THE VICES OF CONSTITUENCIES.
TT is easy to censure, and at the same time difficult not to
share, the cheerful composure with which Commissioners and audience alike receive the account of the electoral condi- tion of Norwich. A great deal depends on the temper in which the subject is approached, and if the Commissioners ever had an idea of treating the inquiry seriously, they have probably long ago put it aside. You cannot read Dumas's "Monte Christo" in a judicial frame of mind. You feel from the first that you are in a world to which the ordinary sane- tions of religion or morality do not apply. Norwich, as it is painted by the witnesses before the Commission, is very much such a world. Of course it ii wrong to take bribes, or to offer bribes,. or to give voters oolourable employment, or to keep open house for them, or to regard election-time as a carnival, in which half-crowns and pots of beer are to be had without limit and without the distasteful condition of earning or paying for them. But when the traveller comes into a constituency in which all these things are habitual, he is tempted to divest himself of his own theories, not indeed as doubting their superiority to those which he finds existing in the strange land he is visiting, but as feeling that every community has a right to be judged by its own standards. The morality of Turks, or Mormons, or South-Sea Islanders is not the morality of Western Europe, and in the same way the Norwich electors may have a sense of right and wrong which is not in any way outraged by practices which so shock moral- ists of a sterner, or perhaps we ought only to say, of a different school.
If Norwich stood alone in the possession of these character- istics, there would be a good deal to be said for taking this in- dulgent view of its condition. A solitary instance of political corruption might be a very proper object of philosophical ob- servation, and it might be highly desirable to keep the mind free from the bias which is almost inseparable from the atti- tude of a censor. But unhappily, there is no reason to think that Norwich does stand alone. Some constituencies are worse than others, and Norwich may possibly have gone so far ahead in the race of corruption, that no rival borough can possibly overtake it. But there are many constituencies in which pre- cisely similar evils may be supposed to exist, though they may not exist to quite the same extent. Consequently, we are forced to be grave whether we like it or not. A Commissioner can think only of the constituency into whose condition he is inquiring, but those to whom Norwich is only one of a class cannot help feeling that what might be half- comic if it were an exception, becomes wholly serious when there is ground to fear it may be a rule. That there is ground to fear this is shown in two ways. In the first place, the conclusion is the more firmly established in proportion as the induction becomes larger. There is a strange similarity about the facts which come to light whenever a
Commission is sent to ferret them out, and even where the evidence of corruption is not strong enough to justify the appointment of a Commission, the disclosures made before the Election Judges usually point in the same direction. A Judge necessarily arranges the constituencies in which a Member is petitioned against in a sort of rough scale of demerit ; and when he has reported of a very bad borough that corrupt practices have extensively prevailed in it, he will be likely to pass a milder judgment on a borough which is not quite so bad. The certificate that corrupt practices have not extensively prevailed may thus have only a relative value; it may mean nothing more than that they have not prevailed so extensively as somewhere else. Certainly there are but few election petitions in which there is not a good deal of evi-
dence which more or less resembles the evidence given before the Norwich Commissioners. The application of the deductive method to the facts lands us in the same conclusion. The electoral corruption which is to be seen in so many constitu- encies, and may be suspected in so many more, is only the natural effect of causes which are plainly in operation both among candidates and among electors. The motive which leads a man to enter the House of Commons necessarily influ- ences him in the choice of means to get there. If his object is to further the attainment of great public ends he will rarely care to advance it by demoralising the little section of the public with which he is immediately concerned. If, on the other hand, his object is to gain importance in the place in which he lives, or to get good invitations for his wife and daughters, or to obtain a seat in one or two profitable Directions, or to secure any other of the social or financial advantages which a seat in Parliament brings with it, why should he be scrupulous as to his dealings with the electors ? It is true that if a vote is a trust, a candidate has no business to make it a matter of bargain and sale. But then if a vote is a trust, how much more is a seat in Parliament a trust? And if a man is not made uneasy by the thought of becoming a trustee to advance his own private interests, why