ELECTION CARICATURES AND ELECTION SCENES.* THE title, A History of

Parliamentary Elections, is a good deal too grand for the book. It is rather a collection of election caricatures, and anecdotes of striking incidents in some famous elections, than a connected history of Parlia- mentary elections. Perhaps it is none the lees amusing, or even instructive, for that. A history of elections would be certainly daft, and probably unprofitable. This book is neither. It is, indeed, not edited with remarkable care. There is a good deal of vain repetition about it. This occurs notably in regard to the elections during the Wilkes era, when, as each separate caricature is described, we are over and over again told the same facts about the same persons, and always with an air of fresh- ness, as if they were being related for the first time. If the book ever reaches another edition, its value and interest would • A History of Parliamentary Elections and Electioneering. By Joseph Grego. London Clutha and Windage

be greatly improved by judicious excision, compression, and revision.

In spite of its somewhat irritating faults, the book is in- teresting and amusing. It clearly shows that the same election crimes at which we still levy our Corrupt Practices Acts and our political articles, severe or satirical, have prevailed " from the earliest times to the present day." From age to age the precise fashion has varied, and the persons and classes who have attempted by underhand means to influence elections have changed ; but intimidation, bribery, and corruption have been regularly charged and irregularly committed at elections for at least three hundred years. Before the days of good Queen Bess, bribery, indeed, appears to have been unknown, at least in its modern form of bribery of the electors by the candidate. If there was bribery then, it was bribery of the candidate by the electors, who had to induce him to serve by presents of horses and money over and above the wages allotted to Members by law. From the very first, undue influence and intimidation prevailed by the Crown and the magnates in favour of their nominees, and Parliaments were packed by the dominant power, Crown or Barons, Yorkists or Lancastrians. In the year 1571 appears the first recorded instance of bribery in our sense. One Thomas Long, Member for Westbury, in Wiltshire (was he an ancestor of one of the present Wilts Members P) who, " being found to be a very simple man, and not fit to serve in that place, was questioned how he came to be elected," and " immediately confessed to the House that he gave to Anthony Garland, Mayor of the said town, and one Watts, of the same, £4 for his place in Parliament." At a time when the year's pay of a Canon was from £10 to £20, this was no had sum, and the receivers were ordered to repay it, while the Corporation and inhabitants of Westbury were find £20 for the Queen's use,—a useful precedent, which might perhaps be followed with effect in these days. It was not, however, till after the Restoration of Charles H. that the election struggles began, based on the party divisions of the Court and country party, the Tories and Whigs, Conservatives and Radicals, which still continue. From that day to this, every election has resounded with similar cries, and been conducted on much the same methods ; nor, it must be confessed, has one party differed much from the other as to the methods employed. Electioneering ballads began to be rife at this date, though electioneering caricatures did not begin till the reign of George L It is curious, by the way, that one of the best early election squibs, that on the Pensioner Parliament of Charles II., is founded on a joke about a pump, which recalls a recent platform speech " Curse on such representatives;

They sell us all, our bairns and wives,' Quoth Dick, with indignation. They are but engines to raise tax, And the whole business of their acts

Is to undo the nation.

Just like our rotten pump at home ; We poor in water when 'twon't come, And that way get more oat.

So when mine host does money lack, He money gives among the pack,

And then it runs full spent.' "

The earliest election caricature is a Tory one of 1721, and is entitled, "The Prevailing Candidate ; or, the Election carried by Bribery and the D—l." It is explained in some rather good verses :—

" Here's a minion sent down to a corporate town,

In hopes to be newly elected ; By his prodigal show you may easily know To the Court he is truly affected.

He's a man by the hand who has power to command All the votes in the Corporation ;

Shows a sum in his pocket, the D—1 cries take it, 'Tis all for the good of the nation.

The wife standing by looks a little awry At the candidate's way of addressing; But a priest stepping in avers bribery no sin, Since money's a family blessing.

