Mr. Austin replied: “It’s disagreeable, but it’s the practice. I would gladly be bound by a common undertaking to abstain.”
“Captain Beauchamp argues that it would be all to your advantage. He says that a personal visit is the only chance for an unknown candidate to make the people acquainted with him.”
“It’s a very good opportunity for making him acquainted with them; and I hope he may profit by it.”
“Ah! pah! ‘To beg the vote and wink the bribe,’” Colonel Halkett subjoined abhorrently:
‘“It well becomes the Whiggish tribe
To beg the vote and wink the bribe.’
Canvassing means intimidation or corruption.”
“Or the mixture of the two, called cajolery,” said Mr. Austin; “and that was the principal art of the Whigs.”
Thus did these gentlemen converse upon canvassing.
It is not possible to gather up in one volume of sound the rattle of the knocks at Englishmen’s castle-gates during election days; so, with the thunder of it unheard, the majesty of the act of canvassing can be but barely appreciable, and he, therefore, who would celebrate it must follow the candidate obsequiously from door to door, where, like a cross between a postman delivering a bill and a beggar craving an alms, patiently he attempts the extraction of the vote, as little boys pick periwinkles with a pin.
“This is your duty, which I most abjectly entreat you to do,” is pretty nearly the form of the supplication.