It is held by patriots and sages that it is a citizen’s duty to serve the public wherever his services are required, whether it be in the tented field or in the civic chair. So far as the matter of the civic chair is concerned, many of us—and the writer among the number—are quite content to let those who are so supremely anxious to serve their fellows have the offices as long as they can fulfil the duties fairly well.
Unquestionably, the public have a right to the individual’s services, but until the public really need them I hold it not to be a real neglect of one’s duty to let those who are so very anxious to serve do so, so long as they serve well and without public pay. The public will seek out the individual if they really require his aid. When Rome was in her palmiest days Cincinnatus was made consul, and received all the honors the Roman people could confer upon him. When his consulship had expired he retired to his farm beyond the Tiber, and went to cultivating the soil with his own hands. About 458 B.C., while engaged, it is said, ploughing in his field, five horsemen galloped up and informed him that he had been elected Dictator of that mighty empire republic—Rome. He left his plough and put on once more the royal purple.
George Washington, upon resigning his commission to Congress at the close of the war of the Revolution, retired to his lands at Mount Vernon on the Potomac, and is credited with having said, “I’d rather be among my fields at Mount Vernon than be emperor of the world.”
As might be supposed, there are often curious incidents and characters which appear in this connection. We have scarcely a county—I had almost said township—in which there is not the history of some one or other eventful election or polling day.
All sorts of objections are raised to throw doubt upon the suitability of each candidate by his opponent in politics or rival in local popularity, each side waxing eloquent in favor of its own man, or even resorting to means that are in some degree beyond the limits of wit or repartee to confound the tactics of the opposition candidate. In a recent contest a meeting called in the interests of one side by invitation cards was packed by their opponents through the medium of a card, a fac-simile in all except the hour, which, being a few minutes earlier than the bona fide invitation enabled the holders to secure the seats in advance and in good order. The old-time stories of two-thirds of the “free and independent electors” going to the poll on crutches that later they might be used as shillelahs, with broken heads as the result, are not more absurd than some of the stories of incidents in the back-country contests for municipal honors at the present time.
A candidate during recent municipal elections had been charged with religious unbelief, and consequent unfitness for the office. He was a farmer who owned and cultivated his one hundred acres—worth, perhaps, farm and stock, about $11,000. During his younger days, when sowing his wild oats, he had strayed from home and had been a sailor before the mast on our great lakes, and had thus mixed considerably more than his fellow farmers with the outside world. When on the rostrum, making his speech, urging the people to vote for him as councillor, he was dressed in a Canada pepper-and-salt tweed suit, shooting coat, with large lapels to his pockets overhanging them, a red scarf about his neck, and a pair of thick cowhide boots, the tops of which were too large, with the legs of his trousers stretched tightly over them. His tout ensemble would denote a good plain, practical farmer, in fair circumstances, and having a mediocre amount of brain power or gift of penetration. Once getting upon the rostrum his speech ran on about thus:—“Gentlemen, I am accused as not believing the Bible. I tell you that ain’t so, for I believe the Bible as well as you do. There are some verses in the Bible I do not quite believe, for I don’t believe Jonah was three days in the whale’s belly, and that he would come out alive. Well, I don’t believe that Samson set 3,000 foxes’ tails on fire, and set fire to green wheat. The rest of the Bible I believe, and I think you ought to elect me. Gentlemen, I ask for your votes,” and with this brief address he bowed and left the platform. A hum was heard about the room, the general conclusion being that his explanation was worse than the charge; that he did not better it any, and would have done as well to have said nothing. It would be almost superfluous to add that this novel candidate was defeated, and, so far as I can learn, in Ontario at least, never before was religious belief made a test of fitness for municipal office.
Another candidate comes before my mind who wanted to sacrifice himself on the altar of his country by filling some civic office. He had, it seems, been jocularly accused by someone with being a clodhopper and not sharp enough for a councillor. For the first time in his life he mounted the rostrum, and eager as he was to speak when among the crowd, up there it was quite another affair. A great big, hulking fellow he was, who had just attained his majority, and whose father had set him up on a hundred-acre farm. Never since his youthful days, when he recited at the common school—
“On Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,”
with all the declamation the piece could possibly stand, had he stood up before the public. He chokes, makes a squeak, tries it again, swallows rapidly, and after a most painful suspense of a minute or so gets out: “Gentlemen, I am a clodhopper, and I’m not ashamed to own it. But I am fit for the office of councillor, and if you will vote for me I will serve you well and faithfully. I promise you I will keep down expenditures, and I will do my best to look after the roads and bridges. Gentlemen, I ask for your votes.” And he gets off that rostrum as quickly as if he were standing on hot coals. He is in a profuse glow of perspiration, feeling down in his heart, “What a fool I made of myself.” This time the religious belief was all right, and he got in.
In our towns and cities throughout Ontario, nearly seven out of every ten men are looking for municipal offices. Let one attend a town nomination and he will find as many as ten applicants for every single office, and the mutual recriminations which these would-be-immortalized townsmen make upon one another are to the listener, to say the least, rather disgraceful and disgusting. It is a fact that very ordinary persons in our towns and villages—men of very moderate ability or means—will come as near calling their fellow-townsmen liars as they dare go, and all for the sake of sitting at a council board for one year. Let the roads in that town, for instance, be pretty bad during an open winter, and one may hear such municipal councillors holding an open-air meeting of the council, and it is quite refreshing to find that every single one of that devoted council is responsible for the bad streets of the town. To get municipal honors in towns it may be necessary to act in this way, but then I am pleased to think there are some few persons in every community who are content to jog on through life and do without such honors, and who do not find it necessary to call their fellows liars. It is said the real safeguard for the liberty of the English-speaking people is the town meeting. If that be so, our liberties in Canada are fully assured.