] was a little put out with Mary Crawford's blithe suggestions that he just 'go into Parliament.'

It could have been done. One aspect of the way money influenced the composition of the Commons was that there were members who represented distinct economic "interests" by buying their way in. There was an East India interest of "nabobs" who had made their pile in India, a manufacturing interest of men like the Peels, father and son, a banking interest, and a West India interest of sugar plantation owners and slave traders. Banastare Tarleton, as Linden points out, represented Liverpool, a popular constituency that supported the West India interest because it was one of the two economic centers of the slave trade.

As an absentee plantation owner, Sir Thomas Bertram belongs to the West India interest. Apparently so does his new son-in-law Rushworth. In Ch. 4, point Sir Thomas is described as favoring the match as "a connexion of exactly the right sort -- in the same county and the same interest . . . " Between the Bertram and Rushworth money, a seat could have been procured for Edumund easily enough had he been inclined to represent the family business.

The sticking point is that Edmund's principles might well have kept him from being a faithful representative of the West India interest. Many people see him as an Evangelical by temperment, if not explictly so, and I agree. I can't see him speaking or even voting dutifully for the slave trade, slavery, and high tariffs on foreign sugar on his father's instructions.