by James Grant
The chairman of the meeting, R. W. Wood, announced that Bagehot had come up from London on the train to say a few words, if the people would care to hear him. Were the people amenable? Partisan voices cried, “Hear, hear!” or “No! No!” A man called out: was this Bagehot not the son-in-law of the late James Wilson, founder of the Economist and a political ally of John Bright, famed champion of free trade and one-time member of Parliament for Manchester? And if he were that eminence—though all that the people really knew about him was that the Manchester Guardian had printed his name—why was he not already in Parliament serving a constituency that “rejoiced in his presence,” say, the City of London? Laughter rippled through the hall. The voice continued: “If all that they knew of him was that he was called Bagehot or Baggott, might they not, as regarded Manchester, look on him as the Manchester Guardian’s ‘bagged fox’?”2 The crowd laughed and cheered.
Bagehot had come cold into the room. A Manchester political audience was notoriously boisterous.3 Bagehot was a famous talker in small groups, and had wowed the audiences who heard him debate at University College, but this audience was different.
Bagehot said that, if they would have him, he would be happy to represent the “moderate Liberal interest for Manchester.” He had heard in London that this particular wing of the Liberal Party was dead. He could see for himself that it wasn’t. (“Not yet, lad,” someone yelled.) “[L]iving beings actuated by real life and energy”—what he saw in front of him—contradicted what he had read in the Saturday Review and what he had heard in the south of England, Bagehot continued.
The crowd needed no persuading that the London snobs were against them, and something in the speaker’s manner, or in his invocation of the high-toned, Tory Saturday Review, turned the crowd against him. People now started to laugh, not with Bagehot but at him. They hissed him and whistled. Wood called for order. “Send him back to London,” someone cried. But
order had been restored, Mr. Bagehot continued. He said that after what he had heard he fancied that some people were there who were not moderate; who had extravagant sentiments and flagrant ideas, or they would not hiss. —[“Oh.”] He was explaining that in the South of England and in London people had an idea that there was no moderate party in Manchester. That its political element was entirely composed of an extreme section, that the most democratic sentiments were the most popular, and that nothing would go down except an abolition of everything that exists. —[“Oh,” and laughter. “Turn him out.”] He maintained from all that he had seen that was completely false. —[Ironical applause.] He maintained that there was a very large section which would support moderate views, and it was with that view that he wished to present himself. —[Laughter.]4
Now Bagehot came to the contentious issue of the franchise. Just how far should it be expanded? If you continued to lower the electoral bar, as the Radicals demanded, you would presently arrive at universal franchise, he said. Bagehot asked the crowd if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. “A bad,” someone called. Yes, agreed Bagehot, a bad, even a fatal thing.
“Mr. Bright some years ago had put it in a very attractive form,” the candidate went on, “which if adopted would lead to the agricultural and manufacturing classes banding together in classes. [‘Send him back to London,’ and laughter.] Bagehot chafed at the derision. He asked if “any working man who might be present” would care to debate the point with him. This was met with a voice calling out, “We are all working men.” Bagehot retorted, “So am I,” which elicited more laughter and a voice saying, “Nay, Lord Dundreary.”* Bagehot rushed to clarify. He meant, was there a factory hand present “who would care to argue out the question with him whether the laboring class should have the complete power in this country.” The audience laughed at the absurdity of the challenge. Undaunted, Bagehot continued, “Having a numerical majority, they would get an absolute supremacy. He would like to hear if that was right. He maintained that no one class ought to have supreme power. [Hear, hear.] Parliament should be the impartial tribunal of all.”
It was not an unreasonable proposition. Still, voices bellowed, “Shut up!” After the noise abated, Wood relayed a question from the audience: Would Bagehot care to give his opinion on some other timely political topic? The crowd answered before the candidate could: “The question was drowned with cries of ‘No,’ and the meeting declined to hear Mr. Bagehot any further.”5
“Badly received,” Eliza jotted in her diary.
THE THIRTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD Bagehot had ruminated on the difficulties of entering politics in the Economist only three weeks before he presented himself to the electors of Manchester. An aspirant must be young, he judged: “Statesmanship—political business—is a profession which a man must learn while young, and to which he must serve a practical apprenticeship; and in England, the House of Commons is the only school for acquiring the necessary skill, aptitude and knowledge.”
