To say the truth (and this is not a time to disguise it from you) this subscription is a subscription against, and not for, the freedom of election. If Sir Samuel Romilly's friends were willing to put their trust in the free good-will of the people of Bristol, why raise money in such large quantities, and especially why resort to party men and to loan makers for this purpose? They will say, perhaps, that the money is intended for the purpose of carrying down the London voters, and for that of fetching voters from elsewhere; but, why are they afraid to put their trust in the resident voters of Bristol? The object of this subscription is very far indeed from resembling the object of that which was set on foot in Westminster, which was not to gain votes by dint of money, but merely to pay the expenses of printing, of clerks, and other little matters inseparable from an election at Westminster; and the whole of which did not amount to more than about eight hundred pounds; whereas as many thousands are stated to be already subscribed for procuring the election of Sir Samuel Romilly. In short, this attempt of the friends of Sir Samuel Romilly is like many others that have been made before. It is purse against purse. Mr. PROTHERO has shaken his purse at Sir Samuel; and, as the latter does not choose to engage with his own purse, his friends, with a loan maker at their head, came forward to make up a purse for him; and the free and unbought voice of the electors of Bristol is evidently intended by neither party to have any weight at all in the decision.
Let us now return and take a view of the political picture which Bristol at this moment presents. And here, the first observation that strikes one is, that neither the friends of Sir Samuel Romilly nor the friends of Mr. Prothero say one word in opposition to Mr. Hart Davis, though he avowedly stands upon the principles of Mr. Bragge and the present Ministers; though he quitted his canvass about ten weeks ago, to come express to London to vote in favour of the Orders in Council; and though he now says, that he will tread in the steps of Mr. Bragge. Though they have all this before their eyes, not one single syllable does any one of them utter against the pretensions or movements of Mr. Davis; and, though the meeting at the Crown and Anchor took place several days after the Bristol and Colchester writs were moved for, and though the parties at the meeting must necessarily have been well acquainted with all that I have above stated to you upon the subject of those writs, not one word did they utter against the pretensions of Mr. Davis, nor did they (according to the printed report of their proceedings) even mention his name, or take the smallest notice of the circumstance, that an election, a little, snug, rotten-borough-like election, was, at that moment, getting up in that very city, for the interest and honour of which they were affecting so much concern! And can you, then, believe them sincere? Can you believe, that they have any other view than merely that of securing a seat for the party in Bristol? Can you doubt that the contest, on their part, is not for the principle, but for the seat?
Having pointed out this circumstance to your attention, it is hardly necessary for me to advert to the conduct of Mr. Hunt, which, in this case in particular, forms a contrast with that of the other parties too striking not to have produced a lasting impression upon your minds. He does not content himself with talking about defending your liberties. He acts as well as talks. He hears that the enemy is at your camp, and he flies to rescue you from his grasp. He does not waste his time in a tavern in London, drawing up flourishing resolutions about "public spirit." He hastens among you; he looks your and his adversary in the face: he shows you that you may depend upon him in the hour of trial. These, Gentlemen, are marks of such a character in a representative as the times demand. Sir Samuel Romilly is a very worthy gentleman; an honest man; a humane man; a man that could not, in my opinion, be by any means tempted to do a cruel or dishonest act; and he is, too, a man of great talents. But, I have no scruple to say, that I should prefer, and greatly prefer, Mr. Hunt to Sir Samuel Romilly, as a Member of Parliament; for, while I do not know, and do not believe, that the latter excels the former in honesty or humanity, I am convinced that his talents, though superior, perhaps, in their kind, are not equal, in value to the public, to the talents possessed by Mr. Hunt, who is at this moment giving you a specimen of the effect of those talents.
