GAINERS AND LOSERS BY BRIBERY.
VIEWING election expentbte re as a profitable or losing investment of money, it may be doub.ed whether the Tories greatly misappre- hend their interest in pas itqr extravagantly for Seats in the House of Commons. The Courier as that the opulent Tories would be the chief sufferers by a plan, recommended to them in the Standard, of contesting evers county and borough in Ireland, in order to drain the purse of the Liberal party, and more especially Otoissreet's. For, obset yes the Courier, " A great portion of every sovereign taken from a Tory purse to contest an election, will go into a Radical pocket. If the greater part of the opulent and the idle are Tories, the greater pale of the comparatively poor and industrious classes are Reformers. The money spent at elections goes into the hands of lawyers, publicans, post-masters, horse-keepers, jockies, and the various indus- trious tradesmen who supply the articles which the others use. A contested election nhiiiiinisbes the resumers of the aristocracy and augments those of the people. In the end, therefore, the recommendation of the Standard would only weaken its friends and strengthen its opponents. To encourage the rich to spend their money in seducing the elec,ors, and to employ their power in intimidating them, seems to us not very moral ; and we are quite sure that in the end the opulent Tories would be the chief sufferers by the plan."
But the Tories expect by profuse expenditure to gain a majo- rity in the House of Commons ; and should they succeed, they would soon manage to recover from the people all that they had laid out in corrupting them. Haifa million employed in the pur- chase of a majority, would be made up in five years at the rate of 100,000/. a year ; and the Tories are too well skilled in the dis- tribution of offices in the State, the Army and Navy, and the Church, not to pick up such a paltry pittance annually with the Utmost ease. The Whigs, to do them justice, are improving rapidly in the science of leathering their nests; and it may be worth their while to " come down" with handsome subscriptions towards an election-fund, on the same principle that opens Tory purse strings. The Tories have already commenced a system of open bribery; as will be seen by a paragraph, which the Standard quoted from a Leicester paper.
C3NSERTATIVE DOINGS; CHRISTMAS CHRER..-It LIS been finally ar- ranged, that a good dinner, with two quarts of ale to each man, will be given to all those who choose to partake of it, eaily in January. The town being divided into wards, a number of houses have been selected, at each of which a member of the Leicester Conservative Society will preside. To prevent con-
fusion, tickets will be issued; and any person wishing to dine, must apply pre-
viously to Mr. John J. Adams, New Street. In order to keep up the good old tunes, the freemen in the county will also be regaled with a dinner. The Conservatives are determined to put into practice the promise made by Paget— viz, to let every poor man have his bellyful of roast beef and plum. pudding.— Leicester Herald.
But if there is any doubt Its to its being the interest of Whigs and Tories to bribe electors, most assuredly the latter are injured even in pocket by their political venality. As Mr. BEAUMONT, in the olden time, is reported to have told the electors of Stafford, he considered the men whom he had bought as his property, and warned them against being guilty of the presumption of annoying him with their affairs. He had purchased his seat, and should use the influence it gave him according to his own pleasure. And the venal voters would have had no right to complain if Mr. BEAU- MONT, instead of voting steadily for Reform, had joined the Tories, and supported an increase in the Estimates and the Pension-list grant, and injurious monopolies of every description. For it is to be remembered, that direct taxation is a small part only of the evil 'which corruption in the representative system entails upon the country. Monopolies, restrictions on trade foreign and domestic, the Corn-laws, and various other modes of enriching the few at the expense of the many, are all based on the bribery of electors. The pecuniary loss of the people by the distribution of money among them for the purposes of political corruption is incalculably great. The sum which they extract from the pockets of candidates is a mere drop in the ocean. Let the Leicestershire operatives and tradesmen remember this while they are feasting at Christmas. Let them not be so "beastly stupid, so brutally degraded," as to imagine that it is at the expense of the Tories they are guzzling. For every pot of beer and every slice of beef, it is intended by their entertainers that they shall dearly pay.
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