Not quite one year later, on the afternoon of Saturday, May 14, 1866, three emissaries from Bridgwater came knocking at the door of his home in Upper Belgrave Street.6 They proceeded to brief him on the local state of play.
He was not the Liberals’ first choice: they had previously tapped Sir John Villiers Shelley, whom the Conservative Henry Westropp and his money had defeated in 1865. Shelley was of the fourth generation of a line of Sussex baronets to sit successively in the House of Commons; he had earlier represented the constituency of Westminster. Years before, Shelley had astounded the reforming elements with his matter-of-fact defense of rotten boroughs: they were, he stoutly maintained, the only constituencies in which a statesman could speak his mind for the simple reason that he had no voters to answer to. As the years passed, Shelley changed his views. He was now for reform and electoral purity.
In 1865, Shelley had paid no bribes to the vendible Bridgwater electorate. That none should be paid on his behalf was the condition he set for standing. This iron stipulation was known only to a few at the top of the local Liberal Party, and caused considerable grumbling when word seeped out on election day. Against Westropp’s gold, Shelley’s sound Liberal principles and amiable character stood not a remote chance. So Sir John declined the invitation to stand again in 1866, though 200 Bridgwater voters had signed a petition urging him to return. He “could not succeed against the corruption practiced by the Tories,” he told them.7
Westropp himself would not be around to corrupt the 1866 election; the very crimes against which Shelley protested had led to his expulsion from Parliament. The editor of the Economist knew enough about the situation to extract from his visitors a kind of purity pledge. He assumed, he told them, that the election would be conducted on the straight and narrow. “Oh, yes,” they replied.
Bagehot asked no questions about the likely expense of the race—a curious omission, the Liberal scouts thought. He did agree to contribute £600 to the cost of legal action after the election if the Conservatives were found to be up to their old tricks. Asked to submit a letter to the Bridgwater voters setting out his views on the issues of the day, the literary candidate wrote one, then a second and a third, each dated May 8.
ELECTION BRIBERY WAS A hardy English perennial, and had prospered in spite of more than a century’s worth of legislation intended to stamp it out. The Treating Act of 1696 forbade the kind of hospitality that led a voter to cast a grateful ballot for the man who bought him a drink. The Bribery Act of 1726 prescribed a £500 fine for any who would sell a vote. There were additional clean-election laws in 1841 and 1842, and a Corrupt Practices Act in 1854.
It is beyond knowing how debauched English politics might have been in the absence of these attempts to eradicate corruption; as it was, according to twentieth-century estimates, bribery was endemic in one-third to one-half of all English constituencies at about the time that Bagehot committed to stand as member for Bridgwater.8 In the estimation of John Stuart Mill, in 1864, corruption threatened “the vitality of representative government.”
The iss
ue was front and center in Parliament. On May 1, 1866, the House of Commons heard findings that in the borough of Totnes, votes were “quoted like a share-list on the Stock Exchange” and in Great Yarmouth, the rising price of a vote resembled the bull market in oysters in London. Before the 1832 Reform Act, two guineas had secured a Great Yarmouth ballot, but after that landmark legislation, the price jumped to £3. It pushed to £10 in 1852, between £13 and £16 in 1860, and as much as £30 in 1864. The expense was considerable even when the voters patronized only one bribing agent; it doubled when enterprising citizens tickled money from the pockets of both sides.
In some precincts, voters regarded the taking of a bribe as a venial sin, like robbing an orchard.9 In others, they looked upon it as a kind of right. In Reigate, where £5 per ballot was the market rate, a voter went to court in 1864 to secure the payment that he said had been promised but never paid. “When the case came on in the County Court,” the MPs heard, “forty other voters cherishing a similar grievance were present in court, fully resolved to follow his example if he were successful, but of course he was not.”10
Bagehot knew all about these goings-on. In 1864, the Economist had apprised its readers of a new kind of bribery: rather than buying votes on election day, a monied candidate would shower a community with philanthropy in the months or years leading up to the vote. The aspiring parliamentarian, perhaps one of the new millionaires that Britain’s industrial prosperity was so freely minting, would found a school or restore a cathedral. The grateful community would dispatch its patron to Parliament. To the description of this form of seduction, Bagehot added, “we have known the cases we quote.”
