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 upon the minds of the constituency, headed the poll from the first, continued to head it to the last, and was returned by a majority of seventy-eight, having recorded 488 votes, whilst the Peel candidate, with all his weight of local influence, could command no more than 410. The enemies of free trade and reform endeavoured to lessen the value of the victory by saying that had the Marquis of Londonderry exerted his power the result would have been different; that is, if a peer had illegally interfered in the election, the monopolist candidate might have been elected. With equal propriety they might have attributed the defeat to the fear of using their usual auxiliary, the corruption of the voters. The talk was that of the wrestler, who would say: "You could not have thrown me if I had chosen to stab you with my knife." My comment on this victory at the time was: "Greater than the accession to the House of Commons of an additional advocate of freedom of trade, freedom of conscience, freedom of representation, and universal peace, able, vigorous, and eloquent though he be, must be the results of John Bright's election. It has proved that a principle is much more influential than a name. He has achieved a victory which could not have been attained by any one even of the very élite of the whig aristocracy. Lord John Russell, Lord Morpeth, Lord Howick, would have failed where the Rochdale cotton-spinner has been successful. They would have found that the party. name was no longer one to conjure with. The electors who rallied round Mr. Bright, listening with breathless attention to his exposition of the real causes of national distress, despising every allurement and every threat, and struggling for his success as if their very existence were involved in the contest, would have remained unmoved as the stones in the market-place to speeches upon the comparative merits of whig and tory administrations. The lesson will not be thrown away. The Walsall election, by showing how powerless were the aristocratic influences of