lest your Lordship should lay more stress upon some circumstances than the whole facts might bear. I return your Lordship many thanks for the communication of what had passed in Wiltshire. Your Lordship may say that I am not easily satisfied; for I confess, I rather think—that Wiltshire is too cold, and that I should at the same time express an opinion that Yorkshire has been too precipitate. I think a medium between both would have been more likely to have produced general concurrence."[1]
"I am very sorry," Shelburne wrote in a contrary strain to Lord Mahon, "that the Buckinghamshire Committee has been appointed to meet in London, as they cannot be assisted by the country members without manifest inconvenience. I cannot, with any propriety, ask the gentlemen in this part to go out of the county. As to the business which it meets upon, I can only repeat to your Lordship, that I cannot discover in the plan of the Yorkshire Association a single exceptionable principle. General union is acknowledged to be essential to our success. To this end, there must be a reasonable lead somewhere. Where can it remain so safely or so honourably as with the Meeting of the County of York, which took its rise from a sense of oppression, who have uniformly proceeded hitherto with a view to measures and not to men, and regarding whom there does not exist the smallest well-founded suspicion of the interference of party? Next as to the points which are made the objects of association. It is acknowledged that the approaching Election has a very great influence on the divisions now taking place in the House of Commons in favour of Reform and redress of grievances. The county members have very generally voted on the public side; except a few who are likely to lose their seats by not doing so. What, then, is so natural or so reasonable, as to follow where these principles lead, and desire that Parliament shall be shortened, and an effectual addition or substitution of county members made to the present House of Com-
- ↑ Rockingham to Shelburne, April 2nd, 1780.
