For the proper production of the young M.P. there are many receipts, but only one is genuine. Take a rickety boy, and provide him with a wealthy father, slightly flavoured with a good social position and political tastes. Send him to a public school, having first eliminated as much youthfulness as is compatible with continued existence. Add some flattering masters, and a distaste for games. Season with the idea that he is born for a great career. Let him be, if possible, verbose and argumentative, and inclined to contradict his elders. Eliminate more youth and transfer hot to a University. Add more verbosity, and a strong extract of priggishness. Throw in a degree, and two speeches at the Union. Set him to simmer for two years in a popular constituency, and serve him up, a chattering pedant of twenty-four, at Westminster.
In the course of the contest which resulted in his return to the House of Commons, the young M.P. will have tasted the sweets of advertisement by seeing his name constantly placarded in huge letters on coloured posters. He will have been constantly referred to as "Our popular young Candidate," and he will thus have become convinced that the welfare of his country imperatively demands his immediate presence and permanent continuance in Parliament. When the genial butcher who, besides retailing the carcases of sheep and oxen, sits in the Town Council, and presides over one of the local political associations, declared, as he often has at other contests and of other candidates, that never, in the course of his political career, had he listened to more mature wisdom, adorned with nobler eloquence, than that which had fallen from "Our young and popular Candidate," he was merely satisfying a burning desire for rhetorical expansion, without any particular regard to accuracy of statement. But the candidate himself greedily gulps that lump of flattery, and all the praise which is the conventional sauce for every political gander. On this he grows fat, and being, in addition, puffed up by a very considerable conceit of his own, he eventually presents an aspect which is not pleasing, and assumes (towards those who are not voters in the Constituency) a manner which can scarcely be described as modest.
The majority of his Constituents regard him simply as an automatic machine for the regular distribution of large subscriptions. He regards himself as a being of great importance and capacity, and endowed with the power of acting as he likes, whilst the local wirepullers look upon him as a convenient mask, behind which they may the more effectively carry on their own petty schemes of personal ambition.
As a Candidate, moreover, the young M.P. will have discovered that the triumph of his party depends not merely or even chiefly upon the due exposition of those political principles with which he may have lately crammed himself by the aid of a stray volume of Mill, and a Compendium of Political History, but rather upon the careful observance of local custom and local etiquette, and the ceaseless effort to trump his adversary's every trick. He will thus have become the President of the local Glee Club, the Patron of a Scientific Association, and a local Dog Show, the Vice-President of four Cricket Clubs and of five Football Clubs, a Member of the Committee of the Hospital Ball, and of the Society for Improving the breed of Grey Parrots; to say nothing of the Guild for Promoting the happiness of Middle-aged Housemaids, and the local Association for the Distribution of Penny Buns, at cheap prices, to the deserving poor. Moreover, before he has discovered the true relation of benefit societies to politics, he will find himself a Member of the Odd Fellows, the Foresters, the Hearts of Oak, the Druids, and the Loyal and Ancient Order of Free and Accepted Buffaloes, with the right, conferred by the last-named Society, of being addressed on lodge nights as if he were a Baronet, or, at least, a Knight.
Having thus met and shaken hands with the working-man during his hours of festive relaxation, the young M.P. will be properly qualified for discussing those social questions which form the chief part of every aspirant's political baggage. Being gifted with a happy power of enunciating pompous platitudes with an air of profound conviction, and of spreading butter churned from the speeches of his leaders on the bread of political economy, he will be highly thought of at meetings of political leagues of either sex, or of both combined. It is necessary that he should catch the eye of the Speaker during his first Session. He will afterwards talk to his Constituents of the forms of the House in the tone of one who is familiar with mysteries, and is accustomed to mingle on terms of equality with the great and famous. He will bring in a Bill which an M.P. who was once young, has abandoned, and, finding his measure blocked, will discourse with extreme bitterness of the obstruction by which the efforts of rising political genius are oppressed.
In London Society the young M.P. may be recognised by an air of conscious importance as of one who carries the burden of the State upon his shoulders, and desires to impress the fact upon others. He may be flattered by being consulted as to the secret intentions of foreign Cabinets or the prospects of party divisions. He will then speak at length of his leaders as "we," and will probably announce, in a voice intended not so much for his immediate neighbours as for the thoughtless crowd beyond, that "we shall smash them in Committee," and that "Akers-Douglas" (or Arnold Morley, as the case may be) "has asked me to answer the fellows on the other side to-morrow. I am not sure I shall speak," the MS. of his speech being already complete. On the following day he will speak during the dinner-hour to an audience of four, and, having escaped being counted out, will be greatly admired by his Constituents. He will assiduously attend all social functions, and will not object to seeing his name in the paragraphs of Society papers. It is not absolutely necessary that the young M.P. should be bald, but it is essential that he should wear a frock-coat. It is well, also, that his dress should be neat, but not ostentatiously spruce, lest the more horny-handed of his supporters should take umbrage at an offensive assumption of superiority over those whose votes keep him in place.
Custom demands that the young M.P. should travel extensively, and that he should enlighten his home-staying Constituents as to the designs of Barataria, the labour question in Lilliput, and the prospects of federation in Laputa, by means of letters addressed to the local newspaper. He will also interview foreign potentates and statesmen, and cause the fact to be published through the medium of Reuter. On his return, he will write a book, and deliver a lecture before the Mutual Improvement Society of the town he represents. He will then marry, in order that he may attend Mothers' meetings by deputy, and cause his wife to make lavish purchases at a local bazaar, which he will have opened. Shortly afterwards he will select an unpopular fad, which certain members of his own party approve, and will take a vigorous stand against it on principle, thus earning the commendation of all parties as a man of independent views, and unswerving rectitude.
If, at a subsequent election, he should chance to be rejected at the poll, he will publicly profess that he is delighted to be relieved of an uncongenial burden, whilst assuring his friends in private that the country in which able and honest men are neglected must be in a very bad way. He will, however, publish an address to the electors, in which he will claim a moral victory, and will assure them that it will ever be one of his proudest memories to have been connected with their constituency. He will spend his period of retirement on the stump, and, unless he be speedily furnished with another Constituency, will entertain doubts as to the sanity of his party leaders. Subsequently he will find himself again in the House of Commons, and, having been spoken of as a young man for about a quarter of a century, will at last become an Under-Secretary of State, and a grandfather, in the same year.
Master Singers.—Sir,—In accordance with your request, I visited the Meistersingers' Club (an institution which, seemingly from its name, has been established as a memorial to Wagner), where a "dramatic performance" was given last week that had many points of interest to the languid pleasure-seeker, wearily thirsting for fresh sources of amusement. The evening's entertainment commenced with a play obligingly described by the author as a farce, which was followed by a new and original operetta, containing some very pretty music by Mr. Percy Reeve, with the exquisitely droll title of The Crusader and the Craven. The one lady and two gentlemen who took part in this were, from a prompter's point of view, nearly perfect. Mr. R. Hendon as Sir Rupert de Malvoisie (the Crusader) suggested, by his accent and gestures, that he must have come from the East—how far East, it boots not to inquire. Miss Florence Darley was a good Lady Alice, and Mr. J. A. Shale an efficient "Craven." Later on an operatic performance is threatened. If the thrilling series of arrangements on the back of the Programme is to be accepted as authentic, the members of the Club will be invited to have Patience. It would be difficult to find a more appropriate accessory to a Night with the Meistersingers. No one asked me to have any supper, Yours, A Hand at Clubs.