Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 1.djvu/330

 CURRAN. S19 revehue system, with the business of elections, which en- abled them, in all emergencies, to march a whole army of excisemen, tax-gatherers, distillers, brewers, and publicans, into the field; all of whom had either votes in corpo- rations, or were forty-shilling freeholders in three or four counties; and, if on any occasion, the success of the court candidate was doubtful, a batch of those forty-shilling voters were manufactured for the occasion, and the same identical acre was sometimes transferred in succession from one to twenty tenants, with an increasing profit-rent of forty-shillings a year to each. On one particular oc- casion, when popular interest ran high on the approach of a general election, Mr. Beresford was obliged to bri- gade the custom-house officers from the metropolis, and every out-port in the kingdom, all of whom being pre- viously organised as quorum voters for several counties, were actually marched by squads, and travelled through every district within the circuit of their respective can- tonments, to turn the scale at every election they could reach against the popular candidate. On the meeting of the new parliament Mr. Curran laid hold of this circumstance, which he handled with infinite humour:-"What, Mr. Speaker, said he, "must be the alarm and consternation of the whole country, when they saw these hordes of custom-house Tartars traversing every district, devouring like locusts the provisions, and over- whelming the franchises of the people ? These fiscal comedians travelled in carts and waggons from town to town, county to county, and election to election, to fill this house, not with the representatives of the people, but of the great Cham who commands them. Methinks I see a whole caravan of those strolling constituents, trund- ling in their vehicles towards a country town, where some gaping simpleton, in wondernent at their appearance, asks the driver of the first vehicle: Where, my good fellow, are you going with those raggamuftins ? I suppose they are convicts on their way to the kid-ship for trans- portation to Botany Bay Oh! no,' answers the driver,