THE MOTOR-CAR IN POLITICS.
ELEVEN years ago, at the time of the last General
Election but one, it was technically illegal to drive a motor-car on the public roads. One of the pioneers of auto- mobilism, Mr. T. R. B. Elliot, relates in the "Badminton Library" volume on " Motors " how, towards the end of February, 1896, he first drove his car through Roxburghshire to Berwick by night, and as he proceeded to picnic under the shadow of the Town Hall at three o'clock in the morning, he was surrounded by the entire police force on duty, thirteen in all. The sergeant took his name, and thought he would not be prosecuted; however, the sergeant was wrong, and Mr. Elliot was fined no less than 6d., with 19s. 6d. costs, for "using a horseless carriage without having a man preceding it." It is 'difficult to realise that it is not ten years ago since that law 'became obsolete, and it was no longer legally necessary for a man waving a red flag to march in front of the auto-car, as it was called in those days. But there is no need to go back as much as ten years to find an astonishing contrast between the old and the new. At the General Election of 1900 motor-cars were still vehicles to be stared at, and it was still a good joke to laugh at the motorist in difficulties with his machinery. In the description of the pollings there is hardly a word about the employment of cars on either side; the great thing was to see that the candidate was well supplied with brakes, and broughams. To-day it is one • of the commonplaces of electioneering that a candidate is heavily handicapped if his resources are limited to horse-drawn vehicles. There may be exceptions, of course, for the candidature of at least one politician is said to have been considerably helped by the fact that he was able to take some of his constituents to the poll on fire-engines ; but the general trend of opinion is well represented by the comment that the result of one of the elections was due hardly so much to political enthusiasm as to the attractions of the eighty motor-cars with which the successful candidate was able to patrol his constituency.
The chief point in the indispensability of the motor-car, indeed, is its capacity for bringing voters to the poll. Owing to idiosyncrasies doubtless peculiarly British, it happens at election times that, keenly as the voter may feel on political questions, he greatly dislikes the actual trouble of registering his vote; not only that, but the law and the authorities often enough combine to make the process of recording a vote rather a nuisance than anything else. It might be unreasonable to ask for the numbers of polling-booths to be much increased, though frequently to get to the polling-booth means a long walk for many. Probably no great changes will be made in that direction. Indeed, just as it apparently passes the wit of Englishmen to devise a better method of voting in a Parliamentary division than walking in and out of lobbies, so no method of collecting the opinion of voters except the present system is likely to be adopted. That system insists that in order to take a share in deciding who shall govern his country the voter must be present in the body at a particular spot at a particular time, and make a certain mark in a certain kind of way on a specially printed slip of paper. To the indolent and apathetic the trouble involved in the process presents few attractions. They have not the energy and public spirit of the well-known jockey who chartered a special train from the North to Newmarket in order to poll, and then invalidated the whole proceeding by writing with immense enthusiasm on the paper banded to him : "1 vote for Mr. So-and-so, and no mistake." Their attitude to the candidate, though doubtless their political predilections are well defined and based on sound argu. ment, is occasionally to be summed up in some such reflection as : " Well , what I say is, if he wants my vote, let him come and get it!" Nor is the reluctant voter invariably appeased by the offer of a seat behind a pair of horses. After all, a farm labourer has plenty of oppor- tunities of riding on farm carts, and there is no very great difference, for the town voter, between a brake and an omnibus. But there is an undeniable attraction in the power and speed of a fine automobile ; so great an attraction, indeed, that it is likely that for many the episode best worth remembering of the whole Election time has been the moment when the long low car slid up to take them up at the house door, and purred down the road to the polling station.
But if a sufficient supply of motor-cars is a great factor in success in bringing supporters to the poll on the actual day of the election, none the less has the motor-car become invaluable to the candidate during the feverish days which precede the polling. To begin with, he has gained a great deal if he is known by sight, and by the sound of his voice, to all his potential constituents, and that in the old days he was often enough unable to achieve. There was not time to do so. In a widely scattered constituency, especially one in which two or three important centres had to be visited more than once, it was physically impossible for him to cover the ground; it was an exhausting performance to speak at more than one meeting on the same evening, owing to the distance the horses had to travel. But now that the motor-car can take its driver from one side of a division to the other in an hour, rolling up the miles behind it like plane-shavings, there is no more difficulty, so far as time and distance are concerned, in attending three or four separate meetings in an evening than there used to be in attending one. Do not the rush and hurry involved, it may be asked, add frightfully to the wear and tear of standing for a seat? It would be some kind of an answer, at all events, to urge that there is less mental worry involved in the knowledge that you can personally address all the voters, even though to do so necessitates a great- expenditure of physical energy, than in the realisation that time does not allow- you to become known to the men whose suffrages you are asking. The season of the year, too, at which the present General Election is taking place tells in some respects a little against the motor-car. There cannot be very much enjoyment in the prospect of turning out two or three times on the same evening from a warm room to bump along slushy country lanes, and the reiteration of the changes from indoor air to snow and wind may not be in accordance with doctor's advice. But it is possible to imagine that at a different time of year—if the Election were to take place, for instance, at the old-fashioned season between the hay and the corn harvest--there might be a certain exhilaration in bowling at top speed along smooth roads, with the moon "as big as a bandbox" above the trees, from one successful meeting to another; and even in the worst of weathers there is something inspiriting, for the onlookers at any rate, in the spectacle of the arrival and departure of any vehicle at a fine spanking pace. In the old days, if the candidate was lucky or rich enough to be able to drive about on a coach-and-four, or even behind a spirited pair, it was an exciting sight for the crowd to watch him pull up at the meeting and drive away amid the cheering and booing at the end. A certain glamour will always belong to the comings and goings of a candidate's carriage and horses in the brimming days just before the poll; but the popular taste at present, without doubt, is for the fast, powerful motor-car, which is still a vehicle novel enough to stir the pulses, heralded by its deep, busy hum and gleam- ing lamplights out of the darkness, and passing with strength and swiftness into the darkness again. It possesses, indeed, for electioneering purposes but one single disadvantage,—you cannot take the horses out of it.
On the whole, the element of speed is the friend of truth; or it would be fairer to say, perhaps, that the increased facilities of locomotion lead to increased knowledge on the part of the voter, so far as he can obtain valuable knowledge in our present stage of civilisation, and increased opportunities of obtaining a full expression of the voters' wishes. Few things have been more remarkable during the past week than the enormous proportion of the number of qualified voters, often as high as ninety-five per cent., who have actually gone to the poll. That means, no doubt, that the questions on which they have been called to vote have interested them deeply; and doubtless, also, the percentages are always high when the register is new. But there is a further fact to be taken into consideration, and that is that the candidates have seen to it that the indolent and apathetic, as well as the enthusiastic, have been taken to the poll, and the speed of the motor-car has had a great deal to do with that achievement. A curious side-issue arises, for the most violent opponent of auto- mobilism, who perhaps has perpetually described the motor- car as the rich man's toy, would in the stress of getting voters to the poll be only too glad to avail himself of its services. There are obvious possibilities of grim humour in the idea of the political extremist being assisted to victory by the numbers and speed of his opponent's motor-cars, ready in these days of secret voting to take any and every elector to the poll. But that is perhaps rather too fantastic a picture to look at with any gravity. The outstanding point is that in assuring as it does that practically every voter shall go to the poll if he wishes to, the motor-car at election times has become a guarantee for the furtherance of the ideals of democracy.
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