gained seats in some counties, the Liberals have gained in other counties. The resident and honest electors are cheated out of their rights, public morals are outraged, and the Parliamentary agents prosper by involving both parties in profitless contentions.

a-year.

To approach closer to this strange and monstrous birth of Parliamentary agency. According to the Reform Act, to be a county voter in England, a man must have property worth forty shillings a-year, and in Scotland it must be worth ten pounds Himself or his tenants must possess it. He must enjoy the profits of it. Possession on paper, or profits on paper, will not do; the possession must be, and the profits must be, real, actual, and substantial. Legal fictions will not do, and paper will not do, for the Act contemplates nothing but reality. The law says, they must possess or enjoy the profits of land worth ten pounds, or forty shillings-must be duly registered -their qualification specified, and take an oath, the intention of which is, that they shall swear all is right. In the multitude of questions there is safety. By questioning over and over, and questioning again and again, and exhausting every possible supposition, and every possible way of supposing and questioning by unstopping the ears-by discriminating between the imaginary voices which the desires and prejudices prompt, and the real voices of the things themselves-and by listening humbly to the still small syllabic sounds of the facts themselves, the true nature of the subject of inquiry will be revealed if uncovered at all, and the truth heard, if heard at all, or ever. Now, apply this exhaustive method of questioning to the strange voters who carried the election in Peebleshire. Were they possessed of freeholds? Not one of them has a foot of land in the county. Did they receive rents or profits from any land? Not one of them received a penny. Did their agents receive rents for them? They had not a single agent in the county. Were they paper voters? Did they hold a fictitious possession, and receive fictitious rents on paper? Were they possessed of sham account books? They were never intrusted with the books and papers relating to their own votes, for a single hour. The political agent of the Conservative party kept them all the while. Possessed neither of lands, rents, nor papers! What qualification had these important voters? What enabled them to carry the election? They were duly registered by fraud, and they swore they were duly qualified by perjury.

This is the suffrage, of which the qualification is simply perjury. The man is a voter because he swears that he possesses what he does not possess-receives what he does not receive, and is what he is not. Infuse into one of these voters a con

science which will not allow him to swear falsely, and you disqualify him. A qualm of conscience might strike him off the roll. Perjury is the beginning, the middle, and the end of this suffrage. It is not a fictitious or a paper, but it is simply a perjury qualification. Were the political or electioneering agent to be seized with a fit of veracity, the whole fabrication would explode. The system is kept up by the perjuries of the voters, and the electioneering agent protects them with a hedge of eversprouting perjuries. False oaths make juggleries, realities; frauds, fair dealings; and forgeries, regular business transactions. Sometimes sums of money are employed collusively in ledgerdemain payments, which are all made real by hundreds of false oaths, and then the money is returned just as it was received, like a ring lent to a conjurer,-broken into pieces, and then restored to its owner as whole as ever. The perjury votes are surrounded with as many perjuries as a hedge-hog has bristles. But this suffrage has returned many Honourable Gentlemen. Perjurers and suborners are, by the actual working of the law, liable to become, according to circumstances, convicts in prisons, or transported felons, or the arbiters of elections, or officials of the Government. The deed which sends one man to the hulks, sends another to the legislature. Small criminality in perjury may cause a man to be transported, and very great criminalities in perjuries may elevate him to a place among the advisers of Her Majesty. It is exceedingly unjust to charge these members on any occasion whatever, with a betrayal of their constituents, however they may change their principles to serve their interests. Their constituents are not men, but frauds. Loyalty to principle would be treason to their origin, and an adherence to truth and justice would be a treachery to their constituency, on the part of the representatives of many thousands of perjuries. However, woe be to the perjurers and suborners, had they been found out attempting to obtain by false oaths, the acquittal of any young and mistaught child of crime, guilty of stealing the worth of a few shillings! In such cases the law assigns them imprisonment and transportation. But the law is far gentler to suborners and perjurers, if they only rob a few counties of their legislative power, and send an impersonation of perjuries to the deliberations of the Senate and the councils of the Sovereign.

