The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1839-06-18 00:00:00

burgh the other day; that, for his own part, he thought
the two former rather advantages than the contrary,
and spoke of the " kindly feeling engendered" by
their efficacious op, !ration ; and seemed to say that
bribery, like mercy, was " twice blessed—blessing him
that gives, and him that takes." We had read in a
greater orator even_ than the great Macaulay, that
" the interest of the traitor is not regarded by the man
who bribes him. `When the votary of ambition has
once attained his of eject, he also becomes master of his
vile agents ; and, a s he knows their baseness then,
then he detests the m, he keeps them at a wary dis-
tance, he spurns them from him." (See Leland's
Demosthenes : Oration on the Crown.) With Sir
Robert Peel we loatle and abhor corruption, however
the pure whig of self-denying Edinburgh may palliate
or applaud it. But we must not quarrel with tastes.
Possibly his sojourn in the East Indies may have put
the matter in a diffe rent light before his eyes.
The natural, inevitable, and just influence of pro-
perty is stigmatised_ as intimidation ; and if a tenant
will not pay his rent or till his land in a husbandman-
like manner, and the landlord refuses to renew his lease ; '
or if the shopkeeper sells bad butter, and finds his
customers fall off, utraightway he becomes a patriot—
a martyr to the liberty of conscience—and the Examiner,
with its characteristic fairness, quotes him in testimony
to the evils of open voting. The real amount of direct
intimidation is not great : we honestly own we wish it
were less. But the Ballot will not and cannot dimi-
nish it. Why ? Because if the Ballot fail in securing
secresy, as to political opinions, of course it fails alto-
gether. Now in this country, so long as it is inhabited
by men who are descended from the honest and free-
spoken ancestry of the Saxons—men will never wear a
padlock on their lips as to any questions of political
interest.

To make the Ballot worth anything, the unhappy
voter must, from day to day, and month to month,
and year to year, maintain an absolute silence upon
the only questions which greatly interest the people of
England as a body. The wife of his bosom, the child
of his affections, the companion of his jovial hours,
must not know what he thinks upon politics. His de-
meanour must be guarded, his remarks studied, his
reading stealthy, or the bias of his opinions will in-
fallibly be known ; and if known, according to the
argument of the Radicals, persecuted; and if perse-
cuted, what benefit has the Ballot conferred on him ?
We know no one with whom to compare him save the
barber of Midas, who, oppressed with the secret which
he could no longer contain, rushed into a wilderness,
and cried aloud to the winds, " Midas has the ears of
an ass." We beg distinctly to state, that we here
make no allusion to the auricular appendages of Mr.
Grote, however the quotation may apply to those of
his followers. If he is the tenant of a farm, and his
landlord wishes to employ intimidation—and in no
other case is the hypothesis of Ballot protection requi-
site—he must hurrah for the landlord's candidate, he
must pledge toasts which he abhors, he must profess
his landlord's politics, and all this the more thoroughly
and obtrusively to avoid suspicion, which, under the
Ballot system, will watch with the eyes of Argus. If
the landlord sees any reason to suspect, he will act as
upon a certainty. In such a case, " once to doubt, is
once to be resolved." Nay, since the means of esta-
blishing his veracity, which he at present enjoys by the
production of the poll-book, will not then exist, he
must go greater lengths than he does now in trying to
convince the tyrannical Squire that he voluntarily
adopts the politics he inwardly detests. Giles Chaw-
bacon will find himself in this dilemma. Either he
must remain doggedly silent to all questioning, and
thus having such silence interpreted as at the Old
Bailey, "in malam partem," be convicted of the guilt
of holding opinions hostile to those of his landlord, in
which case we are bound to assume that he is summa-
rily ejected from his farm, or he must square and ac-
commodate his whole life to an acted lie, and make
strong protestations, every one of which is hollow and
false.

