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?