Some men, from an amiable inclination to think well of persons they know, are unwilling to admit the existence of this kind of franchise; we must therefore adduce proofs. Many men, whose consciences have been rotted by electioneering experience, deny that the enfranchising thing is perjury; we wish we could not prove it.

Ever since the passing of the Reform Act, political agents have been at work, in the fabrication of what are mildly called fictitious, faggot, or paper votes. Mr. Robert Haldane, the Liberal political agent at Galasheils, in his evidence before Mr. Horsman's committee on fictitious votes, (Scotland) 1837, gives us a glimpse of the first appearance in Selkirkshire of the perjury electors. Mr. Haldane's suspicions had been roused by the addition, in 1833, to the small constituency of Selkirkshire, consisting of 180 votes, of no less than seventy-three new Tory claimants, registered as joint proprietors, life renters, or joint tenants. One, Brydon, a farmer at Moodlaw, had enfranchised, among others, his nephew, a Mr. William Brydon. At the elec tion in 1835, Mr. Robert Haldane caused the oath of trust to be administered to Mr. William Brydon. It was towards the end of the polling, the sheriff said to him, 'Hold up your hand to take the oath.' He said, 'I want to know what I have to swear first.' The sheriff read, 'I, William Brydon;' and when he came to 'I hold the same for my own benefit, and not in trust for any other person,' he remarked, 'No, I will not swear that, because my uncle did not tell me so,' and then he walked away.'

William Brydon was the fictitious voter of 1835, with a conscience which scrupled at decisively enfranchising himself by perjury. But thousands of electors have become bold in crime, in the last dozen years. William Brydon, be it noted, lost his vote by having a conscience. He would not swear falsely, and had therefore to walk away; but thousands since have hardened their hearts against the risk of a false oath, and the hardness has carried them through the polling booth triumphantly. Whatever legality may say, morality will regard as similarly if not equally criminal, the man who exercises a privilege to which he has no title, while ready to swear falsely, and the man who does it after swearing falsely. The identity of their guilt is dependant upon the accident of the administration of the oath.

We shall avail ourselves here of a statement of facts, which will be found in a speech 'On the Distribution of Electoral Power,' by Mr. John Robertson. He is asserting that the Reform Act gives the largest proportions of electoral power to the worst electors, and the smallest proportions to the best electors, and is proving his point by samples of counties and boroughs. Respecting counties, he says,

'Middlesex, North and South Lancashire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire, are the great seats of British commerce and manufactures, of wealth, enterprise, independence, and intelligence. These three counties contained in 1846, 85,422 electors, three-fourths of whom are freeholders. These 85,000 electors return eight members. The Reform

