London, Friday, August 20, 1852 

Just before the late House of Commons separated, it resolved to 
heap up as many difficulties as possible for its successors in their 
way to Parliament. It voted a Draconian law against bribery, 
corruption, intimidation, and electioneering sharp practices in 
general. 

A long list of questions is drawn up, which, by this enactment, 
may be put to petitioners or sitting members, the most searching 
and stringent that can be conceived.* They may be required on 
oath to state who were their agents, and what communications 
they held with them. They may be asked and compelled to state, 
not only what they know, but what they “believe, conjecture, and 
suspect,” as to money expended either by themselves or any one 
else acting—authorized or not authorized—on their behalf. In a 
word, no member can go through the strange ordeal without risk 
of perjury, if he have the slightest idea that it is possible or likely 
that any one has been led to overstep on his behalf the limits of 
the law. 

Now, even supposing this law to take it for granted that the new 
legislators will use the same liberty as the clergy, who only believe 
some of the Thirty-Nine Articles,**° yet contrive to sign them all, 
yet there remain, nevertheless, clauses sufficient to make the new 
Parliament the most virginal assembly that ever made speeches 
and passed laws for the three kingdoms. And in juxtaposition with 
the general election immediately following, this law secures to the 
Tories the glory, that under their administration the greatest 
purity of election has been theoretically proclaimed and the greatest 

amount of electoral corruption has been practically carried out. 

“A fresh election is proceeded with, and here a scene of bribery, corruption, 
violence, drunkenness and murder ensues, unparalleled since the times the old Tory 
monopoly reigned supreme before. We actually hear of soldiers with loaded guns, 
and bayonets fixed, taking Liberal electors by force, dragging them under the 
landlord’s eyes to vote against their own consciences, and these soldiers, shooting 
with deliberate aim the people who dared to sympathize with the captive electors, 
and committing wholesale murder on the unresisting people! [Allusion to the event 
at Six Mile Bridge, Limerick, County Clare.] It may be said: That was in Ireland! 
Ay, and in England they have employed their police to break the stalls of those 
opposed to them; they have sent their organized gangs of midnight ruffians: 
prowling through the streets to intercept and intimidate the Liberal electors; they 
have opened the cesspools of drunkenness; they have showered the gold of 
corruption, as at Derby, and in almost every contested place they have exercised 
systematic intimidation.” * 

Thus far Ernest Jones’s People’s Paper. Now, after this Chartist 
weekly paper, hear the weekly paper of the opposite party, the 
most sober, the most rational, the most moderate organ of the 
industrial Bourgeoisie, The London Economist: 

“We believe we may affirm, at this general election, there has been more 
truckling, more corruption, more intimidation, more fanaticism and more debauchery 
than on any previous occasion.... It is reported that bribery has been more 
extensively resorted to at this election than for many previous years.... Of the 
amount of intimidation and undue influence of every sort which has been practised 
at the late election, it is probably impossible to form an exaggerated estimate... 
And when we sum up all these things—the brutal drunkenness, the low intrigues, 
the wholesale corruption, the barbarous intimidation, the integrity of candidates 
warped and stained, the honest electors who are ruined, the feeble ones who are 
suborned and dishonored; the lies, the stratagems, the slanders, which stalk abroad 
in the daylight, naked and not ashamed—the desecration of holy words, the soiling 
of noble names—we stand aghast at the holocaust of victims, of destroyed bodies 
and lost souls, on whose funeral pile a new Parliament is reared.” » 

The means of corruption and intimidation were the usual ones: 
direct Government influence. Thus on an electioneering agent at 
Derby, arrested in the flagrant act of bribing, a letter was found 
from Major Beresford, the Secretary at War, wherein that same 
Beresford opens a credit upon a commercial firm for electioneer- 
ing monies. The Poole Herald publishes a circular from the 
Admiralty-House to the half-pay officers, signed by the comman- 
der-in-chief of a naval station, requesting their votes for the 
ministerial candidates.— Direct force of arms has also been 
employed, as at Cork, Belfast, Limerick (at which latter place eight 

persons were killed).— Threats of ejectment by landlords against 
their farmers, unless they voted with them. The Land Agents of 
Lord Derby herein gave the example to their colleagues.— Threats 
of exclusive dealing against shopkeepers, of dismissal against 
workmen, intoxication, etc., etc-——To these profane means of 
corruption spiritual ones were added by the Tories; the royal 
proclamation against Roman Catholic Processions* was issued in 
order to inflame bigotry and religious hatred; the No-Popery cry 
was raised everywhere. One of the results of this proclamation 
were the Stockport Riots.”! The Irish priests, of course, retorted 
with similar weapons. 

