[copyist’s hand]

nd [wm 1818]

To Erskine

3.

This is what Honourable Gentlemen are ready enough to tell you: and amongst the readiest, far more so, than those whose special care it is, that, in the case of those seats, the property of which, composing as in their language it does the most honourable part of their property, is in the same language sacred and inviolable, all freedom shall be effectually excluded as possible: and whose negative, accompanied with their avowed or unavowed observance is ready for the only mode of voting in which freedom is possible.

In the United States, notwithstanding the improvements there made on an institution they have not yet brought Election business to that state of perfection which the theory insists upon: they have not yet devised a mode of Election which shall end without having been begun. In the mean time, for giving beginnings to Elections, they have devised an Instrument called a Caucus. To keep clear of definitions, this Caucus is neither more nor less than a Rump. M r Cobbet saw the thing; and in conjunction with it, the name. For the particular purpose to which he saw an advantage in applying it, there remained nothing for him to do but to substitute to that American an English name. Copying from M r Cobbet the new name and the application, M r Perry has put the Whig stamp upon it; and now it forms part of the language.

Those to whom in any instance the result of the consultation carried on in a Caucus is favourable, will now say – though not exactly perhaps in Your Lordship’s language, in such elegant language as it may be in their power to find – that it is an instrument for enabling “enlightened men who can see clearly the interests of their Country, to use their influence with persons less qualified to investigate those subjects”: those to whom it is unfavourable will say with M r Cobbet and M r Perry that it is an instrument composed of “that most miserable junto which so long disgraced the City” (naming it or the other Election district whatever it may be) “by a fraudulently acquired and extremely absurd ascendancy.”

Accuse me not, My Lord, of any such design as that of injuring the harmony between your Lordship and so intimate a friend. Nothing can be more perfect than the concord. By the “enlightened men” Your Lordship meant the enlightened men who formed M r Lamb’s Committee: by “the miserable junto”, M r Perry meant their adversaries – M r Hobhouse’s Rump.

But,