In the boroughs especially, there were immense variations in both the pattern and tone of politics after 1832. The counties were more homogeneous, except perhaps in precociously industrialised Middlesex, Lancashire and the West Riding. Before 1868, one can hardly conceive of public opinion in most county constituencies. Electors tended to vote in geographical units, or deference communities, rather than according to their degrees of wealth or status, or the nature of their employment. In counties like Northampton, Huntingdon and Cambridge, the eighteenth-century system of 'influence' was preserved, like a fly in amber, until well into Victorian times. Urban Toryism was always a force to be reckoned with. Millowners, for example, could be divided evenly between the parties. So could their workers. In any case, industrial society, at least the simplified model of it as a monolithic contest between masters and men, made a genuine impact on the political system only after 1868.