Post-Mortems on Bye-Elections
Impious though this may sound, I would always—if I had to choose between listening to a gamekeeper and listening to a politician—choose the former. It is only recently that I have noticed how similar are the terms in which each explains failure, and as I walked home the other evening with old Moleskin I must have become confused in my mind. ' Well, Sir,' (I thought I heard him say), ' to begin with, we simply haven't got the number of voters on this place that we used to have. It quite changed the whole character of the shoot when Maxton Wood went to the syndicate next door. Then the weather was against us; you'll never get the birds over the polling booths in a fog. Rotten lot of party organisers we had. too; I reckon they walked over half the birds. And as for those gentlemen from London—why, a lot of them couldn't have hit Sir Waldron Smithers at twenty paces. . .
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