[p. 110]
|110| has been excluded from Parliament because the acceptance of bribery by the electors has been proved; the electors in this town are very numerous, and since it is very rich, it is to be presumed that among those bribed there were also many well-to-do persons. Further, just as well as the great landowners knew how to put forward hundreds and thousands of their propertyless tenants as owners of a free ground rent of 40 shillings, so well will this peculiar way of procuring votes also adapt itself to the new census, and those dependent men will let themselves be masked as holders of ground rent of ten pounds. No less will the carousing of several weeks and the intoxication in which the unleashed wildness of the English rabble received the invitation and the payment to let itself go, let itself be deprived of that enjoyment, notwithstanding the raising of the conditional rent. At the last election but one to Parliament it was stated that in the populous county of York 80,000 pounds sterling (about 560,000 Reichsthaler) were spent on the election of a landowner there, Beaumont4); if it has been brought forward in parliamentary debates that the costs of elections are by now becoming all too great, the question is how the people will look upon the fact that the rich want to make savings at its expense. How this side of a real advantage [will] shape itself, what new combinations will be invented by the untiring speculation of the agents occupied with the trade in seats in Parliament, is still undetermined; it would be too early to want to build conjectures upon the change that is going on in this interest.
4) Hegel’s footnote. In one of the last sittings of Parliament the expense of the election at Liverpool mentioned just before has been stated as 120,000 pounds sterling (over 800,000 Reichsthaler).
A higher interest, however, the right of voting itself seems
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.