[131a-012]

1818 March 22 +

Parl Reform. Answer to Antiballotists

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But if I do not greatly deceive myself, the nature of the case furnishes sufficient means for preventing /precluding/ men to any considerable extent from engaging in the practising or the attempting to practise this tyranny: and only in proportion as the tyranny has place, can there be any room for that insincerity, which has for it sole object the escaping from the tyrant gripe.

Unless the abovementioned appellatives Election-tyranny and Election-tyrant will be manifestly, and according to general opinion, altogether misapplied, then so it is, that by the very act of attaching to them these appellatives by the authority of the law, a preventative remedy of no small force will by so simple an expedient have been applied.

Even without the assistance of any such impressive instrument – even under that open mode which they propose – the honour attached to the possession of a seat would {say the Antiballotists themselves} “ be effectually destroyed by any known exercise of sinister influence”: by sinister influence meaning here, with or without the addition of bribery, what is here denominated Election tyranny. But if without any such stigma as is here proposed, such would probably be the result, how much more probably, not to say certainly, would not this same result be produced by the additional force of this same stigma? I mean that appellative, in the application of which, the Antiballotists, unless in this particular they contradict themselves, can not but expect the people at large to join?