Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/139

 as since, counties and boroughs in which elections were scenes of moral degradation more disgusting than any of the metropolitan fairs which, within the last few years, have been put down as intolerable. The political leaders of those days had prepared the way for a system of corruption, which is now less open and barefaced, but more extensive, systematic, and effectual. Poets and painters have given permanence to the memory of the orgies of former times, which sapped the foundations of morality, by showing that persons of the highest station were ready to sacrifice morals to expediency. It was a maxim then, as now, that all is fair in electioneering,—the result being, that people whose probity was unquestionable, lost all their strictness on the occasion of a dissolution. "Men," says Southey, "who at other times regard it as a duty to speak truth, and think their honour implicated in their word, scruple not at asserting the grossest and most impudent falsehoods, if thereby they can obtain a momentary advantage over the hostile party." The system was only a fit accompaniment of the age of drinking, duelling, cock-fighting, and like brutalising habits. To it was sacrificed as well female delicacy as manly truth and honour. An idiot laugh was echoed by the crowd, as a high-born dame, in rank of the noblest, in beauty glorious as a vision, profimed the heavenly gift, cast aside the modesty of her sex, and yielded to a filthy caress, to buy a vote.

The effect of electoral contests before 1832, which, from the number of close boroughs, were, of course, much less numerous, tended to demoralise a portion of the constituency, and the inhabitants of the places where they occurred; but, at the same time, they generally ended by placing in the House the most eminent men of the day. The system since