THE RESULTS OF THE BALLOT.
WE fancy, from what we hear, that the country may look upon the Ballot Bill as passed. There will be a hot debate, and perhaps a large division, upon the third reading ; but the borough constituencies, upon the whole, approve the Bill, the country voters are not inimical to it, though the country gentry are, and as the party will vote together, the majority in the Commons must be heavy. Nor is there any serious danger of its rejection or emasculation in the Lords. The Government is quite determined that the Bill shall pass ; the Peers, as a body, would dislike a dissolution on such a subject ; and it is doubtful if the Tory chiefs are quite in earnest in their resistance, if they are not in some degree under the influence of the belief that the Ballot once settled, the permanent programme of the Liberals will have been "played out," and parties will then rearrange themselves after
a fashion which will leave the Conservatives, for a time, at all events, masters of the situation,—able perhaps to appeal with effect to the masses of the towns, hitherto outside Lancashire so resolutely opposed to them. The Bill therefore, as we bear, will get through, and getting through, will undoubtedly produce considerable results. It is not a perfect Bill, by any means, even from the point of view of its advocates ; but it contains clauses against intimidation and bribery of exceeding stringency, clauses which the kind of persons who bribe or intimidate—landowners, capitalists, or popular leaders—will be extremely reluctant to encounter ; and it may have the effect which usually follows in England on penal legislation, that of making the offence condemned excessively discreditable. The Bill will release the voter from influence, healthy as well as unhealthy, and it is matter of curious speculation to forecast what the result of that release will be. That is an excessively difficult forecast to make, because the result depends so greatly on an unknown quantity, the secret wishes of an enormous number of persons accustomed all their lives to regulate and moderate their opinions under the pressure of influences which in their aggregate effect are as imperceptible but as irresistible as the weight of the atmo- sphere ; but still there are some few results which, to speak with the utmost caution, seem exceedingly probable. And scarcely any of these results suggest to us any lively hope in the future.
One of them, if it occurs, will certainly be disastrous. Is it at all certain that when external influences of all kinds are withdrawn, and no one knows whether you have or have not exercised your highest privilege, the majority of the electors will go to the polls at all—will go, that is, through a ceremony more or less disagreeable in order to secure objects more or less matters of indifference? Of course, in serious crises, when the issues were very great and very distinctly visible, they would ; but we speak of quiet times, when one man seems nearly as good as another, and trade is fairly prosperous, and everybody is anxious about his own affairs, and each man is apt to think his vote unimportant—would the average elector who now votes because somebody asks him, or because he would be thought wanting in spirit if he did not, then go up to the booths at all ? It is a very suggestive fact that in London, where the pressure on the voter is least, the vote, even in general elections, is usually the lightest. In the great provincial cities, where voting for the Education Boards is public, the electors vote ; but in London, where the election is secret, three-fourths of them stay away. The interest taken in politics no doubt is much greater than the interest taken in education, but still it is not in quiet times very great, as is proved by the small circulation of the newspapers, as compared with the figures they would reach if everybody were intensely interested in their contents. Any such falling-off in the habit of voting as we have witnessed in London during School-Board elections would be a grave misfortune, firstly, because it would diminish the power of our only living insti- tution, the House of Commons, which pro tante would cease to be representative ; secondly, because it would give an un- natural and dangerous influence to the one-idea men, such as teetotallers, who would be sure to vote, while their opponents would not be sure ; and thirdly, because it would import into our politics an element of jerkiness and uncertainty which would, by and by, make government nearly impossible. Nobody would ever know whether a given question would or would not attract people to the polls, and the people attracted by one election might be just the people who had abstained from voting at another. The greatest power confided to our otherwise much-cramped Executive is that of dissolution, but who could dissolve when dissolution might end in a House returned not by the people, but by that section of the people which chanced at the moment to be keenly interested in the special fight then going on I It would be needful to be sensational in order to bring the people up, and we cannot imagine a temptation more dangerous to statesmen. It may be said that the abstinence which we dread is not found in the United States, and that is true ; but then in the Union the people is Sovereign and knows it, and in England it is only Sovereign on certain points,—excluding, Lord Kimberley said last week, all social points, for on these the Lords are independent ; in the Union, elections are as excit- ing as battles, because every election affects the decision of vital questions, and in the Union the vote regulates the distri- bution of a patronage which is open to everybody. The whip of taxation no longer affects our people, who scarcely feel taxed ; our electors have no hope of State patronage ; and our quiet voters are not excited by the immense dramatic interest involved in the direct election of the Head of the State. Take away the connection between all the elections and the Presidential contest, take off all the severely felt taxes, and abolish patronage and corruption, and what proportion of citizens would in the United States record their obscure votes ? We shall be very glad to be wrong, but we earnestly dread this particular risk, a risk which in some countries is extreme, —which in France, for example, makes it positively unsafe to have too frequent elections. The people will not go to the polls en masse more than once in a certain cycle.