Say the boys, ' Ye sad rogues, here are French wooden braves

To reward your vile treacherous knavery, For such traitors as you are the rascally crew That betray the whole -kingdom to slavery.' "

From a party at that time trying to bring in the Pretender by French arms this squib is not bad. This joke of the "wooden shoes," which was persistent in elections till the Reform Bill, and used on both sides to accuse the other of trying to bring the people down to the level of the French peasantry by means of French gold, is curiously illustrative of the view of the evil

condition to which the French people were reduced by auto- cratic government held by Philip de Commines in Edward 1.1L's time, and Forteseue in Henry VI.'s time, as mochas by Fox and Arthur Young on the eve of the French Revolution. That it should now have entirely disappeared after so long a reign argues a considerable improvement in the French people, or in our own knowledge of our own shortcomings. Another fruitful source of electioneering ballads and caricatures disappeared with the Reform Bill, namely, the transcendent interest of the Westminster election. For a whole century, this election was regarded as the chief index of public opinion. It was the only large borough, too large to be either bribed or intimidated, in which the popular voice really made itself felt, its franchise including every payer of "scot and lot," while its proximity to the Court of St. James's rendered the expression of popular feeling all the more powerful. The hustings in old days used to be erected in Covent Garden, and the front of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, figures in many a cartoon from 1741 to 1831. The election of 1741 was the begin- ning of the end of Walpole's Administration. The poll was forcibly closed by the Guards at the instance of Lord Bandon, the second. Ministerial candidate, when the other side had still large numbers to poll. Numerous were the caricatures in the sense of this verse :— " Ye Westminster Boys,

By your freedom of choice Who have shown to your good friends of Loudon Ye dare to be free, Reject pension and fee, By throwing out Wager and Bandon."

Hogarth's celebrated election pictures and engravings appeared at the Oxford election in 1754, where bribery, corruption, and violence are displayed in their full operation on either side. But all other elections of the latter half of the eighteenth century pale in interest before the Middlesex elections of 1768-69 during the Wilkes agitation, and the Westminster election of 1784, when in both cases the popular party proved too strong for the combined and open interest of the Crown and corruption. The former election was of too serious a nature, involving as it did murderous riots and bloodshed, to be produc- tive of much humour in drawing or writing. The introduction of the forerunners of the Primrose Dames, in the persons of the Duchess of Devonshire and her sister, into the contest of 1784 gave full scope to pen and pencil. The person who came worst out of the encounter was Fox's opponent, Sir Cecil Wray, who had " ratted " from him to Pitt just before the election, and who is finally depicted as having fallen into "a deep Pitt." But perhaps the beet caricature of all is that of an operatic "trio" by Fox, Lord North (both of them dressed as ladies of portly proportions), and the Duchess of Devonshire. When Gillray appeared upon the scene, coarse- ness and savagery became the chief characteristics of election cartoons. Perhaps the most scathing of his earlier efforts is the entry of "the tyrant of the North," Earl Wolf (Lord Lonsdale, the famous or infamous Sir James Lowther), into Blaekham (Whitehaven), 1792. Gillray however, did not confine his attentions to one side only, but belaboured Fox and Orator Thelwall as heartily as he did Pitt and Lord Lonsdale ; and one of the worst cari- catures in point of taste and good-feeling ever published, was that of Fox as the " Worn-out Patriot," at the annual meeting of the Westminster Association in 1800, in which the physical evils under which he laboured are held up to public derision. After Fox's death, Sir Francis Burdett, as the popular hero of a hundred fights in Westminster, is one of the chief subjects of elec- tion squibs, pictorial and other, until his final disappearance from the scene, after his remarkable conversion to Toryism in 1837. But undoubtedly the beat cartoon in the whole book, and perhaps the best ever produced for simple humour and effective irony, is that of Doyle on May 26th, 1831, where William PT. is shown looking through his eye-glass at "the Handwriting on the Wall," a dead wall, on which is written, " Reform Bill ;" and the King says, " Reform Bill S can that mean me 7"