Gentlemen, the predominance of Lawyers, in this country, has produced amongst us a very erroneous way of thinking with respect to the talents of public men; and, contrary to the notions of the world in general, we are apt to think a man great in mind in proportion to the glibness of his tongue. With us, to be a great talker is to be a great man; but perhaps a falser rule of judging never was adopted. It is so far from being true as a general maxim, that it is generally the contrary of the truth; and, if you look back through the list of our own public men, you will find that, in general, they have been shallow and mischievous in proportion to their gift of talking. We have been brought to our present miserable state by a lawyer-like policy, defended in lawyer-like debates. Plain good sense has been brow-beaten out of countenance; has been talked down, by the politicians from the bar; haranguing and special pleading and quibbling have usurped the place of frank and explicit statement and unsophisticated reasoning. In Mr. Hunt you have no lawyer, but you have a man who is not to be brow-beaten into silence. You have a man not to be intimidated by the frowns or the threats of wealth or of rank; a man not to be induced to abandon his duty towards you from any consideration of danger to himself; and, I venture to foretell (begging that my words may be remembered) that, if you elect him, the whole country will soon acknowledge the benefit conferred on it by the city of Bristol.
Gentlemen, this letter will, in all likelihood, find you engaged in the bustle of an election. With all the advantages on the side of your adversary, you may not, perhaps, upon the present occasion, be able to defeat him. But you will have a chance; you will have an opportunity of trying; you will have an election; and this you would not have had if it had not been for Mr. Hunt, for the whole affair would have been over before you had scarcely heard of it. At the very least you will have some days of liberty to speak your minds; to tell Mr. Davis what you think of him and of his predecessor; to declare aloud your grievances and your indignation; and even for this liberty you will be indebted to Mr. Hunt, and solely to Mr. Hunt. You are told of the zeal of Mr. Prothero and Sir Samuel Romilly in your service; you are told of their desire to promote your interest and your honour; but where are they now? Where are they when the enemy is in your city, when you were to have been handed over from Mr. Bragge Bathurst to Hart Davis as quietly as if you had been a cargo of tallow or of corn? It is now, it is in this moment of real need, that Mr. Hunt comes to your aid; and, if he fail in defeating, he will, at the least, harass your enemy, make his victory over you cost him dear, and by exposing the sources and means of his success, lay the foundation of his future defeat and disgrace.—I am, your friend,
WM. COBBETT.
State Prison, Nerogate, Monday, 29th June, 1812.
Such of my readers as are not old enough to remember the events, or to have read Mr. Cobbett's Register at that time, will acquire from this letter a pretty cleat insight into the state of the case at this period of the proceedings. It has already been seen, that, on the first morning, I made my way to the hustings, and, under every disadvantage, maintained the right of election in the City of Bristol. I had no allies but the people; of them, indeed, I had the great mass with me; but, though I had well-wishers in all the richer classes, there was scarcely a single man beyond the rank of a journeyman, who had the courage openly to give me any countenance or support. The Whigs and Tories united with all their accumulated force against me. I had, therefore, to contend, single-handed, against all the power, wealth and influence of all parties and factions in the city. All the corporation, all the merchants, all the tradesmen, all the clergy and priests, whether of the church of England or of the numberless sects of dissenters, all these, and all whom they could array under their banners, were volunteers to uphold the most corrupt and profligate system of election that ever disgraced the rottenest of rotten boroughs. Then came the hireling legion, consisting of a swarm of more foul and noxious vermin than Moses inflicted upon the land of Egypt. It was made up of all the attorneys, and pettifoggers, with their clerks, scamps, and runners; every man, or rather every reptile, of them, being profusely fed to bark, to snarl, to cavil, and to bully; and all of them more ravenous and ferocious than sharks or wolves. It is, indeed, almost a libel upon the sharks and wolves to compare them with such creatures. I cannot, perhaps, give a better idea of them than in the forcible, though rather coarse language of a mechanic, who declared that, "if hell were raked with a small tooth-comb, it would not be possible to collect another such a gang." In the evening, I requested my Committee to procure me a list of these worthy limbs of the law; and, if I recollect right, the number was forty-one. I know that it was one under or one over forty, but I do not know which. There they were, Whigs and Tories, bitter haters of each other on all other occasions, but now jumbled together like pigs in a stye, or like hungry curs of all sorts of mis-begotten and degenerate breeds. I believe that the famous Mr. WEBB HALL, who was then a practising attorney in Bristol (of the firm of Jarman and Hall); I believe that this profound agricultural quack of 1821, was, in 1812, one of the formidable phalanx which was drawn up against me.
