r a knight of a shire the
qualification was fixed at five hundred a year; for a burgess at two
hundred a year. Early in February this bill was read a second time and
referred to a Select Committee. A motion was made that the Committee
should be instructed to add a clause enacting that all elections should
be by ballot. Whether this motion proceeded from a Whig or a Tory, by
what arguments it was supported and on what grounds it was opposed,
we have now no means of discovering. We know only that it was rejected
without a division.

Before the bill came back from the Committee, some of the most
respectable constituent bodies in the kingdom had raised their voices
against the new restriction to which it was proposed to subject them.
There had in general been little sympathy between the commercial towns
and the Universities. For the commercial towns were the chief seats of
Whiggism and Non conformity; and the Universities were zealous for the
Crown and the Church. Now, however, Oxford and Cambridge made common
cause with London and Bristol. It was hard, said the Academics, that a
grave and learned man, sent by a large body of grave and learned men to
the Great Council of the nation, should be thought less fit to sit in
that Council than a boozing clown who had scarcely literature enough
to entitle him to the benefit of clergy. It was hard, said the traders,
that a merchant prince, who had been the first magistrate of the first
city in the world, whose name on the back of a bill commanded entire
confidence at Smyrna and at Genoa, at Hamburg and at Amsterdam, who
had at sea ships every one of which was worth a manor, and who had
repeatedly, when the liberty and religion of the kingdom were in peril,
advanced to the government, at an hour's notice, five or ten thousand
pounds, should be supposed to have a less stake in the prosperity of the
commonwealth than a squire who sold his own bullocks and hops over a pot
of ale at the nearest market town. On the report, it was moved that the
Universities should be excepted; but the motion was lost by a hundred
and fifty-one votes to a hundred and forty-three. On the third reading
it was moved that the City of London should be excepted; but it was not
thought advisable to divide. The final question that the bill do pass,
was carried by a hundred and seventy-three votes to a hundred and fifty
on the day which preceded the discovery of the Assassination Plot. The
Lords agreed to the bill