during his administration was unusually low; yet such was the condition of the Legislature by which he governed, that he appears to have found it necessary to offer direct money bribes even to Members of the House of Lords.

If Walpole was guilty of corruption, it may be fairly urged that it was scarcely possible to manage Parliament without it, and also that skilful writers, under the guidance of Bolingbroke, were studiously aggravating his faults. He was, no doubt, often misrepresented. His saying of a group of Members, 'All these men have their price,' was turned into a general assertion that 'all men have their price;' and there was probably some truth in another saying ascribed to him,- that he was obliged to bribe Members not to vote against, but for their conscience.' Although in the case of a minister who had very few scruples, and who disposed, absolutely for many years, of immense sums of secret service money, it is impossible to speak with confidence, we may at least affirm that there is no real evidence that Walpole dishonestly appropriated public money to his own. purposes, and he retired from office deeply in debt.

The real charge against him is that in a period of profound peace, when he exercised an almost unexampled ascendency in politics, and when public opinion was strongly in favour of the diminution of corrupt influence in Parliament, he steadily and successfully resisted every attempt at reform. Other ministers may have bribed on a larger scale to gain some special object, or in moments of transition, crisis, or difficulty.

1 Grenville Correspondence, iii. p. 143.

2 The following very curious note from Lord Saye and Scle to Grenville has been preserved. The tone of the writer makes it almost certain that the transaction referred to was not regarded as either unusual or insulting:

'London, Nov. 26, 1763.

'Honoured Sir,-I am very much obliged to you for that freedom of converse you this morning indulged me in, which I prize more than the lucrative advantage I then received.

To show the sincerity of my words (pardon, Sir, the perhaps over-niceness of my disposition) I return enclosed the bill for 3001. you favoured me with, as good manners would not permit my refusal of it when tendered by you. Your most obliged and most obedient servant, SAYE & SELE.

'P.S. As a free horse needs no spur, so I stand in need of no inducement or douceur to lend my small assistance to the King and his friends in the present administration.' -Grenville Correspondence, iii. 145146.

It was left to Walpole to organise corruption as a system, and to make it the normal process of Parliamentary government. It was his settled policy to maintain his Parliamentary majority, not by attracting to his ministry great orators, great writers, great financiers, or great statesmen, not by effecting any combination or coalition of parties, by identifying himself with any great object of popular desire, or by winning to his side young men in whose character and ability he could trace the promise of future eminence, but simply by engrossing borough influence and extending the patronage of the Crown. Material motives were the only ones he recognised. During several successive Parliaments the majority of the counties were usually in opposition.' It was by the purchase of a multitude of small and perfectly venal boroughs, especially in Cornwall and Scotland, that the Government majority was maintained. Whenever

there was a choice between a man of ability and a man possessing large borough influence, the latter was invariably preferred. Thus it was that in 1724 Carteret was displaced from the Secretaryship of War, and the claims of Pulteney were neglected in order that Walpole might attach to his fortunes the Duke of Newcastle, who was the greatest borough-owner in the kingdom, but whose weak and timid character he was the first to ridicule. Thus it was that he met and defeated every effort to reduce the pension lists, and to enquire into the corruption of Parliament. He made it, said one who knew him well, a mair. object at all times, and on all occasions, to prevent Parliamentary enquiries.1 Pension Bill after Pension Bill was brought in with the strong support of public opinion. Sometimes he openly opposed them. More frequently he suffered them to pass the Commons, and employed his influence to stifle them in the Lords. Always he made it his object to discourage and defeat them. He constructed a system under which a despotic sovereign or minister might make a Parliamentary majority one of the most subservient and efficient

1 See a remarkable statement of Horace Walpole. Memoirs of George 11. i. 406. 2 Lord Hervey's Memoirs, i. 224.

instruments for destroying the liberties of England; and although he himself used it with signal moderation, he bequeathed it intact to his successors, and it became, under George III., the great instrument of misgovernment.

His influence upon young men appears to have been peculiarly pernicious. If we may believe Chesterfield, he was accustomed to ask them in a tone of irony upon their entrance into Parliament whether they too were going to be saints or Romans, and he employed all the weight of his position to make them regard purity and patriotism as ridiculous or unmanly. Of the next generation of statesmen, Fox, the first Lord Holland, was the only man of remarkable ability who can be said to have been his disciple, and he was, perhaps, the most corrupt and unscrupulous of the statesmen of his age.

