This ill-fated question had been prompted by a report, diligently spread
through the town, that the Whig candidates were Unitarians; a report
which, even if correct, would probably have done little to damage
their electioneering prospects. There are few general remarks which
so uniformly hold good as the observation that men are not willing to
attend the religious worship of people who believe less than themselves,
or to vote at elections for people who believe more than themselves.
While the congregations at a high Anglican service are in part composed
of Low churchmen and Broad churchmen; while Presbyterians and
Wesleyans have no objection to a sound discourse from a divine of the
Establishment; it is seldom the case that any but Unitarians are seen
inside a Unitarian chapel. On the other hand, at the general election
of 1874, when not a solitary Roman Catholic was returned throughout
the length and breadth of the island of Great Britain, the
Unitarians retained their long acknowledged pre-eminence as the most
over-represented sect in the kingdom.

While Macaulay was stern in his refusal to gratify his electors with
the customary blandishments, he gave them plenty of excellent political
instruction; which he conveyed to them in rhetoric, not premeditated
with the care that alone makes speeches readable after a lapse of years,
but for this very reason all the more effective when the passion of the
moment was pouring itself from his lips in a stream of faultless, but
unstudied, sentences. A course of mobs, which turned Cobden into an
orator, made of Macaulay a Parliamentary debater; and the ear and eye
of the House of Commons soon detected, in his replies from the Treasury
bench, welcome signs of the invaluable training that can be got nowhere
except on the hustings and the platform. There is no better sample of
Macaulay's extempore speaking than the first words which he addressed
to his committee at Leeds after the Reform Bill had received the Royal
assent. "I find it difficult to express my gratification at seeing such
an assembly convened at such a time. All the history of our own country,
all the history of other countries, furnishes nothing parallel to it.
Look at the great events in our own former history, and in every one of
them, which, for importance, we can venture to compare with the Reform
Bill, we shall find something to disgrace and tarnish the achievement.
It was by the assistance of French arms and of