BIBCUULE FoR

r93

Public money no longer expended without responsibility
to those who paid it. The battle between privilege und —..34
Popular representation which had been fought on the great
S¢ene at Westminster in 1832, was now resumed and fought
Out on the pettier stage of the new boroughs. The classes
"ho had lost the power of bad government on a large
Dationa] scale, tried hard to retain it on » small local scale,
The low-minded and corrupt rabble of freemen and pot-Wallopers
 united with those who were on principle the
®mbittered enemies of all improvement, the noisy, inglorious
Bldons of the provincial towns, and did their best to thwart
the petitions. The Tories and the Residuom, to use the
Phrase of 5 later day, made that alliance which Cobden
calls unholy, but which rests on the natural affinities of
bigotry und ignorance. The Whig, as usual, was timid and
Incomfortable; he went about murmuring that a charter
Was unnecessary, and muttered something about expense.
“When your former kind and friendly letter reached me,”
Cobden writes to Tait, the Edinburgh publisher, “1 was
Sngaged before the Commissioners, employed in exposing the
trickery of the Tories in getting up their petition against the
incorporation of our borough. For three weeks I was in-Gessantly
 occupied at the Town Hall, By dint of hard work
8nd some expense, we got at the filth in their Augean stable,
80d laid their dirty doings before the public eye. I beliove
ow there is little doubt of our being chartered before the
bext November election, and it will be a new era for Manchester
 when it shakes off the feudal livery of Sir Oswald
Mosley, to put on the democratic garb of the Municipal
Reform Act,
“So important do I consider the step for incorporating the
borough, that 1 have been incessantly engaged at the task
for the last six months. T began by writing a letter of
which I circulated five thousand copies, with a view oi