A letter to the Times of Tuesday, from the successful
Conservative candidate at Derry, Mr. Lewis, brings out one or two remarkable results of election by Ballot. First, while all four candidates were in the field, their actual pledges added together amounted to 700 more than the constituency (who number 1,400); in other words, at least half the constituency must have pledged their votes twice, unless we prefer to suppose that a quarter of it pledged them four times ;—whence we deduce the moral that the Ballot does lead to lying, as we said it would. The Some Rule candidate, says Mr. Lewis, was much the greatest sufferer by unredeemed pledges, polling only a very small fraction of his promises, and this, though in Mr. Lewis's opinion the Roman Catholic priests put no pressure on the voters to vote for Mr. Palles (the Irish Attorney-General). Finally the Ballot, so far from operating (in Ireland) to cause abstention from voting, yielded a number of 1,324 voters out of 1,400 on the register. Mr. Hors- man said in his speech on Thursday at Liskeard, that the Ballot was the logical sequence of household suffrage, and followed it as necessarily as a dog's tail follows a dog,—to which we may add that in Ireland, if we may judge from our experience hitherto, the tail will, as Lord Dundreary says, not only follow the dog, but wag him too.
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