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Happily, things have greatly improved since the time of Cobden. It is probable that the average elector still fails to see that his representative deserves any gratitude or thanks for his services in Parliament. On the contrary, the elector may think that it is he who is entitled to some return for having helped his representative to a seat in the House of Commons in preference to another who was equally eager for the honour. The spectacle of so many men competing for the voluntary service of the State in the capacity of a Member of Parliament cannot but tend to convince the ordinary elector that he is conferring a favour on the particular candidate for whom he votes. Constituents, certainly, are often very exacting. And as the representative desires to retain his seat, he cannot afford to ignore a letter from even the humblest and obscurest of the electors. The General Election may come round again with unexpected suddenness, bringing with it the day of reckoning for the Member who has been neglectful of communications from his constituents. Then it is that the voter, however humble, however obscure, can help to make or mar the prospect of the Member’s return to Westminster. The worst of it is that some constituents will unreasonably persist in asking for things impossible. In the post-bag of the M.P. appointments used to be greatly in demand. There was a time when the M.P. had some patronage to distribute in the way of nominations to posts in the Customs and the Inland Revenue, for which no examination was required, should the Party he supported be in power. But that good time, or bad, is gone and for ever. The throwing open of the Civil Service to competition deprived the M.P. of this sort of small change, which he once was able to scatter among the electors so as to reward past services and secure future support. Now he has absolutely nothing in his gift, except, perhaps, a nomination for any vacant sub-post office in his constituency. Yet numbers of the electors still imagine there are many comfortable posts in the public service which are to be had merely for the saying of a word by their representatives to the Minister of the Department concerned. An example of what the M.P. has occasionally to put up with may be seen in the terms of a blunt and abusive epistle—admittedly a very rare one—sent by a disappointed office-seeker to the man he says “he carried in on his own shoulders” at the last election. It opened: “You’re a fraud, and you know it. I don’t care a rap for the billet or the money either, but you could hev got it for me if you wasn’t so mean. Two pound a week ain’t any more to me than 40 shillin’s is to you, but I objekt to bein’ maid a fool of.” It went on: “Soon after you was elected by my hard workin’, a feller here wanted to bet me that You wouldn’t be in the House more than a week before you made a ass of yourself. I bet him a Cow on that as I thort you was worth it then. After I got Your Note sayin’ you deklined to ackt in the matter I driv the Cow over to the Feller’s place an’ told him he had won her.” And thus concluded: “That’s orl I got by howlin’ meself Hoarse for you on pole day, an’ months befoar. I believe you think you’ll get in agen. I don’t. Yure no man. An’ I doant think yure much of a demercrat either. I lowers meself ritin to so low a feller, even tho I med him a member of parlerment.”
Other electors argue that as M.P.’s are law-makers they should consequently be able to rescue law-breakers from the clutches of the police and gaolers. Accordingly there are appeals for the remission of fines imposed on children for breaking windows, and even to get sentences of penal servitude revoked. The respectable tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy, who could be restored to a sound financial position by the loan of £100, is perhaps the worst pest of all the cadging letter-writers. He usually declares that he not only voted for his representative, but also attended every meeting that gentleman addressed in the course of the election. The best reply the M.P. could make to such an attempt to fleece him is to advise his correspondent to attend more to business and less to politics; but he probably never makes it, for he can rarely afford to speak out his mind to a constituent. An Irish Member who was elected for an Ulster constituency after a close contest showed me a letter he got from one of his supporters asking for some favour. “I voted for you under thirteen different names,” said the writer, “and could I do more for you than that?” No Member would think of offending so invaluable a supporter. Inventors are also of the plagues from which the M.P. suffers. The man who knows how to make soap out of sawdust writes glowing letters about the fortune awaiting a company which would work the process. Almost every post brings samples of tonics and boxes of lozenges calculated to transform the harshest croak into the clearest and mellowest of voices. “I shall be thankful for a testimonial,” said the maker of one mixture, “that after you had used my specific the House was spellbound by the music of your tones, and I guarantee to extend your fame by publishing it, with your portrait, broadcast.” Tradesmen are very importunate. For instance, the Labour Members receive circulars from too enterprising firms soliciting their custom for things which, it was declared, were most requisite for the maintenance of the state and dignity becoming a Member of Parliament. From one firm a Member, fresh from working in the coalmines, had a tender for a Court dress of black velvet, to cost, with sword, only £50. A company of wine merchants offered to stock with the choicest brands the wine-cellar of the establishment they presumed he was about to set up in London.
The day after the announcement of a birth in a Member’s family a van pulled up at the entrance to the Houses of Parliament containing three different sorts of perambulators. The tradesman who brought them was extremely indignant because the police refused him admission to the House to display their good points and conveniences to the happy father! Poets ask for subscriptions to publish their works, or, enclosing some doggerel verses as samples, appeal for orders for odes for the next General Election. “If you would quote in the House a verse from my volume, Twitterings in the Twilight, what a grand advertisement I’d get!” wrote one rhymester to his representative. “You might say something like this: ‘One of the most delightful collections of poems it has ever been my good fortune to come across is Mr. Socrates Wilkin’s Twitterings in the Twilight. Could the situation in which the Empire finds itself be more happily touched off than in the following verse of that eminent poet?’ and then go on to quote some lines from my book, which I enclose.” Members who are lawyers and doctors are expected by a large section of their constituents to give professional advice for nothing. If one of these unreasonable persons has a dispute with his landlord as to the amount of rent due, or finds it impossible to recover a debt, he expects, as a matter of course, his representative, if a gentleman learned in the law, to help him out of his difficulty; or, if a doctor, he favours him with long and incoherent accounts of mysterious complaints from which he has suffered for years. The M.P. is also expected to throw oil on disturbed domestic waters. Here is a specimen of a communication which is by no means uncommon:
Dear Sir,
Me and the wife had a bit of a tiff last Saturday night, and she won’t make it up. If you just send her a line saying Bill’s all right, she will come round. She thinks the hell of a lot of you since you kissed the nipper the day you called for our votes.
But pity the poor M.P. who receives from a female voter so embarrassing a letter as the following:
Honoured Sir,
I hear that Mr. Balfour is not a married man. Something tells me that I would make the right sort of wife for him. I am coming to London to-morrow, and will call at the House of Commons to see you, hoping you will get me an introduction to the honourable gentleman. I am only thirty years of age, and can do cooking and washing.
Agnes Merton.
P.S.—Perhaps if Mr. Balfour would not have me, you would say a word for me to one of the policemen at the House.
During the evening the Member who received this strange epistle cautiously ventured into the Central Hall, and, sure enough, espied an eccentric-looking woman in angry controversy with a constable, who was trying to induce her to go away. But she refused to leave, and ultimately found sympathetic companions in the crazy old party who has haunted the place for years in the hope that some day she will induce the Government to restore the £5,000,000 of which she declares they have robbed her, and the other lady, younger, but just as mad, who is convinced that some M.P. has married her secretly and left her to starve, and has come to Westminster to claim him “before all the world.”