ion which disgraced contested elections. The summer of that year
was also rendered memorable in Lord John's career by his first speech on
Parliamentary Reform. In July, Sir Francis Burdett, undeterred by
previous overwhelming defeats, brought forward his usual sweeping motion
demanding universal suffrage, equal electoral districts, vote by ballot,
and annual Parliaments. Lord John's criticism was level-headed, and
therefore characteristic. He had little sympathy with extreme measures,
and he knew, moreover, that it was not merely useless but injurious to
the cause of Reform to urge them at such a moment. The opposition was
too powerful and too impervious to anything in the nature of an idea to
give such proposals just then the least chance of success. Property
meant to fight hard for its privileges, and the great landowners looked
upon their pocket-boroughs as a goodly heritage as well as a rightful
appanage of rank and wealth. As for the great unrepresented towns, they
were regarded as hot-beds of sedition, and therefore the people were to
be kept in their place, and that meant without a voice in the affairs of
the nation. The close corporations and the corrupt boroughs were
meanwhile dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders or a laugh of scorn.

Lord John was as yet by no means a full-fledged Reformer, but it was
something in those days for a duke's son to take sides, even in a
modified way, with the party of progress. His speech represented the
views not so much of the multitude as of the middle classes. They were
alarmed at the truculent violence of mob orators up and down the
country; their fund of inherited reverence for the aristocracy was as
yet scarcely diminished. They had their own dread of spoliation, and
they had not quite recovered from their fright over the French
Revolution. They were law abiding, moreover, and the blood and treasure
which it had cost the nation to crush Napoleon had allayed in thousands
of them the thirst for glory, and turned them into possibly humdrum but
very sincere lovers of peace. Lord John's speech was an appeal to the
average man in his strength and in his limitations, and men of cautious
common-sense everywhere rejoiced that the young Whig--who was liked none
the less by farmer and shopkeeper because he was a lord--had struck the
nail exactly on the head. The growth of Lord John's influence in
Parliament was watched at Woburn with keen interest. 'I have had a good
deal of convers