TOPICS OF THE DAY.
BRIBERY.
Ma. ROEBUCK'S blow has told borne: the effects are beginning to show themselves. Whig, Tory, and Radical, are striving to outdo each other in professions of horror for the sin of bribing and being bribed. Some are devising laws for more effectually reaching the guilty ; others are crying out for immediate and more strict execu- tion of the laws which already exist. All this is so far good that it indicates a healthy tone of morals in the general public. How- ever the venal voters of boroughs large and small may talk among themselves—however lax may be the sentiments which. Members of the House of Commons interchange in their confidential con- versations " under the rose"—whatever persiflage the wits or would-be wits of the clubs may indulge in—the bulk of the com- munity view bribery in its true light ; or at least, if their virtue has been shaken, they are yet alive to the generous sense of shame, and may be reclaimed.
But the truth is, that some degree of bribery there always will be. The predisposition to bribe and be bribed is in bodies politic, as the phrenologists say of destructireness, acquisitiveness, and other amiable organs, a necessary and elementary part of the constitu- tion. It is neither more nor less than yielding to the impulses of the shortsighted self-love which imagines that there can exist real private advantages inconsistent or incompatible with the public interest. It is a law of nature that men should take care of them- selves in the first place : the perversion of this principle—that which makes it vice—consists in indulging the natural instinct to such an extent as to extinguish the sympathy with others which is equally an innate sentiment. The crime of the briber and the bribed consists not in pursuing their own individual advantage, but in pursuing it in such a manner as to injure the interests of others. But this is precisely the feature in bribery which all men tolerate. Listen to the declamations in or out of Parliament against bribery : you hear about the demoralization of the people by drunkenness or perjury, about all the vices which cluster round bribery and make it more loathsome by their company; but rarely do you hear bribery itself, in its naked elementary lineaments, made an object of reprobation. The cause (or the consequence ?) of This is, that bribery is only hated in the vulgar and vicious. The man—and there are many such—who not only proclaims on all oc- casions that he knows nothing about politics, but to soothe his con- science takes care to know nothing about them and votes un-
_flinchingly with the party to which is linked Cy family or buai- -ness connexions, is bribed. Instead of seeking to promote his pri- vate interest in such a way as shall be compatible with the general interest, he tramples blindfold on the public interest, in order, per- haps, to secure himself against the intrusion of what may tease or ruffle him. This Epicurean effeminacy pervades all ranks of the electoral public : a lip-homage is paid to the virtue of the few who rise superior to it, but every man almost tolerates in others that laxity of plitical principle in which he sees his own clear fea- tures imaged. It would be mischievous exaggeration to say that this liability to undue influence is as bad as the full-blown shame- less venality of the vulgar and drunken tools of bribery in most boroughs: it is, however, the root which puts forth those unsavoury Lowers, and he who would diminish their unhealthy redundancy must attack them in the root. After all that witlings have said about the unloveliness of being " straitlaced," it is only by setting a somea hat puritanical guard upon the first seemingly innocent sug- gestions that grow into crime by being indulged, that virtue is to be preserved either in individuals or communities. Man can stifle the first insidious whispers of passion, but if he nurse it to its full strength he must yield to or die in struggling against it. The lax way in which the respectable portion of society regard the de- corous bribery of family and business influence, is the school of the "freemen," against whom eloquent patriots launch such invectives, as sure as want of moral training, hard work, and occasional leisure devoid of the means of rational amusement or the taste for it, is the school in which are trained the victims of the sensual debauchee.
But the politician must take men as they are. The conclusions of those political systems which would base free institutions only upon preliminary moral and intellectual education forget their be- ginning. Governments are only necessary because men are not wise and not capable of self-control ; for, under any form of go- vernment, men must be the legislators and the enforcers of the laws. The great problem of politics is, how to make and en- force good laws by the very persons who require the control of those laws. The money with which electors are bribed must be drawn from the whole community. So long as the proportion of the electors to the whole population is such as to admit of a majority of the electors being enriched by a participation of the public spoil, the facilities and temptation to bribery will be found irresistible. The evil is increased by the dis- tribution of the electors into constituencies very unequal in number. The small constituencies draw the great prizes in the lottery of bribery ; the comfortable decorous citizens are there corrupted ; and their example seduces and brazens the herd of poor and ignorant voters in more numerous constituencies. Under any circumstances, it will be necessary to attack the predisposition to bribery by the combined influence of education and penal laws ; but, if the recent revelations of Election Committees and the tone of the House of Commons afford any thing like a fair index of the character of the existing electoral body, these remedies, to have the slightest chance of success, must be accompanied by such an extension of the suffrage as will render a greater number of the electors sensible that the results of bribery will be injurious to themselves, and by such an arrangement of the electoral dis- tricts as will effectually swamp those hotbeds of bribery the small constituencies. It is not to be denied that the considera- tion, whether the new members who would thus be admitted to a share in the franchise possess knowledge and virtue sufficient to render it safe to intrust them with it, is most grave. If they do not, there is no cure for bribery: the nation so thoroughly cor- rupt is incapable of free institutions. Moterssoutzu was right when he said that if ever the English electors become more corrupt than their Parliament, English liberty may be extinguished. The anxiety, however, at present evinced by Parliament to "affect a virtue if they have it not," indicates a belief there that the ma- jority of the population is not corrupt and will not countenance corruption ; and so far it is an augury of better things.
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