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.”
3
The Member of Parliament is liable to receive other communications of even less flattering and more exasperating character. Bribes are occasionally dangled before him through the post. Will he allow his name to be used in the floating of a company, or in the advertising of some article of common use or a patent medicine? Will he use his influence in obtaining a Government contract for a certain firm? If he will, there is a cheque for so-and-so at his disposal. In the course of a debate in the House of Commons on the payment of Members, John Burns, for many years a well-known Liberal Minister, evoked both laughter and applause by reading his reply to an offer of £50 received during his previous service as a Labour representative if he obtained for a person in Belfast a vacant collectorship of taxes. “Sir,” he wrote, “you are a scoundrel. I wish you were within reach of my boot.”
But the sane and the righteous give the M.P. more annoyance than the knavish and the crazy. Think of the numerous local functions—religious, social, and political—to which the Member of Parliament is invited! When a meeting is being organized in the constituency, naturally the first thought of its promoters is to try to get the Member to attend. The more conspicuous he is in Parliament, and therefore the more likely to attract an audience, the greater is the number of these invitations; and if he fails to respond, the more widespread is the dissatisfaction among his baulked constituents. He is expected to preside at the inaugural meetings of local amateur dramatic societies and local naturalists’ field clubs, and “to honour with his presence” the beanfeasts of local friendly societies. The literary institution, designed to keep young men of the constituency out of the public-houses, must be opened by him. He must attend entertainments of a mixed political and musical sort, at which his speech is sandwiched between a sentimental song and a comic.
But perhaps the Member of Parliament is most worried by the appeals to his generosity and charity which pour in upon him in aid of churches, chapels, mission-halls, schools, working men’s institutes, hospitals, asylums, cricket and football clubs, and in fact societies and institutions of all sorts and sundry. It is only proper that if money be needed for an excellent local purpose, the representative of the district in Parliament should be included in the appeal. Many wealthy Members of Parliament spend from £1,000 to £4,000 a year on local charities, and they spend it willingly when the objects appear to them to be deserving. But of the 707 M.P.’s there are never a great many who can be described as wealthy.
Besides that, many representatives—among them being some of the most charitable of men—always refuse to send contributions to local objects, influenced by a sense of honour and the fear that it might be regarded as bribing the electors. In so doing they run a grave risk of being misunderstood by their constituents. If a Member of Parliament should refuse to help in providing them with coals, blankets, footballs, cricket-bats, big drums, billiard-tables, church steeples, sewing-machines, he is set down as mean, and numbers of his constituents vow that he shall not have their votes again at the General Election. There is a story told that when John Morley was seeking re-election for Newcastle-on-Tyne an elector who was asked to vote for this statesman of the highest and purest ideals indignantly exclaimed: “Not me! What has John Morley ever done for the Rugger Football Club?”