The Corrupt Practices Bill passed through Committee yester- day week.
In the sitting of that day a new clause was added -to the Bill, making it a corrupt practice to promise the with- drawal of a candidate in consideration of any payment or pro- mise of payment ; and in the evening sitting the Attorney- General explained the general effect of those clauses limiting the maximum of election expense, from which there is, we think, -the best hope of a wholesome and reasonable effect. He hoped, he said, by these clauses, to reduce the expense of a general -election from £2,500,000, which was its cost in 1880, to £800,000. The county elections alone, without counting returning officers' -expenses and a few others, had cost £615,800; and the borough -elections bad cost 2595,424, excluding the same kind of expenses. Under the proposed Bill, he hoped to reduce the same class of county expenses to 2200,000, and of borough expenses to 0209,000, or to reduce them to less than one-third of the
sum in the case of the counties, and to nearly one-third in the case of the boroughs. In cases of a joint candidature, he proposed to subtract one-fourth from the allowable ex- penses of two such candidates on account of their occupying -a joint Committee-room, so that if £500 were the sum allowed under the Bill for a single candidate, the sum admissible for a joint candidature in the same constituency would be 21,000 less by 2250, or £750,—a proposal which elicited some very angry -objections. And a new discussion on the permissible maximum seems likely to be raised on the report.
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