should he be more particular about his constituents' consciences than about his own ? Besides, as regards his constituents, they have probably no consciences for him to be particular about. They have votes which they can do what they like with, and what they like to do with them is to sell them. They are not trifling with any convictions when they give their votes to the candidate whose agents have supplied-them with drink or money, or for whose committee they have run errands, or been ready to run errands. If they could not give them for these considerations, they would as lief keep them to themselves. They take no more interest in public affairs than the candidate for whom they axe voting takes, and it would be unreasonable to require of them a larger measure of public spirit. This is the simplest form of electoral corrup- tion. The value of a vote, as of any other commodity which is of no use to its owner, is entirely determined by the price which somebody else will pay for it. There is another form which is in some sense superior to this, because it is compatible with the keenest possible party-spirit. The elector would not for the world sell his vote to a candidate not of his own colour, but inasmuch ae political distinctions have no meaning to him apart from the badges which symbolise them, he is perfectly ready to sell it to the highest bidder among the Yellows or among the Blues. In a third form of corruption the elector may perhaps realise that there are some ideas of duty cmnected with the act of voting, and be too intelligent to vote in a particular way merely because he has always voted so, or because his father voted so before him. But his patriotism is purely local. The interests which he wishes to see cared for are the special interest of the con- stituency, and his vote is consequently at the disposal of the candidate who has most carefully nursed the constituency. He knows nothing about those larger -concerns in which the whole nation has a part. But he knows that the local charities need support, that coal is very grateful to the poor about Christmas-time, that a bridge would be very much more con- venient than a ferry, that a new dock would give employment while it was building and improve the trade of the town whea it was built. He can but vote according to his lights and his lights tell him that the candidate who most heartily adopts these views is the candidate whom he wishes to see succeed. This is a more subtle variety of electoral corruption than either of the two former, but it is to the full as mischievous. Indeed, by reason of its comparative respectability, it is even more mischievous. The spread of education may conceivably make the open sale of a vote discreditable ; but how can a man who ordinarily neither thinks nor cares about any larger unit than his own borough, be made to rise to higher conceptions at and for the moment that there happens to be a vacancy in the representation?
There is only one specific for this state of things. A man disposes of his vote in one way, because he does not care to dispose of it another way. If he did care to dispose of it in that other way, there is now nothing to prevent him from doing so. If the possession of 5s. pleased an elector less than the triumph of the Liberal or the Conservative party, he would not sell his vote for 5s. If an elector valued the success of the Liberals or the Conservatives in his own borough, not for its own sake but for the sake of the political results to which that success may contribute, he would wish to see the constituency
represented by the most capable candidate of his own party, not by the one who is most ready with his purse. If an elector realised that the nation is of more importance than any one of the smaller communities which make up the nation, he would not send a man to legislate for the nation whose sole recommendation is that he has a keen sense of local wants, and a full determination to get them attended to. Political passion in any one of its many phases is fatal to electoral corruption. Whether the exciting cause of that pas- sion be the wrongs of the class to which the voter belongs, or the wrongs of a supposed Sir Roger Tichborne, all thought of using a vote for any other purpose than that of redressing those wrongs is at once put aside. And the solitary compen- sation there is for the absence now, said to all appearance in the future, of the one element that can purify the political atmosphere, is the fact that this very absence testifies to the accomplished removal of the wrongs which rouse political passion. These electors at Norwich and elsewhere, to whom the franchise is nothing more than an order on a public-house, would be keen politicians and incorruptible voters if Parlia- ment were withholding from them any just right or imposing on them any unjust burden. They are corrupt voters because they are contented subjects. We may wish that we had lived in a time when there was more fighting and less bargaining ; but it is only fair to acknowledge that the bargaining, repulsive as it is, is still a testimony to the completeness of the victory which has been gained.
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