On the eve of the 1866 election, the Economist remonstrated against bribery in an article headed “The Way To Reduce Electoral Corruption.” The writer of the unsigned piece sounded a great deal like the Liberal candidate for Bridgwater. The way to stamp out corruption was to throw the book at bribe-takers, the paper argued; fine them the equivalent of the bribe they had accepted and deny them a vote for life. As for the statesman himself, the man ultimately behind the bribe, remove him from Parliament and bar him from the civil service. Inasmuch as bribe givers enter politics to raise their social status, the threat of stigma should keep them on the straight and narrow.11
IT WAS THUS AS an apostle of electoral purity that Bagehot presented himself to the people of Bridgwater on the eve of the balloting. His audience received him like the neighbor he virtually was—no cutting witticisms, no hissing and mockery this time around. “I need say no more to you on the state of the nation,” Bagehot told the cheering Liberals,
but I want to say one word on the state of the borough. We know that for a long time the Liberal party has been triumphant here, and we know that at the last election that party suffered a temporary but disastrous eclipse, and we know by what foul means that eclipse was produced [hear, hear.] I do not mean to touch the details, but I have a practical remark to make about it. There is a remarkable class of people whose position in the matter I do not understand. I understand Mr. Westropp’s, and I do not want to be hard on him; after all, he has suffered a great penalty in being excluded from Parliament. He was very ambitious of his seat, and therefore, had great temptation.
Bagehot could make allowances for poor voters who took a bribe. But the rich and respectable ones? “They are like a man who stole stinking fish. They commit a crime and they get no benefit.” The people laughed from the belly. Bagehot closed with an appeal to the Liberals to form themselves “into one great vigilance committee” to force the Tories to toe the ethical mark.
Bagehot’s opponent was a Scottish lawyer, George Patton, sixty-three years old—old enough to be Bagehot’s father—who had studied at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a railroad lawyer by profession—“Railway Patton,” they called him—and a former solicitor general of Scotland. Like Bagehot, he was married and childless. Unlike Bagehot, he could claim no extraordinary intellectual gifts.
If corruption was the Tories’ stratagem against Bagehot, Patton made an improbable bribe-giver. He had money to spend—his brother Thomas, a rich Glasgow merchant, had more than enough, even for crooked Bridgwater—but was without an ounce of guile; some rolled their eyes at this characterization of an old and seasoned lawyer, but Patton’s friends swore to it. Then, too, as a Scotsman, the candidate lacked practical vote-buying experience, elections in Scotland being comparatively pure.
A stranger to Bridgwater and its ways—Patton, for instance—might not have supposed that an election that was specially called to choose a successor to an unseated bribe-giver could itself be corrupt. But to any who really knew the borough, it was the prospect of an honest election that beggared the imagination. Corruption had been the way of Bridgwater politics since at least the turn of the nineteenth century—the existence of books dating from 1807, in which were recorded the names of voters whom the Liberals had bribed, seemed to prove as much.12 The Tories may or may not have been so indiscreet. However, the parties were equally seducible—honest Sir John Shelley was the rarest of exceptions—and the rich and the poor alike stuck out their hands. Ten pounds, the standard bribing rate, would pay a year’s rent on a respectable dwelling place, which is why it had stood since 1832 as the criterion for electoral eligibility in towns and cities. Bribe-givers judged that two-thirds of the town’s 600 eligible voters were for sale.
Money, liquor, and special effects made Bridgwater election days festive. Liberals fired off cannons, Conservatives rang church bells, and election agents handed out sovereigns. To receive a bribe, you might—for instance—take the gold-laden hand of a man who had hidden himself behind the door of a pub.13 It fell to the candidates’ agents to buy the optimum number of votes at minimum expense and with maximum discretion at just the right time.