Specific instances of Parliamentary corruption are a class of facts little likely to pass into the domain of history. The secret nature of the act, the interests both of the giver and the recipient, and the general tone and feelings of the politicians of the time, conspire to conceal them, and although public opinion forced on an enquiry into the acts of Walpole, and although the great majority of the commissioners were his personal enemies, no considerable results were arrived at. Nor was this surprising. The whole influence of the Crown and of the House of Lords was exerted to shield the fallen minister, and there was on the part of most leading politicians, and, indeed, of most Members of Parliament, a marked indisposition to enquire too curiously into such matters. Edgecumbe, who chiefly managed the Cornish boroughs, was made a peer expressly for the purpose of preventing the Committee from requiring his evidence. The officials who distributed the secret service money positively refused to give any evidence as to the manner of its distribution, on the ground that they might otherwise criminate themselves. The Secretary of the Treasury, who could probably have thrown most light upon the subject, as the whole secret

2

'Chesterfield's Miscellaneous Works 2 Walpole's Letters, i. p. 175. (ed. 1779), iv. append. p. 36.

service money passed through his hands, declined to take the oath of discovery, and informed the Committee that he had laid his case before the King, and was authorised to say that the disposal of money issued for secret service, by the nature of it, requires the utmost secrecy, and is accountable to his Majesty alone; and therefore his Majesty could not permit him to disclose anything on the subject.' The Committee were completely baffled. Those who distributed the secret service money refused to give any evidence, and it was hardly to be expected that those who received it would criminate themselves by confession. A Bill was brought forward to indemnify the recipients of bribes if they gave evidence against Walpole, but though it passed the Commons, it was rejected by the Lords. Under these circumstances we can hardly lay much stress upon the fact that the discoveries of the Committee were chiefly of the most trivial description. The bestowal of places on the Mayor of Weymouth and on his brother-in-law, in order to secure the nomination of a favourable returning officer at an election, the removal of a few revenue officers who failed to vote for a ministerial candidate, the distribution of some small sums for borough prosecutions and suits, the somewhat suspiciously liberal terms of a contract for the payment of British troops at Jamaica, were all matters which appeared of little moment when they were regarded as the result of a solemn enquiry into ministerial proceedings for ten years. Much more important was the discovery that in this space of time no less than 1,453,400l. had been expended in secret service money, and that of that sum above 50,000l. had been paid to writers in defence of the ministry. It has been shown, indeed, by the apologists for Walpole that the secret service money included the whole pension list, as well as the large sums necessarily expended in obtaining information at foreign Courts, and also that the comparisons instituted between the expenditure of secret service money in the last ten years of Walpole, and that in an equal portion of

2 Coxe's Walpole, i. p. 712.

the reign of Anne, were in several respects fallacious; but there cannot, I think, be much reasonable doubt, though the Committee were unable to obtain evidence on the subject, that much of it was expended in Parliamentary corruption. It is said that supporters of the Government frequently received at the close of the session from 500l. to 1,000l. for their services;2 that Walpole himself boasted that one important division rejecting the demand of the Prince of Wales for an increased allowance cost the Government only 9001.,3 that more than half the members of Parliament were in the receipt of public money in the form of pensions or Government offices. It is certain that the consentient opinion of contemporaries accused the ministers of gross and wholesale corruption, and that they uniformly opposed every enquiry that could vindicate their honour, and every Bill that could tend to purify the Parlia

ment.

The complaints of the Opposition were met by Walpole. in a strain of coarse and cynical banter. Patriots, saints, Spartans, and boys were the terms he continually employed. Something, no doubt, was due to the strong hatred of cant which was a prominent feature of his character, and which sometimes led him, like his great contemporary Swift, into the

See the elaborate chapter in Coxe, on the report of the Committee.

2 Almon's Anecdotes of Chatham, vol. i. p. 137. This was written of the Pelham ministry, but that ministry only continued in a somewhat more moderate form the system of Walpole. Wraxall asserts that all positively Roberts, who was Secretary of the Treasury under Pelham, assured a friend, from whom Wraxall received the story, that he, Roberts, while he remained at the Treasury regularly paid secret stipends varying from 5001. to 800l. to a number of Members at the end of each session. Their names were entered in a book which was kept in the deepest secrecy and which on the death of Pelham was burnt by the King.'-See Wraxall's

Memoirs (1815), ii. 498, 500.

3 Sir R. Walpole and the Queen both told me separately that it [the ministerial triumph] cost the King but 9001-500l. to one man and 4007. to another; and that even these two sums were only advanced to two men who were to have received them at the end of the session had this question never been moved, and who only took this opportunity to solicit prompt payment.'-Lord Hervey's Memoirs, ii. 280.

• Some interesting facts on the fluctuations of the number of placemen in Parliament will be found in Brougham's great speech on the increasing influence of the Crown. June 24, 1822.