hero as I had felt myself in the early morn.
It was a stirring time. The nation was being stirred, as it was never before or since, with the struggle for Reform. The excitement reached us in our out-of-the-way village. We were all Whigs, all bursting with hope. Yet some of the respectable people who feared Sir Thomas Gooch were rather alarmed by my father’s determination to vote against him—the sitting Member—and to support the Liberal candidate. People do not read Parliamentary debates now. They did then, and not a line was skipped. I was a Radical. An old grocer in the village had lent me Hone’s “House that Jack Built,” and similar pamphlets, all illustrated by Cruikshank. My eyes were opened, and I had but a poor opinion of royalty and the Tory Ministers and the place men and parasites and other creeping vermin that infest courts. It is impossible to believe anything more rotten than that glorious Constitution which the Tories told us was the palladium of our liberties, the glory of our country, and the envy of surrounding nations. The Ministry for the time being existed by bribery and corruption. The M.P. bought his seat and sold his vote; the free and independent electors did the same. The boroughs were almost entirely rotten and for sale in consequence of the complicated state of voting in them, and especially in those incorporated by charter. In one borough the right was acquired by birth, in another by servitude, in another by purchase, in a fourth by gift, in a fifth by marriage. In some these rights were exercised by residents, in others by non-residents; in one place by the mayor or bailiff and twelve aldermen only, as at Buckingham, Malmesbury, &c.; in another by eight aldermen or ten or twelve burgesses, as at Bath, Andover, Tiverton, Banbury, &c.; in another by a small number of burgesses—three or four or five, as at Rye, Winchelsea, Romney, &c. As to what was called long ago tenure in boroughs there was no end to its absurdity. At Midhurst the right was in the possession of a hundred stones erected in an open field; at Old Sarum it was in the remaining part of the possession of a demolished castle; at Westbury in a long wall. In many other places it was in the possession of half-a-score or a dozen old thatched cottages, the conveyances to which were made on the morning of election to a few trusty friends or dependents, who held a farcical election, and then returned them to the proprietor as soon as the business was finished. In the little borough of Aldeburgh, where Crabbe was born, the number of electors was eighty, all the property of a private individual; at Dunwich, a little further on the coast, the number of voters was twelve; at Bury St. Edmunds the number of voters was thirty-seven; another little insignificant village on the same coast was Orford, where the right of election was in a corporation of twenty individuals, composed of the family and dependents of the Marquis of Hertford. No wonder the popular fury swept away the rotten boroughs, and no wonder that the long struggle for reform ended in the triumph, not so much of the people, as the middle-class.
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