for L3000, adding a promise to build 600 tons of shipping in the town.  A second (a Mr. Rumbold) was willing to give every freeman L35; and his offer was accepted by the committee, who, however, cautioned him that no freeman was entitled to the money who was not a member of the Christian Club.  He willingly agreed to this limitation of his expenditure, and both he and the club regarded the matter as settled.  He paid every freeman who belonged to the club his stipulated bribe, and on the polling day they tendered eighty-seven votes in his favor, the entire constituency being something under one hundred and fifty.  The general, finding his L3000 declined, did not go to the poll; but a Mr. Purling and Mr. James did, the latter polling only four votes, the former only thirty-seven.  What bribe Mr. Purling had given was never revealed; but by some means or other he had contrived to render himself the most acceptable of all the candidates to Mr. Roberts, the returning officer.  Roberts had himself been a member of the Christian Club, but had quarrelled with it, and on the day of the election, as Rumbold’s voters came up, he administered to each of them the oath against bribery.  They took it without scruple; but he took it on himself to pronounce seventy-six of them disqualified, and to refuse their votes; and, having thus reduced Mr. Rumbold’s voters to eleven, he returned Mr. Purling as duly elected.

Mr. Rumbold, not unnaturally, petitioned against such a return; when Mr. Roberts admitted the facts alleged against him, but pleaded that he had acted under the advice of counsel, who had assured him that it was within his own discretion to admit or to refuse any votes that might be tendered, and that he might lawfully refuse any “which in his own mind he thought illegal.”  It is a striking proof of the laxity which prevailed on every quarter in electioneering practices, that the House, to a great extent, admitted his justification or excuse as valid.  By a strange stretch of lenity, they gave him credit for an honest intention, and contented themselves with ordering him to be reprimanded by the Speaker.  But the case of the bribed freemen and of the borough generally was too gross to be screened by any party.  All agreed that the borough must be regarded as incurably corrupt, and deserving of heavy punishment.  The Attorney-general was ordered to prosecute the five members of the managing committee for “an illegal and corrupt conspiracy;” and a bill was brought in to disfranchise and declare forever incapable of voting at any election eighty-one freemen who had been proved to have received bribes, and to punish the borough itself, by extending the right of voting at future elections to all the freeholders in the rape of Bramber, the district of Sussex in which New Shoreham lies, an arrangement which reduced the borough itself to comparative insignificance.  Mr. Fox opposed the bill, on the ground that the offence committed could be sufficiently punished by the ordinary courts of law.  But he stood alone in his resistance; the bill was passed, and a salutary precedent was established; the penalty inflicted on New Shoreham being for many years regarded as the most proper punishment for all boroughs in which similar practices were proved to prevail.