_Middlesex Election.—Nottingham Election.—Seats in Parliament how
obtained.—Modes of Bribery.—Aylesbury.—Ilchester.—Contested
Elections.—Marriages at Bristol.—Want of Talent in the English
Government accounted for._
During my travels I have missed the sight of a popular election. That
for Middlesex has been carried on with uncommon asperity; it is the only
instance wherein the ministry have exerted their influence; for,
contrary to the custom of all their predecessors, they have fairly
trusted themselves to the opinion of the people. Here, however, they
have taken a part,—and here they have been beaten, because they stood
upon the very worst ground which they could possibly have chosen.
The English have a law called the _habeas corpus_, which they regard,
with good reason, as the main pillar of their freedom. By this law it is
the right of every person who is arrested upon a criminal charge, to be
tried at the first sessions after his arrest; so that, while this law
continues in force, no person can be wrongfully detained in prison, but
his guilt or innocence must be fairly proved. It was thought expedient
to suspend this statute during the late revolutionary ferment. The place
chosen for the suspected persons was a prison in the immediate suburb of
the metropolis; being one of the new buildings upon the fashionable
plan. Complaints were made by the prisoners of cruel usage, and Sir
Francis Burdett, a young man who has warmly espoused the popular party,
brought the business forward in parliament. A wise minister would have
listened to the complaint, examined into it, and redressed the
grievance, even ostentatiously; for the object of government being to
secure these men, and it being also notorious that there was no legal
proof of guilt against them, as if there had they would have been
brought to trial, all rigour not absolutely necessary for the purposes
of confinement, appeared like a determination to punish them in every
way they could, and consequently as an act of arbitrary and cruel power.
But pride and obstinacy are the predominant parts of Mr Pitt's
character; right or wrong he never yields; and he now chose to show his
power by protecting the gaoler in defiance of public opinion. Repeated
complaints were made; and it was affirmed upon oath that a Colonel
Despard, one of these prisoners, had been confined there in a cell
without windows, and without fire, till his feet were ulcered with the
frost. At length a deputation was named to inspect the prison:—it
consisted chiefly of persons disposed to see every thing with favourable
eyes; and, as you may well suppose, the prison was prepared for their
visitation. When they came into the cell where a sailor was confined who
had been concerned in the great mutiny, one of the deputies noticed a
bird which hopped about him, and said how tame it was. "Aye, sir," said
the man, "this place will tame any thing!" and though a hardy English
sailor, he burst into tears. The report was in favour of the prison.
Complaints, however, were still continued. The place acquired the name
of the Bastille; and merely upon the ground of having raised his voice
in parliament against this new species of punishment, Sir Francis
Burdett has become the most popular man in England. He offered himself
as candidate for Middlesex. The ministry acted unwisely in opposing him;
and still more unwisely in supporting against him a man who had no other
possible claim to their support, than that he was implicated in the
charges against the management of the prison, because he was one of the
magistrates whose duty it was to inspect it, and he had given it his
full approbation. By this impolicy they made the question of the
Middlesex election to be this,—whether this system of imprisonment was
approved of by the people or not; and the answer has been most
undeniably given against them.
Electioneering, as they call it, is a game at which every kind of deceit
seems to be considered lawful. On these occasions, men, who at other
times regard it as a duty to speak truth, and think their honour
implicated in their word, scruple not at asserting the grossest and most
impudent falsehoods, if thereby they can obtain a momentary advantage
over the hostile party. A striking instance of this has occurred with
respect to the election for Nottingham, a considerable town in the
middle of England, where the contest has been violent, because
party-spirit has always been carried to a high degree there. Some years
ago the mob ducked those who were most obnoxious to them, and killed
some of them in the operation. This was not forgotten. The opposite
party had the ascendancy now, and those who were noted as having been
active in this outrageous cruelty were severely handled. In such cases
of summary justice the innocent are liable to suffer with the guilty,
and the rabble, when they had got the power, abused it. Whoever voted
for the obnoxious candidate had the skirts of his coat cut off, and it
was well if he escaped without further injury. It might have been
thought that the plain statement of these facts would have sufficed to
show that the election was not a fair one; but instead of being
satisfied with a plain tale, a gentleman comes forward as the advocate
of the unsuccessful party, accuses all the other party of the most
violent jacobinism, and asserts that at the triumph of the winning
candidate the tree of liberty was carried before him, and that a naked
woman walked in the procession as the Goddess of Reason. The history of
the tree is, that as the candidate's name happened to be Birch, a birch
bough was borne in his honour: the other falsehood is so apparent that
no person supposes this writer can possibly believe it himself. It is a
pious fraud to answer a party purpose, and on such occasions no frauds,
pious or impious, are scrupled.
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 to 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
many of these boroughs, and individuals buy in at others. The price is
as well known as the value of 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;[13] 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 suffrage, but
as the bet which he has won. As all this is in direct violation of 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. "D—mn 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
in 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 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 their prize out of town, and coop him in
some barn or outhouse, 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 qualification for voting differs at different places. At Bristol a
freeman's daughter conveys it by marriage. Women enter into the heat of
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[14] 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 law—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 precluded 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
legislative 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 therefore 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.
Long peace is not more unfavourable to the skill of an army, than long
security to the wisdom of a government. In times of internal commotion,
all stirring spirits come forward; the whole intellect of a nation is
called forth; good men sacrifice the comforts of a wise privacy to serve
their country; bad men press on to advance themselves; the good fall a
sacrifice, and the government is resigned into the hands of able
villains. When, on the contrary, every thing has long been safe, as is
the case in England, politics become an established trade; to which a
certain cast are regularly born and bred. They are bred to it as others
are to the navy, to the law, or to the church; with this wide
difference, that no predisposing aptitude of talents has been consulted,
and no study of the profession is required. It is fine weather; the ship
is heavy laden; she has a double and treble allowance of officers and
supernumeraries,—men enough on board, but no seamen; still it is fine
weather, and as long as it continues so the ship sails smoothly, and
every thing goes on as well as if Christopher Columbus himself had the
command. Changes are made in the equipage; the doctor and the pilot take
each other's places; the gunner is made cook, and the cook gunner; it
may happen, indeed, that he may charge the guns with peas, and shot them
with potatoes,—what matters it while there is no enemy at hand?
[13] Spaniard! But is he wishing to recommend a Cortes, by insinuating
that it would strengthen the power of the crown?—TR.
[14] A committee chosen from the house of commons.—TR.