Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/336

 Leaves from an Rnglish Solicitor's Note Book.

307

LEAVES FROM AN ENGLISH SOLICITOR'S NOTE BOOK. VII. BLUE WINS THE DAY.

A STORY OF AN OLD TIME ELECTION IN ENGLAND.

BY BAXTER BORRET. WrITH the passing of the Ballot Act, and the Corrupt Practices at Elec tions Act (the latter a vigorous measure car ried through the House of Commons by the indomitable energy of Sir Henry James, now Lord James of Hereford), bribery at Parlia mentary elections has been practically extin guished. Under the working of the ballot the most astute election agent can never be certain whether the promises made to him before the election have been kept by voters; and under Lord James's act bribery has be come, to say the least of it, highly dan gerous to all the parties directly, or even indirectly, concerned; the seat won by an entirely innocent candidate may later on be declared vacant through the act of some amateur electioneer with more zeal than dis cretion, one, for instance, who, for the sake of the good cause, at his own expense hires a carriage to convey an invalid voter to the poll to record his vote; such an act comes within the definition of a " corrupt practice," and jeopardizes the seat won by a candidate who has clone his best to fight the election on the strictest lines of purity. Another bar to the practice of wholesale bribery was created when the last act providing for the redistribution of electoral districts was passed; since which time the number of voters in each district has been so enor mously increased that the longest purse cannot afford the strain of wholesale bribing. I may say with some degree of confi dence, therefore, that something very nearly approaching to absolute purity of election has been at last established throughout the length and breadth of the electoral districts of Great Britain. Of Ireland I cannot speak from per

sonal knowledge, but there is an impression in England that the most potent factor at Irish elections is the spiritual influence of the Roman Catholic priest over the votes of the ignorant and ill educated, but no act of Parliament can reach this evil. Things were very different when I first joined the legal profession; perhaps an ac count of my first and only experience of electioneering under the old system may in terest, and possibly amuse, the readers of the Green Bag. Early in the sixties a Parliamentary elec tion was pending in the little borough of Rottenton, on the eastern coast of England, and a close fight was expected. Rottenton was an old-fashioned borough which, somehow or other, had escaped being swept off the board at the time of the passing of the first reform bill; the constituency was a small one, the voters did not number 500 all told. The fate of an election usually depended on the votes of some twenty-five or thirty 'long shoremen, who picked up their livelihood along the little wharf of the town, and who were, by right of some ancient charter, free men of the town and entitled to vote. The oracle of the town at election times was a small, wooden-legged man named Briggs, who combined the trade of tobac conist with the profession (as he called it) of barber; his shop was the center of politi cal life at those times, and an election agent who knew his work knew that to secure Briggs was the way to win the election. The 'long shoremen habitually resorted to Briggs's shop first of all for a matter of daily want, tobacco; secondly, not so necessary for their comfort, for a shave and clean up; at election times