TREATING.
WE have often wondered whether the Hebrews while still in Palestine were well-fed men. The evidence is a little conflicting. They were very proud, no doubt, of the natural richness of their country, its vines and its olives, its plains flowing with milk and honey ; but so are the Italians, who eat less than any other people in the world ; and the Hebrews certainly hated gluttony with a hatred that suggests it was a national inconvenience. They made it a grievous sin, which no other nation has done, though an idea of the kind can be detected in some of the precepts obeyed, or at least respected, by Brahmins, Buddhist priests, and the Catholic monastic orders. No country, however, has ever condemned eating too much or on wrong occasions as crime, and it is not very creditable to England that we should have been compelled to take the lead in making the desire for a good meal an offence. We have already made " treating " punishable in a candidate, and we may possibly be obliged next year to make it an offence in a voter to take a "treat." It is quite clear from the evidence given in many boroughs during the "Election Assizes " that a certain class of voters are very much moved by " treating ;" that anything beyond Mr. Forster's modicum of refreshment, a few ham sandwiches and a cup of coffee, greatly conciliates them,— with all his popularity, he was abused as a " hungry and dry lot,"—and that a good meal of meat and beer acts as a most effective bribe. We are not sure that it is not the most effective of all, that the man who is fed is not more securely bound to the candidate than the man who is paid. To take a man's dinner and then "rat " would strike many Englishmen as a meaner thing to do than to take his money and betray him, the bribe suggesting a wrongfulness in the proceeding much less apparent in the eating of the dinner. If the treating went very far, it might in some places demoralize a whole town. M. Gamin, a recently elected Member of the Corps Legislatif, is said to have beaten the Prefect of his department by treating constituents to black coffee and champagne, and we all know what an influence the sausages and champagne of Satory had on the fortunes of France. The earlier Romans only smiled at treating as a "benignity," holding, doubtless, that nobody in that frugal community would desert his party for a meal ; but bread giving became in later days an important political act, and we should be sorry to see the effect of a relaxation of the law even here. Good bold treating,—dinner, say, for three days, with unlimited liquor,—would, we suspect, sap the virtue of a good many towns, and the cost would be quite within the sum many candidates would be prepared to spend. Thirty shil lings a head would do it, and two or three thousand votes might be secured for four or five thousand pounds. No form of bribery would be so efficient as this, and scarcely any so demoralizing. Treating in England implies liquor, unpurchased liquor very often implies drunkenness, and a drunk electorate is about the very worst form of electorate it is possible to conceive.
There is something odd, something a little shameful, nevertheless, in the fact that it is necessary to make strong laws against treating ; and one would fain discover a reason decently creditable for the readiness shown to accept this form of bribery. Something, we believe, must be attributed to the desire of the Residuum, to whom the expense of their food is an ever present consideration, who from year's end to year's end never eat quite as much or drink quite as much as they would like, to share in what seems to them a banquet at which there is no apparent stint ; and something, too, to the habit of eating frequently, so rare among the cultivated, so universal among all who labour with their hands. Great numbers of Englishmen of the upper class eat only twice and drink only once a day, and fast habitually from 8 p.m. to 10 a.m., fourteen long hours ; but the workers in England are accustomed to eat every six hours, and drink even more often. One of the greatest difficulties in the way of any Sunday Liquor Bill is the sort of necessity the poor seem to feel for obtaining " refreshment " after a short walk, the extreme indisposition to fast long when awake. So strong is this feeling, that it influences the hours of labour in every trade, and the slightest interference with the custom is resented as an oppression of the worst kind. Indeed, it is believed by all Election Agents to be doubtful whether a final Act against Treating, an Act which prohibited the giving of food to canvassers at all, could be obeyed, whether the men employed could wait fasting the whole day without becoming unmanageably irritable. A very considerable proportion of the assaults, and even murders, committed in English country districts are the result of the " temper " evoked by a little delay in preparing supper, and the excuse, " Well, my tea worn't ready," is held in the mining districts sufficient to account for any display of savagery. The true reason of the fancy for being treated is, however, we imagine, a different one from this. It is not a treat the electors of this sort want to enjoy, but a " spree," a day without labour, but with some kind of amusement, or interest, or excitement, in its proceedings. Phrase about it as we like, daily labour for bread is monotonous, and in a people almost without holidays, living in an uncertain climate, and amid the most depressing architecture in the world, the desire for an occupied, and therefore exciting holiday, becomes sometimes irresistible. Look at the scores of thousands who throng the neighbourhoods of London on the few recognized holidays of the year, the tens of thousands who plan for weeks to join a Foresters' or Odd Fellows' fete, and who, as their social superiors think, work harder for their amusement than ever they do for their bread. No weather, no distance, no toil in carrying children seems to daunt them, if only they may enjoy for the day the luxury of feeling free to do as they like, or, to put it more correctly, to leave what they are accustomed to do undone. To that luxury meals are essential, and if it is to be enjoyed on extra days, like election days, the meals must be paid for by other than the thriftless elector. It is the thirst for enjoyment which stimulates him, more than the crave either for food or drink, the release from labour which buys him far more than the so-called treating. Election day, as held, say, in Bewdley, is a festival of Saturn for him, a day when he can do as he like's, eat as he likes, drink very nearly as he likes, and be treated none the less with unusual respect by all above him.
If our people were a sober people, we do not know that much would be gained morally by abolishing a practice which would gradually shape itself into a " chairing" dinner given by the candidates to electors of their own party ; but politically the custom would be just as great an evil. This is the point which so many of those who argue about treating fail, as it seems to us, to see. Supposing the whole system stripped of all its most objectionable features, —the drinking and rioting and dishonest voting,—and reduced to the exercise of a large hospitality, such as many a noble exercises when his heir comes of age, such as is exercised by clergymen very often towards poor children, the gratuitous gift of a well-fed holiday, and still the Legislature ought to interfere if the English Constitutional system is to be kept pure. The election holiday would in five years become a right, and the last chance of a poor candidate would be taken away. He could not give the holiday, and if he did not give it he must, in all but the most exceptional cases, lose his chance, lose it just as much as a Londoner would lose it if he had procured a Bill making work imperative on the Derby Day. The right of candidature would still be confined to those who could afford to waste a few thousands, and the nation would still wilfully waste four-fifths of its reservoir of intellectual power. It does waste it now, but for the first time in_ thirty years we begin on this matter to see light. As Ave have elsewhere said; Mr. Disraeli has done a service to the country which may yet compensate us for his party's two years' tenure of power,— he has made it possible for a man of very moderate means to enter Parliament. We believe he sincerely meant to do this ; that one political vice for which he has a bitter intellectual scorn is the purchase of power by cash outlay, but intentionally or unintentionally he has succeeded. This new Act, it was evident from the first, would kill bribery, and it is now clear that it will also put down treating, a form of corruption which it was thought could scarcely be reached by its procedure. It can be reached easily, swiftly, and at a comparatively little expense and outlay, for an election is at last reduced to the direct and fair expenses which the borough or county ought to pay. They never need be heavy, never, we should say, beyond twenty pounds per thousand electors, and that sum can scarcely be an obstacle to a candidate with any true following at all.
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