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Politics
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"...he shortly found himself arrived at politics, and from politics, it was an easy step to silence." |
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| Electioneering | |||
ELECTIONEERING
(from Robert Southey's "Letters from England,"written
in 1802)
Any thing like election in the plain sense of the word is unknown in England. Members are never chosen for parliament as deputies were for a Cortes, because they are the fittest persons to be deputed. Some seats are private property; --- that is, the right of voting belongs to a few householders, sometimes not more than half-a-dozen, and of course these votes are commanded by the owner of the estate. The fewer they are , the more easily they are managed. Great part of a borough in the west of England was consumed some years ago by fire, and the lord of the manor would not suffer the houses to be rebuilt for this reason. If such an estate be sold, it is publicly advertised as carrying with it the power of returning two members; sometimes that power is veiled under the modest phrase of a valuable appendage to the estate, or the desirable privilege of nominating to seats in a certain assembly. Government hold man of these boroughs, and individuals buy in at others. The price is as well known as the value of the land, or of stock, and it is not uncommon to see a seat in a certain house advertised for in the public newspapers. In this manner are a majority of the members returned. You will see then that the house of commons must necessarily be a manageable body. This is as it should be; the people have all the forms of freedom, and the crown governs them while they believe they govern themselves. Burleigh foresaw this, and said that to govern through a parliament was the securest method of exercising power.
In other places, where the number of voters is something greater, so as to be too many for this kind of quiet and absolute control, the business is more difficult, and sometimes more expensive. The candidate, then instead of paying a settled sum to the lord of the borough, must deal individually, with the constituents, who sell themselves to the highest bidder. Remember that an oath against bribery is required! A common mode of evading the letter of the oath is to lay a wager, “I will bet so much,” says the agent of the candidate, “that you do not vote for us,” “Done,” says the voter freeman, --- goes to the hustings, gives his voice; and returns to receive the money, not as the price of his sufferage, but as the bet which he has won. All this is in direct violation of the law, though both parties use the same means, the losing one never scruples to accuse his successful opponent of bribery, if he thinks he can establish the charge; and thus the mystery of iniquity is brought to light. It is said that at Aylesbury a punch-bowl full of guineas stood upon the table in the committee-room, and the voters were helped out of it. The price of votes varies according to their number. In some places it is as low as forty shillings, in others, at Ilchester for instance, it is thirty pounds. “Thirty pounds,” said the apothecary of the place on his examination, “is the price of an Ilchester voter.” When he was asked how he came to know the sum so accurately, he replied, that he attended the families of the voters professionally, and his bills were paid at election times with the money. A set of such constituents once waited upon the member whom they had chosen, to request that he would vote against the minister. “Damn you!” was his answer: “What! have I not bought you? And do you think I will not sell you?”
It is only in large cities that any trial of public opinion is made, --- for the counties the contest, if any there be, lies between the great families, and a sort of hereditary influence is maintained, which is perhaps unobjectionable. But in large cities public opinion and faction have their full scope. Every resource of violence and of cunning is here brought into play. A great proportion of the inferior voters are necessarily under the absolute control of their employers; but there are always many who are to be influenced by weighty arguments applied to the palm of the hand; and the struggle for these, when the parties happen to be well-balanced, leads to a thousand devices. The moment one party can lay hold on a voter of this description, they endeavour to keep him constantly drunk till the time of the election, and never to lose sight of him. If the others can catch him, and overbid them, they on their part are afraid of a rescue, carry him out of town, and coop him in some barn or out-house, where they stuff him day and night with meat and drink till they bring him up to the place of polling, oftentimes so intoxicated that the fellow must be led between two others, one to hold him up as he gives his voice, while the other shows him a card in the palm of his hand with the name of the candidate written in large letters, lest he should forget for whom he is to vote.
The qualifications for voting differs at different places. At Bristol a freeman’s daughter conveys it by marriage. Women enter into the heat of a party even more eagerly than men, and when the mob is more than usually mischievous, are sure to be at the head of it. In one election for that city, which was violently disputed, it was common for the same woman to marry several men. The mode of divorce was, that as soon as the ceremony was over and the parties came out of church, they went into the church-yard, and shaking hands over a grave, cried, Now “death us do part”: --- away then went the man to vote with his new qualification, and the woman to qualify another husband at another church.
Such tricks are well understood, and practised by all parties: but if an appeal be made against a return as having been thus obtained by illegal means, the cause is tried in the house of commons, and these are perhaps the only subjects which are decided there with strict impartiality. Bribery is punished in him who gives, by the loss of his seat, and he may be prosecuted for heavy fines: he who receives, falls under the penal laws --- the heaviest punishment ought to fall upon the tempter; and as government in England is made a trade, it seems hard that the poor should not get something by it once in seven years, when they are to pay so much for it all the rest of the time.
These abuses are not necessarily inherent in the nature of popular election; they would effectually be preclude by the use of the ballot. The popular party call loudly for reform, but they are divided among themselves as to what reform they would have; and the aristocracy of the country, as they have every thing in their own hands, will never consent to any which would destroy their own influence.
One evil consequence results from this mode of representation which affects the rulers as well as the people. The house of commons has not, and cannot have, its proportion of talents: its members are wholly chosen from among persons of great fortune. The more limited the number out of which they are chosen, the less must be the chance of finding able men: there is therefore a natural unfitness in having a legislature body composed wholly of the rich. it is known both at schools and at universities, that the students of the privileged classes are generally remiss in their studies, and inferior in information for that reason to their contemporaries; --- there is, therefore, less chance of finding a due proportion of knowledge among them. Being rich, and associating wholly with the rich, they have no knowledge of the real state of the great body for whom they are to legislate, and little sympathy for distresses which they have never felt: a legislature composed wholly of the rich is there fore liable to lay the public burthens oppressively upon the inferior ranks.
There are two ways in which men of talents who are not men of fortune find their way into parliament. The minister sometimes picks out a few promising plants from the university, and forces them in his hot-bed. They are chosen so young that they cannot by any possibility have acquired information to fit them for their situations; they are so flattered by the choice that they are puffed up with conceit, and so fettered by it that they must be at the beck of their patron. The other method is by way of the law. But men who make their way up by legal practice, learn in the course of that practice to disregard right and wrong, and to consider themselves entirely as pleaders on the one side. They continue to be pleaders and partisans in the legislature, and never become statesmen.
From these causes it is, that while the English people are held in admiration by all the world, the English government is regarded in so very different a light; and hence it is, that the councils of England have been directed by such a succession of weak ministers, and marked by such a series of political errors. An absolute monarch looks for talents wherever they are to be found, and the French negotiators have always recovered whatever the English fleets have won.