. It was aggravated by the growing wealth of the country, which made the struggle for seats more keen; by the disorganised and fluctuating condition of parties, which in many constituencies disturbed and unsettled the balance of political power; by the appearance of the Court in the field as a new and active competitor for parliamentary interest. The enormous corruption employed to carry the Peace of Paris, the new system of issuing Government loans at extravagant terms and distributing the shares among partisans of the Government, the profligate multiplication of Court places, all stimulated the evil. It appeared by the list in the Court Calendar,' that in 1770, 192 members of the House of Commons held places under the Government, and it was stated that the number of places had doubled since 1740.1 Another very important source of corruption arose from the great increase of the National Debt resulting from the war. The excise and customs revenue had risen to about six millions sterling, and the numerous officials who were employed to collect it were, for the most part, docile servants of the Government. In 1782 Lord Rockingham declared that as many as 11,500 revenue officers were employed, and that no less than 70 elections were controlled by their votes.2 In the first decade of George III. also, the nabobs, or Indian adventurers, who had returned in great numbers laden with the spoils of Hindostan, began to appear prominently in English political life. At the end of 1767, Chesterfield being desirous of bringing his son into Parliament at the approaching election, offered a borough-jobber 2,500l. for a secure seat, but was told that there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for that the rich East and West Indians had secured them all at the rate of 3,000l. at least, but many at 4,000l., and two or three that he knew at 5,000l."3 6 For some years past,' said Chatham, in one of his speeches in 1770, 1 Annual Register, 1770, p. 72. 2 Parl. History, xxiii. 101. 3 Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, December 19, 1767. 'there has been an influx of wealth into this country which has been attended with many fatal consequences, because it has not been the regular, natural produce of labour and industry. The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and have brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principles of government. Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament by such a torrent of private corruption as no private hereditary fortune could resist.' It was very natural that a class of men who were for the most part utterly ignorant of English politics and indifferent to English liberty, whose habits of thought had been formed in scenes of unbridled violence and despotism, and who had obtained their seats for purely personal ends and by the most lavish corruption, should have been ready to support every attempt to encroach upon the Constitution. They usually attached themselves to the King's friends. Clive himself at one time brought no less than five members into Parliament, and we find him, in 1767, bargaining for an English peerage as the reward of his services against Wilkes. The sums that were lavished in parliamentary contests at this time had probably never before been equalled. In spite of the scandalous spoliation of the Duke of Portland by Sir James Lowther, Portland succeeded in wresting Westmoreland and Cumberland from Lowther in the elections of 1768, but each party is said to have expended 40,000l. in the contests.3 The contest for the town of Northampton at the same election cost each party at least 30,000l. The immense wealth,' said Walpole, that had flowed into the country from the war and the East Indies bore down all barriers of economy, and introduced a luxury of expense unknown to empires of vaster extent.'5 2 There were some cases of corruption so flagrant that Parliament was obliged to take notice of them. In 1761, the borough of Sudbury openly advertised itself for sale. At the 'Chatham Correspondence, iii. 405. 2 Grenville Papers, iv. 14. Walpole's George III. i. 330. Walpole's George III. iii. 197. • Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, April 12, 1768. 5 Walpole's Memoirs of George III. iii. 198. Ibid. i. 42. next election the magistrates of the city of Oxford wrote a formal letter to their late representatives offering to secure their re-election on condition of their paying the Corporation debt. The offending magistrates were summoned before the House, reprimanded for their conduct, and confined for five days in Newgate, but the House refused to authorise their prosecution, and they are said to have completed their bargain with their members during the short period of their detention. A few borough-brokers whose too open proceedings had been brought under the unwilling notice of Parliament after the election of 1768, were thrown for a short time into Newgate; 2 and Judge Willes, in trying an aggravated case of bribery by the mayor of a Cornish borough, took occasion to say that the crime had got to such a pitch that it threatened the utter ruin of the nation.' At Shoreham it was discovered that the majority of the freemen had formed themselves into a permanent society called the Christian Club,' for the purpose of selling the seat to the highest bidder, and of monopolising the purchase-money to the prejudice of the other electors. After long discussions eighty-one of the offending freemen were disfranchised, and an important precedent was created by a measure extending the right of voting for members of that borough to all 40s. freeholders in the adjoining rape of Bramber.1 6 The constitution of the House of Commons was, indeed, such that even if there had not been systematic corruption in the constituencies and among the members, it would have had but little claim to be regarded as a true representative of the nation. In a book published in 1774 it was shown by very careful computations that out of the 513 members who sat for England and Wales, as many as 254 represented less than 11,500 voters, and as many as 56 about 700 voters. Of these 56 members no one had a constituency of 38 electors, and 6 had constituencies of not more than 3. The county of Middlesex, including London and Westminster, returned only 8 members, while Cornwall returned 44.5 And yet, taken as a whole, the representation of England and Wales was far more 1 Parl. Hist. xvi. 397–402. Walpole's George III. iii. 153, 154. Walpole's George III. iii. 157. 'Annual Register, 1769, p. 93. Annual Register, 1771, pp. 54, 56. Adolphus, i. 479. 5 De Burgh's Political Dissertations, i. 40-48. |