Kitabı oku: «Crying for the Light: or, Fifty Years Ago. Volume 2 of 3», sayfa 5
CHAPTER XVI.
ELECTIONEERING AGAIN
Elections fifty years ago, if partly a farce, were at any rate picturesque. For a while, everyone seemed insane – the publican, who reaped a golden harvest; the local drapers, who sold the ribbons which formed the colours of the respective parties; the lively stable-keeper; the crowd of idle loafers who were hired to do little more than cheer one candidate and hoot down the other. The town rolled in wealth, which poured in on all sides, and a good deal of it made its way to the electors’ wives and children. The out-voter from the most distant quarter was hunted up and sent down in coaches chartered for the purpose and paid for by the happy candidate or his friends, and every night there was a row and a fight, and a good deal of bad language. All the while there was a perpetual canvass, and the elector was in danger of bursting, as a feeling of his temporary importance grew and swelled within him.
Some refused to vote, as they flattered themselves, vainly, that they should thus offend neither party. The clergy were specially active; nor were their dissenting brethren – with the exception of the Methodists, at that time very cautious in political matters – much behind.
The nomination day was one of great display, and the day of polling was one of still greater, as hourly there was published a state of the poll, and the rival candidates drove from one polling-place to another to cheer the hearts of their supporters, who were many of them so drunk as scarcely to know for whom they were going to vote.
It was often dangerous work taking up the men to the poll through a crowd of heated roughs, who were placed round the booth to increase the difficulties of the intending electors. Meanwhile, all the town was holiday-making and enjoying the sport. Ladies looked down from the first-floors of every house in the neighbourhood to encourage one party and to cheer on its supporters and friends. Voters came in masses, headed by bands playing and with colours flying. Surely there was excitement enough, and folly enough, displayed on the occasion.
Sloville was agitated from top to bottom. Yet some people are never satisfied. They regretted that the harvest was so brief; that it was all over in a day, and did not last, as it did in the good old times, a fortnight; that there was not so much of locking up doubtful voters as of old, and keeping them stowed away drunk till the election was over.
‘There ain’t a voter in the town but what I can account for,’ said Sir Watkin’s agent to his principal. ‘I have got all their names down in black and white. By-the-bye, Sir Watkin, can you let me have another cheque?’
‘I am sorry to hear that. How much do you want?’
‘Another thousand will do it.’
‘Why, you have had one thousand already.’
‘Never mind,’ said the election agent. ‘What’s the good of having money if you don’t spend it. You’ll be sure to get it all back again. Nobody is so popular as a man who spends his money freely.’
‘That may be; but money is hard to get.’
‘Oh, leave that to me,’ said the agent.
‘Well, I suppose I must. But,’ added the Baronet, ‘at any rate you might send up to London and see what the Reform Club will do.’
‘Of course, we must apply to them. A stranger came down from town last night. He has not shown his face, but I’ve pumped the boots at the “Old Swan,” and I find that he is from the Carlton, and has brought a trunk full of sovereigns with him. The voters must have got an inkling of it, and are in ecstasies, and are now keeping off till the last moment. I believe I spotted the fellow in the disguise of an old woman working in the slums this morning’. I could not see his face because he put up his handkerchief; but I do believe it was no other than Shrouder.’
‘Oh, no: it can’t be him. I am told he is at Birmingham.’
‘You may depend upon it, Sir Watkin, he is here, and we shall have the devil to pay.’
‘Devil take him,’ said the Baronet angrily.
‘I must say that Shrouder is a bit of a scamp, and that he is the man for a dirty job. But I am quite a match for him,’ said the agent proudly. ‘At any rate, I am up to his little games. I am really quite delighted to have him as an opponent, and think it complimentary to the borough that he is come here to work it. The Carlton would not have sent him here had they not felt that they were in a desperate state indeed. Ah,’ continued he excitedly, ‘there is nothing like a well-contested election. I am of the opinion of a noble duke. “After all,” said he, “what greater enjoyment can there be in life than to stand a contested election for Yorkshire, and to win it by one?”’
‘Yes; but I ain’t a duke, and have not got a duke’s wealth.’
‘Never mind,’ said the agent; ‘elections don’t happen every day, and when it is over you can economize.’
‘For the first time in my life. That will be hard work.’
In the meanwhile the Baronet continued his canvass, and his carriage with the family arms, and the servants in the family liveries, were incessantly to be seen. He appealed to the Churchmen as one of themselves, to the Dissenters as their friend and ally in the cause of religious freedom. As a landowner he reminded the farmers that they were all in the same boat, and that legislation that was beneficial to the landlord was equally to the advantage of the tenant and the farm-labourer as well. No one was such an ardent admirer of the manufacturing system which had made us a nation of shopkeepers, and he won the hearts of the manufacturers as he told them that to him they seemed as the very pillars of the State. Somehow or other he seemed in a fair way of success, and when he got into a mess his agent was there to pull him out. Thus, one day he happened to call on a humble shopkeeper, who regarded him with natural distrust.
