We shall probably be doing the House of Commons of the day no injustice, if we surmise that the degree in which public attention had recently been directed to the representation, and the interest which the people were beginning to show in the purity of elections, as the principle on the maintenance of which the very liberties of all might depend, had some share in leading the House to establish the wholly new, though most necessary, precedent of punishing a constituency for habitual and inveterate corruption. It may be called the first fruits of Mr. Grenville's act. At the end of the same year in which that statute had been passed, a select committee had sat to try the merits of a petition which complained of an undue return for the borough of New Shoreham. And its report brought to light an organized system of corruption, which there was too much reason to fear was but a specimen of that which prevailed in many other boroughs as yet undetected. It appeared from the report, founded as it was on the evidence and confession of many of the persons inculpated, that a society had long existed in New Shoreham, entitled the Christian Club, which, under this specious name, was instituted, as they frankly acknowledged, for the express purpose of getting as much money as possible at every election from the candidates they brought in. The members of the club were under an oath and bond of L500 not to divulge the secrets of the club, and to be bound by the majority. On every election, a committee of five persons was nominated by the club to treat with the candidates for as much money as they could get. And, in pursuance of this system, when, on the death of Sir Stephen Cornish, one of the members for the borough, five candidates offered themselves to supply the vacancy, this committee of five opened negotiations with them all. The offers of the rival purchasers were liberal enough. One (General Smith) proposed to buy the entire club in the lump for L3000, adding a promise to build 600 tons of shipping in the town. A second (a Mr. Rumbold) was willing to give every freeman L35; and his offer was accepted by the committee, who, however, cautioned him that no freeman was entitled to the money who was not a member of the Christian Club. He willingly agreed to this limitation of his expenditure, and both he and the club regarded the matter as settled. He paid every freeman who belonged to the club his stipulated bribe, and on the polling day they tendered eighty-seven votes in his favor, the entire constituency being something under one hundred and fifty. The general, finding his L3000 declined, did not go to the poll; but a Mr. Purling and Mr. James did, the latter polling only four votes, the former only thirty-seven. What bribe Mr. Purling had given was never revealed; but by some means or other he had contrived to render himself the most acceptable of all the candidates to Mr. Roberts, the returning officer. Roberts had himself been a member of the Christian Club, but had quarrelled with it, and on the day of the election, as Rumbold's voters came up, he administered to each of them the oath against bribery. They took it without scruple; but he took it on himself to pronounce seventy-six of them disqualified, and to refuse their votes; and, having thus reduced Mr. Rumbold's voters to eleven, he returned Mr. Purling as duly elected.
Mr. Rumbold, not unnaturally, petitioned against such a return; when Mr. Roberts admitted the facts alleged against him, but pleaded that he had acted under the advice of counsel, who had assured him that it was within his own discretion to admit or to refuse any votes that might be tendered, and that he might lawfully refuse any "which in his own mind he thought illegal." It is a striking proof of the laxity which prevailed on every quarter in electioneering practices, that the House, to a great extent, admitted his justification or excuse as valid. By a strange stretch of lenity, they gave him credit for an honest intention, and contented themselves with ordering him to be reprimanded by the Speaker. But the case of the bribed freemen and of the borough generally was too gross to be screened by any party. All agreed that the borough must be regarded as incurably corrupt, and deserving of heavy punishment. The Attorney-general was ordered to prosecute the five members of the managing committee for "an illegal and corrupt conspiracy;" and a bill was brought in to disfranchise and declare forever incapable of voting at any election eighty-one freemen who had been proved to have received bribes, and to punish the borough itself, by extending the right of voting at future elections to all the freeholders in the rape of Bramber, the district of Sussex in which New Shoreham lies, an arrangement which reduced the borough itself to comparative insignificance. Mr. Fox opposed the bill, on the ground that the offence committed could be sufficiently punished by the ordinary courts of law. But he stood alone in his resistance; the bill was passed, and a salutary precedent was established; the penalty inflicted on New Shoreham being for many years regarded as the most proper punishment for all boroughs in which similar practices were proved to prevail.
And it might have continued to be thought so, had corruption been confined to the smaller boroughs; but there was no doubt that in many large towns corruption was equally prevalent and inveterate, while there were also many counties in which the cost of a contest was by far too large to be accounted for by any legitimate causes of expenditure. And consequently, as time wore on, severer measures were considered necessary. Some boroughs were deprived of the right of election altogether; in others, whose population or constituency was too numerous to make their permanent disfranchisement advisable, the writ was suspended for a time, that its suspension might serve both as a punishment and as a warning, a practice which is still not unfrequently adopted. But no plan could be devised for dealing with the evil in counties, till what seemed hopeless to achieve by direct legislation was, in a great degree, effected by the indirect operation of the Reform Bill of 1832. The shortening of the duration of an election, which was henceforth concluded in a single day, and the multiplication of polling places, which rendered it impossible to ascertain the progress of the different candidates till the close of the poll, were provisions having an inevitable and most salutary effect in diminishing alike the temptation to bribe on the part of the candidate, and the opportunity of enhancing the value of his vote by the elector. The vast increase of newspapers, by diffusing political education and stimulating political discussion, has had, perhaps, a still greater influence in the same direction. And, as bribery could only be brought to bear on electors too ignorant to estimate the importance of the exercise of the franchise by any higher test than the personal advantage it might bring to themselves, it is to the general diffusion of education among the poorer classes, and their gradually improved and improving intelligence that a complete eradication of electoral corruption can alone be looked for.