Page:Electoral purity and economy.djvu/12

 agent only, but might be allowed one clerk and one messenger for every 400 electors, with a proportionate increase on the day before and the actual day of poll.

There remains the question of the definition of "joint candidatures," but no difficulties need arise on the point. To sign the same address, to canvass together, to address the same meetings, one or all of these actions should constitute a joint candidature.

3. .—The number of hired Committee-Rooms should be strictly limited; and not more than one for every 750 electors in boroughs, and one for every 500 electors in counties, should be allowed. Moreover, there should be a further prohibition against engaging them in public-houses. The numbers being thus limited, there would be no necessity to disfranchise the beneficial owners of the rooms; such disfranchisement would greatly restrict, and perhaps injuriously restrict, the choice of rooms, while in cases of schoolrooms and such like, in which many persons may be pecuniarily interested, it would be unfair and a mistake.

As regards the expenditure on printing, stationery, and hire of rooms for meetings, etc.,—what may be called the literature and education department of the election; and which is at the same time the least in amount, and the most useful branch of expense—it is very difficult to fix any proper limits of expenditure, though something may be done by the process of exhaustion, and by forbidding certain unnecessary items which are now winked at or allowed. It would be nothing but an evil, and an evil of a serious kind, to limit or reduce the number of meetings, or to prohibit altogether the distribution of addresses, reports of speeches and educating literature, etc., all of which, however, involve some cost. Undue expenditure on these items would in the future be checked by the knowledge that the accounts must be properly returned, and that any extravagant expenditure would be thus revealed.

Forbid, however, that which is almost universal, and very often used for improper purposes, the issue of "polling cards" to the electors. It should be the duty of the Returning Officer to send to each elector a card containing the necessary information as to day of poll, number on register, polling place, etc., the cost to be