‘Oh, Sir Watkin,’ said he, ‘I am sure I respect you and your family very much; but before I promise you my vote I’d like to hear what are your principles.’
Sir Watkin was about to give the usual and evasive reply, when his agent pulled him back and opened a broadside:
‘His principles. You ask a gentleman like Sir Watkin his principles; go along with you! Things have come to a pretty pass when a gentleman like Sir Watkin must stop in the road to tell you his principles. Come along, Sir Watkin, don’t be losing precious time here.’ And the small shopkeeper felt that he had done wrong, and promised him his vote accordingly.
‘That was a clever trick of yours,’ said Sir Watkin, laughing; ‘but it would not do a second time.’
‘I don’t know, Sir Watkin; it is well to ride the high horse now and then.’
In another case the Baronet did not get off quite so well. Said an operative at one of his meetings:
‘Why are the mothers and sisters of peers, who have done nothing for the public, to be maintained in luxury and at the public expense, while we are obliged to support our poor relatives from our hard-earned wages or see them sent to the workhouse?’
Happily the Baronet’s supporters made such a noise that the reply was unheard.
But there was a stronger influence at work.
‘What is the chief recommendation of Sir Watkin?’ asked one of Mr. Wentworth’s supporters of a friend of the Baronet’s.
‘Money, to be sure. He’s got it here,’ said the Baronet’s supporter, significantly slapping his pocket.
But the Conservative candidate had money as well. The question was, which had the longest purse.
‘And, then, look at the requisition presented to him,’ continued the Baronet’s friend.
‘Got up by his agent, as a matter of course, who was well paid for his work.’
‘Then look at his committee.’
‘All men who are his tradespeople, or tenants and dependents, or flunkies who want to be invited to the Hall. There has been no independent action in the matter.’
‘You are very green if you expect that in Sloville,’ continued the Baronet’s supporter. ‘If you ask nine men out of ten in the borough who they will vote for, the answer will be, “For them as I gets the most by.”’
It was too true. The Sloville people were as selfish as their representatives. They were like the voters of St. Albans, who, when the traffic on the great North Road was ruined by the railway, lamented that they had nothing to sell but their votes; or like the voters of Stafford, who requested Sheridan to vote against reform, as it was by the sale of votes that they chiefly got their money. They in this resembled the illustrious Samuel Johnson, who, upon his friend Thrale demurring to the expense of a contested election for Southwark, remarked: ‘The expense, if it were more, I should wish him to despise. Money is made for such purposes as this.’
It was an Irish M.P. who, when reproached with selling his country, thanked God that he had got a Government to sell. There were many of the Sloville electors who were of the Irishman’s way of thinking.
‘I suppose there is little chance for me,’ said Wentworth, as he walked home with the Unitarian minister – who had a large chapel, generally empty, but which had been crowded to suffocation to hear him utter his political programme. Wentworth, as the papers say, had received quite an ovation. He had come amongst them as a stranger; he had made them all friends; he was an effective speaker, and his audience were of his side in politics. Unfortunately, it consisted largely of excitable young people who had no votes. They had been told to do their duty: to support neither a half-hearted Liberal nor a thorough-going old Tory, but to rally round the gentleman from London. The Unitarian brother heartily endorsed that appeal. He had known Wentworth when he came to preach as a sapling from college. He had sympathized a good deal with him in his view. He had the Christian charity not to judge too harshly of a man who, it seemed to him, had in a sense gone wrong, but who was a man and a brother still.
‘My dear fellow,’ said he to his guest, as they were seated in his sanctum, ornamented with portraits and darkened with the quartos of the old divines, ‘I fear in politics, as in religion, people do much as they please, lecture them as you will. To listen is one thing, to practise what you hear is another. You are for the separation of Church and State, and I support you; but the respected minister who preaches in your old chapel will preach about Christ’s kingdom being not of this world, and then will go and vote for the Whig Baronet because he belongs to such a respectable family, and all the respectable Dissenters in the town will do the same, and when Christmas comes will receive their reward. Their deacons are very good men, but they will never vote to offend their rich customers. I could get a thousand people to come and hear you, to applaud all your hits, to see all your arguments, to endorse all your opinions, but I could not get ten of them to vote for you – that’s quite another thing. It is all very well to applaud Radical sentiments, so long as business is not interfered with.’
‘But the poorer voters – there are a good many of them in the borough, are there not?’