O, how this blessed band did roar and bluster, and pretend to be shocked and horrified at my "matchless impudence," in thinking to oppose "the amiable" and mighty candidate of the White Lion Club! The reader will bear in mind that there never had been a real contested election in Bristol since that of 1774, when Mr. Burke and Mr. Cruger were elected, upon the opposition or Whig interest, to the exclusion of Earl Nugent and Mr. Brickdale. At the election in 1780, the ministerial faction returned both members. "From that period till 1812," says Mr. Oldfield, in his History of the Boroughs, "the city of Bristol has been governed by two party clubs, and each club has nominated a member, who were quietly returned without any opposition." The people of Bristol, I found, distinguished their two factions by the designation of the high and the low party: the Whigs deriving their principal support from the lower class of tradesmen and journeymen.
The hungry, grasping, quirking attorneys thought they were all the time pretending to be shocked at my opposition to "the worthy Mr. Davis," were, in fact, frightened out of their senses, every moment of the first day, lest I should make a slip, so as to enable their worthy leader, Mr. Arthur Palmer, the perpetual Under Sheriff, to take an advantage of it and close the election. These mercenaries were all hired at five guineas a day each, as long as the election lasted; and of course the cunning old trickster, Palmer, was always upon the look out to spoil their sport, by closing the election. This Squire Palmer, this perpetual tormentor of the poor distressed debtors of the City, was a cavilling, quibbling, empty-headed, testy, old womanish chap, scarcely worthy to be designated by the title of a man. He was eternally yelping, like a cur, without any rhyme or reason; and the reader may estimate the pack by the description that I have given of this, the foremost hound. There was another of this gang who put himself very forward, and who was very insolent to some of my friends. Such a looking creature I had scarcely ever seen in human form; he had coal-black, straight hair, hanging down a sallow-looking face, that had met with very rough usage from the ravages of the small-pox. In fact, his face resembled a piece of cold, dirty, honey combed tripe, and had very little more expression in it; and the whole was completed by two heavy, dark eyes, which looked like leaden bullets stuck in clay. This worthy had been going on for some time in an impertinent way, on which I was about to admonish him; and, as a preliminary, I asked him, with great coolness, "pray, Sir, is not your naive Leach?" "Yes," said he, "it is Leech, and I should like to suck thy blood!" This was esteemed a brilliant sally of wit, and was received with noisy approbation by his surrounding friends. Well! I thought to myself, I am amongst a precious set of cannibals, indeed, and it will require all my temper to manage with such a tribe. There, too, sat the Sheriffs. The one of them, Mr. Sheriff Brice, a sugar-baker, was as upstart, whipper-snapper, waspish a little gentleman as ever disgraced the seat of office. I soon discovered that I was not to expect from him an atom of liberality or fair play. Mr. Sheriff Benjamin Bickley, the other Sheriff, appeared to be an easy, good sort of man, that wished to take it all very coolly and unconcernedly—to wit, "you may settle it just as you please, gentlemen," or some such answer as that, when he was appealed to. However, there was, altogether, a spirit of fairness about him, which, when it came to the push, he had too much honesty to disguise; so that, when he could be moved to interfere, it was generally with impartiality. These were our two Sheriffs and returning officers. But, as they thought it quite beneath them to understand any thing about the law of election, they had their assessor, a barrister, to settle all the law points with me; this assessor was Edmond Griffith, Esq. who is now one of the police magistrates in the metropolis, but at which office I forget. The points of law I carried nineteen times out of twenty, for I had Disney's Abridgement at my fingers ends, and that author's volume we made the umpire in all contested points. Before I proceed any farther, I must say, that, during the whole of this tremendous contest, Mr. Griffith conducted himself in every respect like a gentleman and a man of honour; and when I have said this of Mr. Chancellor Griffith, and Mr. Sheriff Bickley, I shall not belie any person in the city of Bristol by paying him a similar compliment. With these two exceptions, I can safely affirm, that I never received an act of civility, liberality or fair play, from any of that class that call themselves gentlemen, in Bristol, during the whole fifteen days that the election lasted. But, to make amends for this, I received numerous acts of kindness from many worthy tradesmen, and such proofs of devoted attachment from almost the whole of the population, male and female, with the exception of the hirelings and dependents of the gentry, as I have never seen surpassed to this day.