Secondly, they said that it insured a House of ability, by enabling young men of parts, but small means, to obtain seats. Those who put this forward flourished a long list of statesmen who had come in for nomination boroughs. It began with Pitt and ended with Macaulay—a feather plucked from the enemy’s wing; and Burke stood for much in it. It became one of the commonplaces of the struggle.
The third contention was of greater weight. It was that, with all its abuses, the old system had worked well. This argument, too, had its commonplace. The proverb, _stare super antiquas vias_, was thundered from a thousand platforms, coupled with copious references to the French wars, and to the pilot who had weathered the storm. This was the argument of the old, and the rich, and the timid—of those who clung to top-boots in the daytime and to pantaloons in the evening. But as the struggle progressed it came to be merged in the one sound argument to which reference has been made.
“If you do not pass the Bill,” said the Whigs, “there will be a revolution.”
“Possibly,” the Tories rejoined. “And whom have we to thank for that? Who, using the French Revolution of last July as a fulcrum, have unsettled the whole country? And now, having disturbed everything, tell us that we must grant to force what is not due to reason? You! But if the Bill is to pass, not because it is a good Bill, but because the mob desire it, where will this end? Pass Bills out of fear, and where will you end? Presently there will arise a ranting adventurer, more violent than Brougham, a hoary schemer more unscrupulous than Grey, an angry boy, outscolding Durham, a pedant more bloodless than Lord John, an honest fanatic blinder than Althorp! And when _they_ threaten _you_ with the terrors of the mob, what will you say?”
To which the Whigs could only reply that the people must be trusted; and—and that the Bill must pass, or not only coronets but crowns would be flying.
Dry arguments nowadays; but in those days alive, and to the party on its defence—the party which found itself thrust against the wall, that its pockets might be emptied—of vital interest. From scores of platforms candidates, leaning forward, bland and smiling, with one hand under the coat-tails and the other gently pumping, pumping, pumping, enunciated them—old hands these; or, red in the face, thundered them, striking fist into palm and overawing opposition; or, hopeless amid the rain of dead cats and stale eggs, muttered them in a reporter’s ear, since the hootings of the crowd made other utterance impossible. But ever as the contest went on, the smiling candidate grew rarer; for day by day the Tories, seeing their cause hopeless, seeing even Whigs, such as Sir Thomas Acland in Devonshire and Mr. Wilson Patten in Lancashire, cast out if they were lukewarm, grew more desperate, cried more loudly on high heaven, asserted more frantically that justice was dead on the earth. All this, while those who believed that the Bill was going to give everything to everybody pushed their advantage without mercy. Many a borough which had not known a contest for a generation, many a county, was fought and captured. No Tory felt safe; no bargain, though signed and sealed, held good; no patron, though he had held his income from his borough as secure as any part of his property, could say that his voters would dare to go to the poll.