Act gives 10,000 or 11,000 of them the power of returning one member. Now let us turn to eight other counties, which also return eight members. The counties of Bute, Caithness, Elgin, Linlithgow, Nairn, Orkney, Selkirk, and Sutherland, contain 3,770 electors on the register of 1846. When they pass the tellers in the divisions of the House of Commons, the eight members for these 3,700 electors are exactly the equals in the vote lists, and in the business of legislation, of the eight representatives of the 85,000 electors of Lancashire, Yorkshire; and Middlesex. In Whig arithmetic, 3,000 is equal to 85,000! The independence, wealth, respectability, and intelligence of the freeholders of the three greatest English counties are facts known to all men. But let us look closely at their electoral and legislative equals in Bute, Caithness, Elgin, Linlithgow, Nairn, Orkney, Selkirk, and Sutherland. Let us inspect the 3,000 who, in Whig eyes, are worth the 85,000 independent freeholders. In these counties there are a few independent electors, but they are swamped by servile tenants and fictitious voters. Some of these tenants are well known to me, and have themselves told me, indignantly and bitterly, that they have no alternative between voting for the nominees of their landlords, and seeing the ruin of themselves and their families stare them in the face. Of the fictitious voters, two reports of committees of the House of Commons, in large blue-books, furnish me with impressive characteristics. They enable me, supported by them, and by evidence which has been sworn in courts of law, to declare that these fictitious or faggot voters are enfranchised by perjury. 85,400 independent electors are nullified by 3,700 electors; and in this small body itself, the independent and resident electors are nullified, swamped, and overborne by servile tenants, and strangers who owe their votes to nothing but their willingness to swear falsely. With your permission, I will read the extracts from the report of the committee on fictitious votes in 1838, which prove these facts. Though referring more particularly to Selkirkshire and Peebleshire, the committee say these are merely samples of the Scotch counties. This iniquity prevails also in England, as is proved by the evidence published by the committee on votes of electors in 1846. I will now read the extracts from the report on fictitious votes, or, as they are called, colourable life-rents. But where, as has frequently been the case, the franchise has been obtained by a mere colourable acquisition of such life-rents, they think they ought to direct the attention of the House to the following circumstances, which usually attend these transactions. The deeds are made out in the last week in January, so as just to complete the six months' possession necessary for registration. The subject disposed of seldom passes into the hands of the life-renters, but remains in the occupation of the disponer, who receives back a lease of it from the disponees, generally of the same date, and always of the same duration, as his own disposition to them. The price, which is fixed by annuity tables, according to the age of the purchasers, is not paid, but a bill for the amount is given, the interest of which is about equivalent to the rent received by the parties in return. There are few instances of these bills being paid up, nor can it be doubted that payment of them is not expected to be enforced. The transaction, moreover, is not pre

ceded by search of incumbrances, or any inquiry into the real value of the rent, as is invariably the case in purchases of real property. The delivery of the deed, which is essential in law to the completing of a transaction, is virtually evaded, either by the same individual being employed to act as agent for both buyer and seller, or by a more formal delivery of the disposition being gone through before witnesses, after which it is immediately restored to the party granting it, in whose custody it remains. Lastly, infeftment seldom follows on these transactions, though in cases of actual sale, it is not only usual, but essential to the security of the buyer.' But the committee pourtray a darker species of this crime:-'Cases have also been brought before the committee, of individuals making single purchases for the sake of the vote, in which the purchasers, being unprovided with the means of paying, have been assisted with the necessary sum by some political agent or partizan, who takes over the property so acquired as security for the loan advanced. It appears that agents are regularly employed, not only in looking out for properties to be bought for political purposes, but also in affording the necessary facility, by loans to indigent purchasers, who are induced to take them. The consequence is, that the vote thus acquired can never afterwards be exercised but at the will of the creditor. He may demand payment of the sum lent by him, at any moment, and if his demand be not complied with within six days, he may proceed instantly to attach the person of his debtor, and by a second process to obtain possession of the property. It is obvious, then, that in the cause of a poor man thus situated, neither the interest in the property, nor the vote derived from it, belong to him so much as to his creditor, and that he is a mere tool in the hands of another, who, by this species of right, acquires over a considerable portion of the constituency, a power which may be exercised in a very mischievous and objectionable manner.' Realize the position of this debtor, with six days between him and a jail, if he refuses to vote as bidden, or recoils from completing his qualification, by swearing, if called upon, by Almighty God, and as he shall answer at the day of judgment, that he has the property which he has not. The outcast child of the streets who steals a purse may be transported by criminal law; but to make a man perjure his soul in politics is clever electioneering, winked at by the Legislature, and abetted by his Grace the Duke.'

But we must hurry on to complete our brief sketch of the iniquities of which the electioneering agent is the chief actor. There are many before us. In parting with the master-piece of his skill, the perjury suffrage, we cannot help noting the period in which he has successfully done it, and the insight it gives us into the actual morality of the age.

Some journals have expressed their astonishment at the perpetration of fraud, perjury, and subornation, by persons of respectability. The denouncers of their crimes do it gingerly and tenderly. They betray a fear of the social power of the criminals. They hesitate their denunciation. They call perjury