The nature and extent of the change which the discovery of the Assassination Plot had produced in the temper of the House of Commons and of the nation is strikingly illustrated by the history of a bill entitled a Bill for the further Regulation of Elections of Members of Parliament.  The moneyed interest was almost entirely Whig, and was therefore an object of dislike to the Tories.  The rapidly growing power of that interest was generally regarded with jealousy by landowners whether they were Whigs or Tories.  It was something new and monstrous to see a trader from Lombard Street, who had no tie to the soil of our island, and whose wealth was entirely personal and movable, post down to Devonshire or Sussex with a portmanteau full of guineas, offer himself as candidate for a borough in opposition to a neighbouring gentleman whose ancestors had been regularly returned ever since the Wars of the Roses, and come in at the head of the poll.  Yet even this was not the worst.  More than one seat in Parliament, it was said, had been bought and sold over a dish of coffee at Garraway’s.  The purchaser had not been required even to go through the form of showing himself to the electors.  Without leaving his counting house in Cheapside, he had been chosen to represent a place which he had never seen.  Such things were intolerable.  No man, it was said, ought to sit in the English legislature who was not master of some hundreds of acres of English ground.689 A bill was accordingly brought in which provided that every member of the House of Commons must have a certain estate in land.  For a knight of a shire the qualification was fixed at five hundred a year; for a burgess at two hundred a year.  Early in February this bill was read a second time and referred to a Select Committee.  A motion was made that the Committee should be instructed to add a clause enacting that all elections should be by ballot.  Whether this motion proceeded from a Whig or a Tory, by what arguments it was supported and on what grounds it was opposed, we have now no means of discovering.  We know only that it was rejected without a division.

Before the bill came back from the Committee, some of the most respectable constituent bodies in the kingdom had raised their voices against the new restriction to which it was proposed to subject them.  There had in general been little sympathy between the commercial towns and the Universities.  For the commercial towns were the chief seats of Whiggism and Non conformity; and the Universities were zealous for the Crown and the Church.  Now, however, Oxford and Cambridge made common cause with London and Bristol.  It was hard, said the Academics, that a grave and learned man, sent by a large body of grave and learned men to the Great Council of the nation, should be thought less fit to sit in that Council than a boozing clown who had scarcely literature enough to entitle him to the benefit of clergy.  It was hard, said the traders, that a merchant prince, who had been the first