Methods of Reform. 
267 
at and forgotten. When Sheridan, that most brilliant of Irish¬ 
men, was a candidate for parliament at Stafford, his independent 
electors cost him five guineas per burgess, and the humane Wil- 
berforce, the friend of the slave, found four guineas the price 
at Hull. Southey says it rose to £30 a vote at Ilchester. When 
Wilberforce, in 1807, fought what has been called the ’’Auster- 
litz of Electioneering,” the candidates between them expended 
above £300,000, in round numbers a million and a half of dollars, 
and Sir Henry James tells of a gentleman contesting a cath¬ 
edral town in 1826, who spent £86,000 mainly in ribbons, re¬ 
freshments and music. According to Prof. Huxley, four-fifths 
of the seats in the house of Commons were more or less openly 
dealt with as private property. 
When Wilberforce, one of the highest types of his time, 
was a candidate for parliament, his sister, speaking at the 
hustings, promised a new dress to the wife of every elector who 
supported him, and Mr. G-ladstone’s own early elections are said 
to have been characterized by as questionable practices. These 
are examples of the old system which has begun to disappear. 
Everything was sold in the old days. Lord Chancellor Bacon 
sold equity; Lord Chancellor Macclesfield sold places. The 
great and good Montesquieu defended the sale of all public places 
by the state on the ground that if the state did not sell them, 
those controlling them would. In England even the dignities 
and emoluments of the church were formerly bought and sold 
as freely as the right to misrepresent the people in parliament, 
and within most of our memories commissions in the British 
army were as much a matter of barter and sale as the contents 
of a junk shop. 
One by one these old abuses, these “errors” which “though 
hoary are errors still, ” are sloughed off by advancing civilization. 
In the days of our grandsires, the “good old days,” a deacon 
could go to bed mellow six nights in the week without scanda 
or abatement of fervor in his “amen” on the seventh; but some ex¬ 
tremist would find fault now. Just as intemperance was univer¬ 
sal, unquestioned and almost unnoticed a half century ago, so was 
the universal sale of place and power and rights and justice a 
