st acceptable of all the candidates to Mr. Roberts, the returning
officer. Roberts had himself been a member of the Christian Club, but
had quarrelled with it, and on the day of the election, as Rumbold's
voters came up, he administered to each of them the oath against
bribery. They took it without scruple; but he took it on himself to
pronounce seventy-six of them disqualified, and to refuse their votes;
and, having thus reduced Mr. Rumbold's voters to eleven, he returned Mr.
Purling as duly elected.

Mr. Rumbold, not unnaturally, petitioned against such a return; when Mr.
Roberts admitted the facts alleged against him, but pleaded that he had
acted under the advice of counsel, who had assured him that it was
within his own discretion to admit or to refuse any votes that might be
tendered, and that he might lawfully refuse any "which in his own mind
he thought illegal." It is a striking proof of the laxity which
prevailed on every quarter in electioneering practices, that the House,
to a great extent, admitted his justification or excuse as valid. By a
strange stretch of lenity, they gave him credit for an honest intention,
and contented themselves with ordering him to be reprimanded by the
Speaker. But the case of the bribed freemen and of the borough generally
was too gross to be screened by any party. All agreed that the borough
must be regarded as incurably corrupt, and deserving of heavy
punishment. The Attorney-general was ordered to prosecute the five
members of the managing committee for "an illegal and corrupt
conspiracy;" and a bill was brought in to disfranchise and declare
forever incapable of voting at any election eighty-one freemen who had
been proved to have received bribes, and to punish the borough itself,
by extending the right of voting at future elections to all the
freeholders in the rape of Bramber, the district of Sussex in which New
Shoreham lies, an arrangement which reduced the borough itself to
comparative insignificance. Mr. Fox opposed the bill, on the ground that
the offence committed could be sufficiently punished by the ordinary
courts of law. But he stood alone in his resistance; the bill was
passed, and a salutary precedent was established; the penalty inflicted
on New Shoreham being for many years regarded as the most proper
punishment for all boroughs in which similar practices were proved to
prevail.

And it might have continued to be thought so, had corruption been
confined to t