‘Well, they will do as their betters, and you can’t wonder at it. The Tories and the Liberals give away coal and beef and blankets at Christmas. There are lots of Radicals in the town, but they will not vote for a Radical, however much they may cheer a Radical speech. Their wives wouldn’t let them.’
‘I fear Sloville is in a bad way,’ said Wentworth.
‘Well, it is a fair sample of an English borough. I often grieve over it, nevertheless.’
‘Why not make it better?’
‘Ay, that’s the question. I can see no other road to improvement but to go on talking. Liberal ideas spread and light does come, however slowly. Sometimes I almost feel inclined to ask for a drastic reform.’
‘What is that?’
‘To get the borough disfranchised. It would be very easy to get up a petition for bribery and corruption; it would be easier still to prove it.’
‘And then?’
‘The result would be that I should lose my congregation, and be the most unpopular man in the town.’
‘Why not “dare to be a Daniel”?’
‘Because I am poor and have a large family to keep; because I love peace and quietness; because I am a little older than you, know a little more of country life, and feel inclined to make the best of it what little time I have to live. If we are bound to run amuck at all we disapprove of, life, I fear, would be a burden too heavy to be borne. I may be slow, but, at any rate, I am sure.’
‘So you are, old fellow. You were talking just the same way when I came here to preach – it seems to me ages ago – and a good deal has happened since then.’
‘Just what I was going to say,’ said the clerical brother. ‘Politically we have made great progress. We are on the eve of extension of the franchise and vote by ballot, and whoever we return at Sloville – they are safe. I could have got up a petition against bribery and corruption in the place. I ought, perhaps, you say, to have done so. Well, I should have had to spend hundreds of pounds, which I have not got; and if I had succeeded and got the borough disfranchised, I should never have been able to show my face in the town again.’
‘But you would have had another call,’ said Wentworth, with a touch of sarcasm.
‘Not at my time of life. But that is a digression. You London newspaper men may write about bribery and corruption, and you can do good in that way, more even than if you get into Parliament.’
‘I am of the same opinion,’ said Wentworth; ‘but, tell me, is the borough so very bad?’
‘That it is. I can point you to no end of people who take money and are not ashamed. There are gangs of them who meet in public-houses, with whom each party negotiates, and who turn the scale. To-day they are Liberal, to-morrow they will be Conservative. The men are notorious, but they are useful to both parties. The only remedy for that is extension of the suffrage so as to include all householders, and to make bribery impossible by the increase of the number to be bribed.’
‘I would go a step further,’ said Wentworth. ‘In our great cities few of our working classes have that qualification. This raises a demand for a lodger franchise – that is, a fancy franchise – that will give a great opening for ingenuity and fraud, and will only work well for the lawyers, to whom such a state of things will bring plenty of business. No, we must fall back on manhood suffrage. It is the only real and direct qualification. Give the working man a vote, let him feel that he is part and parcel of the community, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh – not a pariah politically, but a brother man – and he will use his vote for his own advantage, and for that of the rest of the community. ‘But, now I think of it, there is a better plan.’
‘What is that?’ said the parson.
‘A money qualification. I was in Jersey last summer, and I found there were a large number of men who voluntarily paid a certain tax in order that they might get a vote. After all, what is Government but a limited liability company for the governing of the nation? In all limited liabilities every man has a vote, but the man who has a larger share than the others has more votes. I would give the vote to every man who cared enough about it to pay for it, and I think that a revenue might be thus raised for the relief of taxation.’
‘Your scheme is excellent, but it will never take.’
‘I fear so, and that is why I fall back on manhood suffrage.’
‘Yes, I quite believe that, but he must have the ballot.’
‘I fear so, though with the ballot we shall still have a good deal of intimidation and bullying. The rich employer, unless he be more Liberal than many of them, will try still to carry his friend or himself, as the case may be. It seems very degrading, however, for a man to vote by ballot, as if he were ashamed of his opinions. I always think of what the great American statesman said when he was in England on that subject.’
‘And what was that? I never heard of it.’
‘When asked at a dinner-party in London whether the ballot prevailed in his State of Virginia, he replied:
‘“I can scarcely believe in all Virginia we have such a fool as to mention even the vote by ballot, and I do not hesitate to say that the adoption of the ballot would make a nation a set of scoundrels if it did not find them so.”’
‘Rather hard, that, on the ballot, seeing that we shall have it very shortly.’
‘Yes, the demand is a popular one with the Liberals, and they will carry it. There is one measure I should like to see, but I fear there is no chance of its coming yet.’
‘What is that?’
‘Annual Parliaments.’
‘Oh,’ exclaimed the parson, ‘that will never do! As it is, the amount of mischief an election does in a borough like ours in the way of creating drunkenness, and bad feeling, and lying, and swearing, is incalculable.’
