The operation of the same system which would go so far to extinguish bribery, would also go equally far to put an end to every kind of intimidation and other unjust and improper influences. The entire disease the whole of its malignity from the same cause—the fact that certain particular votes, and these votes only, are made indispensable, and are, therefore to be obtained per fas et nefas. To the same cause all the sacrifices of truth, justice, of honour, and of decency, are due. Nothing is so sacred that it may not be trampled upon in a struggle which waxes more intense as it draws towards its end. The candidates become like gamblers, spurred on by the recollection of what they have already lost, and ready to peril all that they still possess upon the last stake. Such struggles serve but as excitements to morbid satiety. A Duke of Norfolk is reported to have said, that to stand a contested election for Yorkshire and win it by one, was the greatest enjoyment in life; a sentiment, which, we are told, is "thoroughly English, and to be relished only by freemen!"[1] With all admiration for those manly enjoyments which are a feature of English life, it may be permitted to an Englishman to say, that there are some things too serious to be made a game. Those who have degraded the tone of political morals, treated the most solemn duty of social life as a sport, and delighted in the satire of representation exhibited by the spectacle of the political extinction of
- ↑ Quarterly Review, vol. cii., p. 32.
by the votes which have been bought,—the public evil would be comparatively insignificant. The persons who have accepted payment for their votes will probably, in view of the national interests, have exercised their powers by voting for members as competent as they would be likely under any circumstances to have chosen. The main current of political life has at the same time been purified. In every constituency the corrupt element has been drawn off and the better electors are no longer injured or deprived of their just influence by the conduct of the worse. In the words of a social philosopher, it is then "only the worst people who fell into the worst ways."