The election is hardly over, and already a single Queen’s 
Counsel has received from twenty-five places instructions to 
invalidate the returns to Parliament on account of bribery and 
intimidation. Such petitions against elected members have been 
signed, and the expenses of the proceedings raised at Derby, 
Cockermouth, Barnstaple, Harwich, Canterbury, Yarmouth, 
Wakefield, Boston, Huddersfield, Windsor, and a great number of 
other places. Of eight to ten Derbyite members it is proved that, 
even under the most favorable circumstances, they will be 
rejected on petition. 

The principal scenes of this bribery, corruption and intimidation 
were, of course, the agricultural counties and the Peers’ Boroughs, 
for the conservation of the greatest possible number of which 
latter, the Whigs had expended all their acumen in the Reform 
Bill of 1831. The constituencies of large towns and of densely 
populated manufacturing counties were, by their peculiar cir- 
cumstances, very unfavorable ground for such manoeuvres. 

Days of general election are in Britain traditionally the 
bacchanalia of drunken debauchery, conventional stock-jobbing 
terms for the discounting of political consciences, the richest 
harvest times of the publicans. As an English paper says, “these 
recurring saturnalia never fail to leave enduring traces of their 
pestilential presence.”> Quite naturally so. They are saturnalia in 
the ancient Roman sense of the word. The master then turned 
servant, the servant turned master. If the servant be master for 
one day, on that day brutality will reign supreme. The masters 
were the grand dignitaries of the ruling classes, or sections of 
classes, the servants formed the mass of these same classes, the 

privileged electors encircled by the mass of the non-electors, of 
those thousands that had no other calling than to be mere 
hangers-on, and whose support, vocal or manual, always appeared 
desirable, were it only on account of the theatrical effect. 

If you follow up the history of British elections for a century 
past or longer, you are tempted to ask, not why British 
Parliaments were so bad, but on the contrary, how they managed 
to be even as good as they were, and to represent as much as they 
did, though in a dim refraction, the actual movement of British 
society. Just as opponents of the representative system must feel 
surprised on finding that legislative bodies in which the abstract 
majority, the accident of the mere number is decisive, yet decide 
and resolve according to the necessities of the situation—at least 
during the period of their full vitality. It will always be impossible, 
even by the utmost straining of logical deductions, to derive from 
the relations of mere numbers the necessity of a vote in 
accordance with the actual state of things; but from a given state 
of things the necessity of certain relations of members will always 
follow as of itself. The traditional bribery of British elections, what 
else was it, but another form, as brutal as it was popular, in which 
the relative strength of the contending parties showed itself? Their 
respective means of influence and of dominion, which on other 
occasions they used in a normal way, were here enacted for a few 
days 1n an abnormal and more or less burlesque manner. But the 
premise remained, that the candidates of the rivaling parties 
represented the interests of the mass of.the electors, and that the 
privileged electors again represented the interests of the non- 
voting mass, or rather, that this voteless mass had, as yet, no 
specific interest of its own. The Delphic priestesses had to become 
intoxicated by vapors to enable them to find oracles; the British 
people must intoxicate itself with gin and porter to enable it to 
find its oracle-finders, the legislators. And where these oracle- 
finders were to be looked for, that was a matter of course. 