The same applies with almost equal force to the
shopkeeper and workman. Those who inquire now
into the political opinions of their dependents, will still
try to ferret them out, and every imaginable trap and
snare will be laid to betray the voter into a confession of
his creed. Shopkeepers will be asked point blank by
keen partizans to vote for Mr. A. If any one refuses
to answer he will be judged an enemy, and treated
accordingly ; if he promises to do so, and then votes
the other way, he tells a deliberate and wicked lie; if
his conscience and his customer agree, and he votes
according to his promise, where is the use of the ballot
to him ? But it is said that his politics will not he
found out. Is he then to frequent no spouting club ?
to take in no newspaper ? to engage in no discussion
with his friends and acquaintances ? For, as surely as
he does all or any part of this, so surely will his politics
become known. A straw will show which way the
wind blows ; and under the intolerable state of sus-
picion and watchfulness in which we shall live, if this
hopeful scheme of secret voting be adopted, very slight
straws indeed will be taken to determine the custom of
those who conscientiously or tyrannically think that
their opponents in politics ought not to have their sup-
port in private life. Is an Englishman to forfeit his
birthright, and consider politics as tabooed and for-
bidden ground, as if he dreaded an ukase from St.
Petersburgh or a firman from Constantinople ? What
is to became of public meetings—of the sacred right of
petitioning—of the numberless modes whereby out of
the two Houses of Parliament the wants and wishes of
the masses of the community are made known. Under
the Ballot such things either cannot exist, or if they
do, they render it nugatory and void.
Besides, are such questions as those of Education
and Church Establishment, which come home to the
hearts, and interest the thoughts of every one, to draw
forth no expression of opinion ? May a future Lord
John Russell and a Committee of the Privy Council
bring forward a scheme which is to give the people a
stone for bread, and reduce Christianity to a caput
mortuum of abstract morality; and is the VOICE of the
nation not to be uplifted in stern and solemn denun-
ciation of the unrighteous project ? Are men who
think strongly not to speak strongly ? But if they
speak ; if they petition ; if they attend public meetings,
they become marked men ; their politics are known—
their party is announced—and again we ask, what
good will the Ballot do for them ?
Want of space compels us to pass over the mere
mechanical difficulty of the question, which is no slight
one, namely, How is the Tote of the constituent to be
taken so as to prevent fraud ? Possibly some contri-
vance yet in nubibus may be invented for this ; but it
is yet to be made known. It is, as Sydney Smith
says, a piece of paulo post futurum legislation. But
one thing is certain, that whether the box be a trap-
box, or a ball-box, or a dagger-box, or a soap-box, no
scrutiny or investigation of votes can afterwards take
place ; and either an election must be declared abso-
lutely null and void, because the number of votes
given exceeds the number of voters, to the manifest
injury of the candidate who, having the majority of
good votes, ought in fact to have succeeded; and a
new ballotting must take place, attended with perhaps
the like results—or an investigation must take place,
how, nobody knows. The bad votes, at all events,
must be rejected, which cannot (so far as we can see)
be done without making known to some parties, at
least, the names of the voters.

But it is said that in private Societies and Club-
houses the Ballot is used with convenience and advan-
tage. True : but there is no sequitur from this to
Secret Suffrage in voting at elections for representa-
tives in Parliament. A man who uses this argument
is guilty of the fallacy of non tali pro tali. The cases
are not analogous. In a private Club a man puts in
his black ball, and never thinks or talks, or has occa-
sion for thinking or talking, afterwards about the
matter. He is not catechised on the subject, and from
motives of prudence keeps his own counsel. Besides,
in Clubs men vote for merely personal reasons. Their
reasons may be so capricious as not to bear question-
ing, and yet may be sufficient to induce them to vote
for or against a man in a Society where they must be
brought continually in contact with him. Openly to
blackball a Candidate is to fasten a personal quarrel
upon yourself. The point of honour is brought into
action, and, without some such protection as the Bal-
lot-box does there really afford, these associations
could not continue. Men may be blackballed there
for strange reasons : it may be because a Candidate
wears a pea-green coat with a sky-blue waterfall; or
the vera causa of his rejection may be, that he fancies
low shoos, cotton stockings, and short inexpressibles;