300

LIFE OF OOBDEN. [cHAP

1844. and opinions of the majority of those who reside in it. Such
w= 40, a practice as this seems at no time to have been in Cobder®
contemplation. Still many people demurred. The pl”
wore the look of manufacturing votes; it secraed, they said;
mechanical, unworthy, and barely legitimate. No, replied
Cobden, there is nothing savouring of trick or finesse of ay
kind in it; the law and the constitution prescribe the con”
dition ; you have a bond-fide qualification, and are conforming
to the law both in spirit and in fact. This was quite tri®
and no plan ever proposed by the League met with 5°
unanimous a response from all parts of the kingdom. It
took two hours a day to read the letters that came from
every part of the country, all applauding the scheme. BY
the beginning of 1845 between four and five thousand nev
electors had been brought upon the lists in Yorkshire
Lancashire, and Cheshire. Not less than two hundred and
fifty thousand pounds were invested in these counties if
the forty-shilling qualification. It was believed that eight
or ten times as many persons in other parts of the country
had taken Cobden’s hint to qualify.
It was to be an immense enfranchisement, on old constitutional
 lines and secured by the spontaneous effort and
civil spirit of the population itsolf. “ Wherever there is 2
man above the rank of an unskilled labourer, whether 2
shopkeeper, 8 man of the middle class, or of the skilled
working class that has not got a county vote, or is BOY
striving to accumulate enough to get one, let ns point the
finger of scorn at him ; he is not fit to be a freeman. It 1°
an avenue by which we may reach the recesses of powers
and possess ourselves of any constitutional rights which we
are entitled to possess.” In one of his speeches of tha
date, Cobden allowed it to be perceived that this gros’
process had come into his mind not simply as a means of
quickening the triumph of Free Trade, but as an agency