This relative position of classes and parties underwent a radical 
change from the moment the industrial and commercial middle 
classes, the Bourgeoisie, took up its stand as an official party at the 
side of the Whigs and Tories, and especially from the passing of 
the Reform Bill in 1831. These Bourgeois were in no wise fond of 
costly electioneering manoeuvres, of faux frais of general elections. 
They considered it cheaper to compete with the landed aristocracy 
by general moral, than by personal pecuniary means. On the other 
hand they were conscious of representing a universally predomi- 
nant interest of modern society. They were, therefore, in a position 

to demand that electors should be ruled by their common national 
interests, not by personal and local motives, and the more they 
recurred to this postulate, the more the latter species of electoral 
influence was, by the very composition of constituencies, centered 
in the landed aristocracy, but withheld from the middle classes. 
Thus the Bourgeoisie contended for the principle of moral 
elections and forced the enactment of laws in that sense, intended, 
each of them, as safeguards against the local influence of the 
landed aristocracy; and indeed, from 1831 down, bribery adopted 
a more civilized, more hidden form, and general elections went off 
in a more sober way than before. When at last the mass of the 
people ceased to be a mere chorus, taking a more or less 
impassioned part in the struggle of the official heroes, drawing the 
lots among them, rioting, in bacchantic carouse, at the creation of 
parliamentary divinities, like the Cretan Curetes* at the birth of 
Jupiter,?*? and taking pay and treat for such participation in their 
glory—when the Chartists surrounded in threatening masses the 
whole circle within which the official election struggle must come 
off, and watched with scrutinizing mistrust every movement taking 
place within it—then an election like that of 1852 could not but 
call for universal indignation, and elicit even from the conservative 
Times, for the first time, some words in favor of general suffrage, 
and make the whole mass of the British Proletariat shout as with 
one voice. The foes of Reform, they have given Reformers the 
best arguments; such is an election under the class system; such is 
a House of Commons with such a system of election! 

_In order to comprehend the character of bribery, corruption 
and intimidation, such as they have been practised in the late 
election, it is necessary to call attention to a fact which operated in 
a parallel direction. 

If you refer to the general elections since 1831, you will find 
that, in the same measure as the pressure of the voteless majority 
of the country upon the privileged body of electors was increasing, 
as the demand was heard louder, from the middle classes, for an 
extension of the circle of constituencies, from the working class, to 
extinguish every trace of a similar privileged circle—that in the 
same measure the number of electors who actually voted grew less 
and less, and the constituencies thus more and more contracted 
themselves. Never was this fact more striking than in the late 
election. 

Let us take, for instance, London. In the City the constituency 
numbers 26,728; only 10,000 voted. The Tower Hamlets number 
23,534 registered electors; only 12,000 voted. In Finsbury, of 
20,025 electors, not one-half voted. In Liverpool, the scene of one 
of the most animated contests, of 17,433 registered electors, only 
13,000 came to the polls. 

These examples will suffice. What do they prove? The apathy of 
the privileged constituencies. And this apathy, what proves it? 
That they have outlived themselves—that they have lost every 
interest in their own political existence. This is in no wise apathy 
against politics in general, but against a species of politics, the 
result of which, for the most part, can only consist in helping the 
Tories to oust the Whigs, or the Whigs to conquer the Tories. The 
constituencies feel instinctively that the decision lies no longer 
either with Parliament, or with the making of Parliament. Who 
repealed the Corn Laws? Assuredly not the voters who had elected 
a Protectionist Parliament, still less the Protectionist Parliament 
itself, but only and exclusively the pressure from without. In this 
pressure from without, in other means of influencing Parliament 
than by voting, a great portion even of electors now believe. They 
consider the hitherto lawful mode of voting as an antiquated 
formality, but from the moment Parliament should make front 
against the pressure from without, and dictate laws to the nation 
in the sense of its narrow constituencies, they would join the 
general assault against the whole antiquated system of machinery. 

The bribery and intimidation practised by the Tories were, then, 
merely violent experiments for bringing back to life dying 
electoral bodies which have become incapable of production, and 
which can no longer create decisive electoral results and really 
national Parliaments. And the result? The old Parliament was 
dissolved, because at the end of its career it had dissolved into 
sections which brought each other to a complete standstill. The 
new Parliament begins where the old one ended; it is paralytic 
from the hour of its birth.