Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/135

 discover the weaknesses, the follies, and the vices of their neighbours, and who are both skilful and unscrupulous enough to make them subservient to their own ends. These men are keen in the discovery of fit companions and tools for their purposes. "Noscitur a sociis" is a proverb. They form connecting links with another class of men which had grown up before the time of the Reform Bill, and has since ripened and increased with great fecundity—a class of election agents. The election agent is in habitual communication with the cleverest and the most unscrupulous of those who are either themselves leaders, or know how to tempt or cajole the most influential members of the various little knots or clubs which meet in the parlours and tap-rooms of every public-house in the borough or district. The intercourse between the agents and the intermediate parties is kept up by many reciprocal services, by assistance in business, introduction to offices and employments, under railway companies, in municipal and parish offices, and in other occupations in life, loans of small sums of money, and in infinite variety of favours of greater or less value. By this connection a machinery is ready at all times to cast a web over a very considerable number of the voters of the borough or district, including, of course, a large number of the inhabitants who have no votes. It is time enough to make a distinction between the two classes when the net is to be drawn.

We now come to the candidate. A general election is anticipated, and the aspirants for parliamentary distinction are brought into communication with the local agents. The candidate may be the director of a joint-stock bank, having a large credit given him by his brother directors; he may be an embarrassed man, seeking, by a desperate effort, to retrieve his affairs; he may be a roué requiring a change in his method of dissipation; he may be a second or third-rate lawyer, hoping that the chances of parliamentary subserviency may open a road to promotion which the legitimate labours of