Again, we have a great dread that the Electorate, relieved of all responsibility, will tend to accept favourites rather than political men,—that an entirely new class of Members, popular favourites who are that and nothing else, will crowd into the House of Commons. At present the elector is chained by his antecedents, by opinion, and by party organization, and does not like to reject the candidate selected by his local leaders ; does not like to vote from pure whim, has not the courage to betray a preference not formed on political grounds ; but there is no knowing, when wholly released from responsibility, what he may do or whom he may select. We may have a hundred Sir Juckes Cliftons in Parliament. Almost every borough or county has its popular man, usually a most unfit man for a legislator, who is now kept out because the Conservative or Liberal Committee will not support him, but who, when their guidance is at an end, may be elected by acclaim. There never lived perhaps a man less fitted for Parliament than Charles Dickens, or a man who under the Ballot would have been so certain of being returned; nor are we without a suspicion, grotesque as the suggestion may seem, that there are places in England returning Members where the Claimant would have a fair chance.
It is certain that the chances of celebrities of all kinds will be immensely increased, and so, as we believe, will be that of all men with titles. Look how they win at the London School elections. It is difficult enough even now to defeat them when they stand for popular constituencies, and have to pass the ordeal of Committees composed of men who rather dislike a Lord as being too independent ; but under the Ballot they will stand on their own feet, and will in an extra- ordinary proportion of cases be elected, more especially when they profess Liberalism. Then they will catch the party vote, and at the same time receive the quiet support of multitudes of Tories who think a Lord must be safe as against democracy, and who, though they would not publicly violate party dis- cipline, will privately vote in obedience to social rather than political feeling. We should not wonder if the local magnates, who think that under the Ballot they will have everything their own way, should find that secrecy had released local jealousies, and that their chances had comparatively diminished. That may not be an evil in some ways, these magnates being as a rule stupid persons without political sense ; but it will be an evil in this way, that it will immensely increase the uncer- tainties and difficulties of political combination, of obtaining a clear expression of the national political thought. Of course the favouritism we have spoken of may be national instead of political, and lead to the selection of a series of dictators, the one qualification demanded of a candidate being his readiness to support the Bismarck, or Thiers, or Pitt of the hour ; but it may also be local, and then it will be a puzzle to the politicians. Our main dread, however, is of an abstinence from the polls which would enormously diminish the working power of Parliament, and encourage popular resistance to the working of any unpopular law, its adversaries declaring that it was approved only by the limited class who had voted, and who had not considered or foreseen this especial measure. It will not, as it were, be the business of the individual, but of the community, to elect the right candidate, and business which does not devolve upon an individual is very seldom done. Voting when one is not known to vote has nothing pleasurable about it, and in certain cases involves very disagreeable obligations. In the country, for instance, it involves what is often a troublesome journey, a journey so disliked that the most popular candidate would not have a chance unless he or his friends provided con- veyance for his supporters. We ask any experienced elec- tion agent whether he would run any candidate whatever for any English county if he had to be carried by men who would have to walk to the poll. It could not be done, and we can- not imagine how candidates for county seats intend to pro- vide for a difficulty which will seem to outsiders so small. Are they or their friends to provide carriage for all comers without knowing their votes, or are all candidates to combine and carry all electors, or are all electors indifferently to be left to their own resources The latter will, of course, be at last the line adopted, if candidates find that electors do vote "freely," and unless the Lords can provide some remedy, such a polling-place in every parish, the disuse of conveyance will be followed by an immense and most disastrous falling-off in the aggregate county vote. People hate a long walk in the middle of the day upon business which does not directly interest them, and when they can indulge their indolence without censure either from landlord, or customers, or opinion, they will be very apt to indulge it, and stay at home in a pet because they are not to be carried. The same influence will operate, though of course to a less degree, in borough elec- tions ; and what with indifference, humbleness, dislike of crowds, and dislike of unrewarded trouble, we fully expect to see in the first ordinary election an unexpected and most disastrous reduction in the constituencies, that is, in the moral power from which Parliament derives its strength.
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