‘Yes, but if we had an election once a year it would be quite different. In the first place, an election would be a tamer and much more commonplace an affair than it is now. A man would not care to spend much money on elections if his seat was only good for a year, and all that time he would be on his good behaviour – attending in his place, helping on needful reforms.’
‘Why not triennial Parliaments?’
‘Why, then things would be no better than they are now. There would be the same excitement and bitterness. The new M.P. would be remiss in his attendance the first or second year, while in the last session his only aim would be to gain the goodwill of the electors of his district. Again,’ added Mr. Wentworth, ‘as a rule the people are indifferent to politics. You only move them from their torpor at the time of a General Election. When that is over they become indifferent and apathetic again. With an election once a year you would have the people anxiously discussing political questions. It would be an education for them. It would ensure all the advantages without the disadvantages of the present system.’
‘Upon my word,’ said the parson, ‘there is a good deal in what you say, though I never thought of it before. An election would then be a very commonplace affair.’
‘And then,’ said Wentworth, ‘under such an arrangement the people would be better educated. As it is, it is hard work to get them to the poll at all. Practically, England never gives a verdict – never expresses her political opinions. And I mean by England, Scotland, where the people are better educated than they are here, and Wales, where the people are far more religious. We have a Tory or a Liberal Government in office in consequence of the support of the Irish M.P.’s returned by illiterate voters under the rule of the Roman Catholic priest – who hates England, because it is a prosperous and Protestant nation. The Irish “praste,” as his people call him, creates all the bad blood that has done so much mischief in Ireland. If the Tories are in power, they can only maintain their position by pandering to the Irish members, and if the Liberals are in power they have to do just the same. This difficulty arises from the fact that, whether as regards property or population, Ireland is over-represented. If Sir Robert Peel had had his way, and been able to pension the Irish priests, we should have had no such wretched state of affairs. The “praste” would have taken jolly good care that the Irish M.P. was loyal to the Government that granted him an independent income.’
‘But Peel could not have done so had he wished. You forget the English Evangelicals, with their hatred of Popery in any shape, and the Scotch Presbyterians, and the English Dissenters, who object on principle to any State support of religion.’
‘Alas! I know it too well,’ replied Wentworth; ‘yet had Peel or Pitt had their way, we should have had no Irish difficulty. As it is, Ireland has her revenge. It is she who decides the fate of parties, the rise and fall of ministries, the policy of our great empire, with its conflicting interests in every corner of the globe. Oh that the Green Isle were a thousand miles away! The difficulty would be removed if Ireland had only her fair share of representation, but that is an impossible reform.’
A curious character was that old parson; professedly a Presbyterian, and calling himself such, he and his people were Unitarians. He lived on an endowment left by Lady Hewlett, whose charities were such a bitter bone of contention between the Unitarians and the orthodox Dissenters; but Parliament interfered, and a Bill was carried to render all further litigation impossible. He preached in a grand old red-brick chapel in the busiest part of the town. He had an old-fashioned pulpit with an old-fashioned sounding-board above, and in front of him were great square pews lined with green baize; while behind, in the little red-brick vestry, there were quaint portraits of old divines, of whom no one knew anything. Now, in his meeting-house, with its memorial tablets of departed workers, the worshippers were few and far between. Once there had been life there, but that was a long time ago; and now his hearers were chiefly old, gray-headed men and women, whose fathers and mothers had taken them there in early childhood, and whose talk, when they did talk, which was but rarely, was of Drs. Price and Priestley, and Mr. Belsham, and of Mrs. Barbauld and other ornaments of their expiring creed. It was hard work to preach to such; nevertheless the little parson was a happy man, as he thought of the God of love, of whom once a week he loved to speak. No one interfered with him. To no religious gathering in the town was he ever invited. Churchmen and Dissenters alike gave him the cold shoulder. But he upheld the standard of a Church with no creeds; was content to receive such as could not subscribe to other dogmas, and to believe in a Christian charity which was to cover a multitude of sins. He damned nobody, he frightened nobody, he was nobody’s enemy. His was a voice crying in the wilderness. Once a year he went to the assembly of his denomination in Essex Street Chapel, London, and heard how the cause with which he was connected was advancing, and the day-dawn of a national Christianity was at hand, and then he came back to Sloville to vegetate for another year, while sensational preachers filled the other chapels.
He had his garden, and that was a constant source of happiness, and as he was a vegetarian and his garden supplied all his needs, it mattered little that his salary was a scanty pittance, such as a respectable working mechanic would turn up his nose at. His wife was a lady who did not hesitate to do all the household work herself. Modern life in its rush and roar has left such people far behind. But one loves to remember them, and their peaceful ways, their cheerful solitude, their plain living and high thinking.