Drinking, like balloting, started early in the morning. It began with beer and progressed to ginger brandy, which the revelers nipped from communal jugs. Sometimes election agents rounded up amenable voters, herded them into a party-affiliated public house, turned on the liquor, and locked the door. At length, the drunks would be led to the polling place where, under supervision, they would cast the appropriate ballot.
“WE HAVE KNOWN THE cases we quote,” Bagehot had boasted in the Economist about the philanthropic techniques of corruption, perhaps thinking of the unseated Bridgwater Conservative. Henry Westropp had ingratiated himself with the electorate not only by buying votes, but also by contributing to municipal good works; over six years, 1859–65, he had sprinkled £2,250 into the right causes. Still and all, when election day came, the Conservative philanthropist had found it necessary to supplement the newer techniques of ingratiation with the time-tested methods.
Bagehot, a servant in tow, had arrived in town and checked into a hotel before the June 7 balloting, and on election day he walked the streets of Bridgwater with his handlers. More than once he fielded a question that sounded curiously like a proposition. “I won’t vote for gentlefolks unless they do something for I,” one man addressed him.14 Bagehot kept on walking.
His agents took a more professional view of the opportunity. Unbeknownst to the candidate, they had brought with them £500 in gold, which they began to distribute as the polling got under way. It seemed almost too easy when Bagehot took an early lead. “I am getting nervous about this,” one Liberal agent remarked to his confrere. “I do not think they are spending any money on the other side. This is a trap.”15
The Conservatives, experienced in election-day commerce, gasped at the hypocrisy when they got wind of the early distribution of Liberal gold. Having so mightily protested against Westropp’s bribe-giving, the Liberals were buying votes right and left.16
Like Bagehot, Patton had delegated election-day tactics to his agents. Deftly calculating the number of votes required to overcome the Liberal lead, the Tories requisitioned £300 to supplement the £750 they had already spent. The extra gold—“tin” was the slang of the political
operatives—procured thirty new votes, which brought them nearly even with the Liberals. Too late did Bagehot’s handlers wake up to the Tory surge. With few voters still uncommitted, the price of a loose vote went soaring. Early in the afternoon, one of the Liberal operatives, Reed, buttonholed an uncommitted townsman, Chedsey.
Had he voted? Reed inquired.
Chedsey had not, nor did he intend to.
“Would £50 be of any service?” Reed asked. It would not, answered Chedsey, an honest man.17
When the votes were counted, it was Patton 301, Bagehot 294. The Liberal agents were heartsick. Outgeneraled, they had ended the day with unspent gold in their pockets. They had missed their market.
Bagehot caught the eye of one of his agents after the returns were in. “Mr. Barham,” said the candidate, “I am very much afraid from some things I have seen and observed today that some corrupt practices have been resorted to.”
“Sir,” replied Barham, “I am sorry to tell you that such is the case.”
“I am very, very sorry for it,” said Bagehot, and nothing more.
By the official record, neither candidate had spent a great deal. Patton admitted to £216 19s, Bagehot to £193 10s 2d. Actual outlays were, of course, much higher. Patton’s side was out £3,500, Bagehot’s more than £1,500. As Bagehot could console himself, there was no call for the £600 he had pledged to contribute to a legal challenge against the Conservatives for dirty dealing. It was obvious that his side’s hands were no cleaner than the other’s.
Patton had only a month to savor his victory before he was obliged to stump for still another election—named to ministerial office, he was bound under the prevailing rules to present himself to the voters again. The Liberals asked Bagehot if he was game for another contest. He was not, Bagehot replied, in the first place because he thought it was bad form to contest the election of a man in Patton’s position and, in the second place, because he was disgusted by the corrupt methods of the first election. The Liberals continued their search. In Philip Vanderby, physician turned merchant, they found a candidate who was prepared to outbribe and outspend the Tories, which he did. In this second election, on July 12, 1866, Patton lost, 312 to 276. The Liberals, admitting to an outlay of less than £200, actually spent £4,000; Patton, admitting to legitimate expenses of less than £160, spent more than £2,500. The two elections had cost the temporary Conservative member of Parliament for the borough of Bridgwater the grand total of £6,150.18