roaches to the place of election. At the two last
elections, I was told, that the road within a mile of Wandsworth was
so blocked up by vehicles, that none could move backward or forward
during many hours; and that the candidates, dressed like
chimney-sweepers on May-day, or in the mock-fashion of the period,
were brought to the hustings in the carriages of peers, drawn by six
horses, the owners themselves condescending to become their drivers!

Whether the effect of inculcating useful principles by means of these
mock politicians, was compensated by the ridicule thrown on the sacred
exertions of patriotism, may perhaps be doubted. These elections
served, however, to keep alive the feelings of the people on public
questions, and tended to increase those discussions and enquiries
which support the arterial circulation of the body politic. The deadly
plague of despotism, and the equally fatal disease of ministerial
corruption, find victims of their influence only among people who are
devoid of moral energies and public spirit, and whose stagnant and
torpid condition generates morbid dispositions that invite, rather
than resist, the attacks of any public enemy.

I am a friend, therefore, on principle, to the bustle and tumult of
popular elections. They are the flint and steel, the animating
friction, the galvanic energy, of society. Virtue alone can face them.
Vice dreads them as it dreads the light. With uncourtly hands, they
tear the mask from Hypocrisy; they arraign at the bar of public
opinion, political Culprits, amenable to no other tribunal; and they
probe to the quick, the seared consciences of Peculators and
Oppressors. If the sycophants of courts, and the sophistical
apologists of arbitrary power, should craftily urge that the people
are sometimes misled by fraud and falsehood, and therefore unable to
distinguish between patriots and plunderers, we should not forget that
occasional errors are misfortunes which do not abrogate general
rights; and that popular elections are never adopted in well-trained
despotisms, as part of the machinery of the state, calculated to
subjugate the bodies and minds of their slaves. Do we hear of the
suffrages of the people among the Turks, the Russians, the Moors, or
the Algerines? Rather, as the means of eliciting the public voice, and
of exciting enquiry, are they not of all despotisms, the bane; and of
all usurpations and abuses of power, the terror; while, by generating
that p