and thus to make them the principal, not
the secondary, theatre of their manoeuvres for securing a determined
majority in parliament.

I believe nobody will deny that the electors are corruptible. They are
men; it is saying nothing worse of them; many of them are but
ill-informed in their minds, many feeble in their circumstances, easily
over-reached, easily seduced. If they are many, the wages of corruption
are the lower; and would to God it were not rather a contemptible and
hypocritical adulation than a charitable sentiment, to say that there is
already no debauchery, no corruption, no bribery, no perjury, no blind
fury, and interested faction among the electors in many parts of this
kingdom: nor is it surprising, or at all blamable, in that class of
private men, when they see their neighbours aggrandised, and themselves
poor and virtuous, without that _eclat_ or dignity which attends men in
higher stations.

But admit it were true that the great mass of the electors were too vast
an object for court influence to grasp, or extend to, and that in despair
they must abandon it; he must be very ignorant of the state of every
popular interest, who does not know that in all the corporations, all the
open boroughs--indeed, in every district of the kingdom--there is some
leading man, some agitator, some wealthy merchant, or considerable
manufacturer, some active attorney, some popular preacher, some money-
lender, &c., &c., who is followed by the whole flock. This is the style
of all free countries.

--Multum in Fabia valet hic, valet ille Velina;
Cuilibet hic fasces dabit eripietque curule.

These spirits, each of which informs and governs his own little orb, are
neither so many, nor so little powerful, nor so incorruptible, but that a
Minister may, as he does frequently, find means of gaining them, and
through them all their followers. To establish, therefore, a very
general influence among electors will no more be found an impracticable
project, than to gain an undue influence over members of parliament.
Therefore I am apprehensive that this bill, though it shifts the place of
the disorder, does by no means relieve the Constitution. I went through
almost every contested election in the beginning of this parliament, and
acted as a manager in very many of them: by which, though at a school of
pretty severe and ragged discipline, I came to have some degree of
instruction concerning the means by which parliame