“IF any man ventures to run independently of the two political caucuses, the difficulties in the way of his success are enormous. Generally he is severely hampered for want of money, while his official opponents have not only an inexhaustible fund to draw upon, but a fund whose sole purpose is the financing not the winning of elections. Also, though a majority of voters may actually prefer him to any other candidate, they are often afraid to vote for him, lest by so doing they should “waste” their votes: for under an absurd and dishonest arrangement, which the machine carefully preserves, no second ballot is allowed. An impartial observer may be pardoned for thinking that, even under this system, a man could hardly waste his vote more thoroughly than by giving it to the nominee of the political bosses, who, when he is once elected, must regard himself as the servant not of his constituents, but of the caucus. But British electors are not always impartial observers, and there is no doubt that the hypnotic effect of continual assurances that an independent candidate “cannot win” operates powerfully against him. Votes promised some days before the poll are in such cases continually revoked at the last moment under the influence of this “fear of wasting a vote.”
“Thus it will be seen that only three types of men find it normally possible to get into Parliament. First, local rich men who can dominate the local political organisation. Secondly, rich men from the outside who have suborned the central political organisation. Thirdly, comparatively poor men who are willing, in consideration of a seat in Parliament and the chances of material gains which it offers, to become the obedient and submissive servants of the caucus.”
~Hilaire Belloc & Cecil Chesterton: The Party System, Chap. V. (1911)
THE OTHER DAY as I was going out upon my travels, I came upon a plain
so broad that it greatly wearied me. This plain was grown in parts with
barley, but as it stood high in foreign mountains and was arid, very
little was grown. Small runnels, long run dry under the heat, made the
place look like a desert—almost like Africa; nor was there anything to
relieve my gaze except a huddle of small grey houses far away; but when I
reached them I found, to my inexpressible joy, a railway running by and
a station to receive me.
For those who complain of railways talk folly, and prove themselves
either rich or, more probably, the hangers-on of the rich. A railway is
an excellent thing; it takes one quickly through the world for next to
nothing, and if in many countries the people it takes are brutes, and
disfigure all they visit, that is not the fault of the railway, but of
the Government and religion of these people, which, between them, have
ruined the citizens of the State.
So was it not in this place of which I speak, for all the people were industrious, wealthy, kind, amenable, and free.
I took a ticket for the only town on the railway list whose history I
knew, and then in a third-class carriage made entirely of wood I
settled down to a conversation with my kind; for though these people
were not of my blood—indeed, I am certain that for some hundreds of
years not a drop of their blood has mingled with my own—yet we
understood each other by a common tongue called Lingua Franca, of which I
have spoken in another place and am a past master.
As all the people round began their talk of cattle, land, and
weather, two men next me, or rather the one next me and the other
opposite me, began to talk of the election which had been held in that
delightful plain: by which, as I learnt, a dealer in herds had been
defeated by a somewhat usurious and perhaps insignificant attorney. In
this election more than half the voters—that is, a good third of the
families in the plain—had gone up to the little huts of wood and had
made a mark upon a bit of paper, some on one part, some on the other.
About a sixth of the families had desired the dealer in herds to make
their laws, and about a sixth the attorney. Of the rest some could not,
some would not, go and make the little mark of which I speak. Many more
could by law make it, and would have made it, if they had thought it
useful to any possible purpose under the sun. One-sixth, I say, had made
their mark for the aged and money-lending attorney, and one-sixth for
the venerable but avaricious dealer in herds, and since the first sixth
was imperceptibly larger than the second it was the lawyer, not the
merchant, who stood to make the laws for the people. But not only to
make laws: he was also in some mystic way the Persona and Representative
of all the plain. The long sun-lit fields; the infinite
past—Carolingian, enormous; the delicate fronds of young trees; the
distant sight of the mountains, which is the note of all that land; the
invasions it had suffered, the conquests it might yet achieve; its soul
and its material self, were all summed up in the solicitor, not in the
farmer, and he was to vote on peace or war, on wine or water, on God or
no God in the schools. For the people of the plain were self-governing;
they had no lords.
Of my two companions, the one had voted for the cow-buyer, but the
other for the scribbler upon parchment, and they discussed their action
without heat, gently and with many reasons.
The one said: "It cannot be doubted that the solidarity of society
demands that the homogeneity of economic interests should be recognised
by the magistrate." The other said: "The first need is rather that the
historic continuity of society should be affirmed by the momentary
depositaries of the executive."
For these two men were of some education, and saw things from a
higher standpoint than the peasants around us, who continued to
discourse, now angrily, now merrily, but always loudly and rapidly, upon
the insignificant matter of their lives: that is, strong, red, bubbling
wine, healthy and well-fed beef, rich land and housing, the marriage of
daughters, and the putting forward of sons.
Then one of the two, who had long guessed by my dress and face from
what country I came, said to me: "And you, how is it in your country?" I
told him we met from time to time, upon occasions not less often than
seven years apart, and did just as they had done. That one-sixth of us
voted one way and one-sixth the other; the first, let us say, for a
moneylender, and the second for a man remarkable for motor-cars or
famous for the wealth of his mother; and whichever sixth was
imperceptibly larger than the other, that sixth carried its man, and he
stood for the flats of the Wash or for the clear hills of Cumberland, or
for Devon, which is all one great and lonely hill.
"This man," said I, "in some very mystic way is Ourselves—he is our past and our great national
memory. By his vote he decides what shall be done; but he is
controlled."
"By what is he controlled?" said my companions eagerly. Evidently they had a sneaking love of seeing representatives controlled.
"By a committee of the rich," said I promptly.
At this they shrugged their shoulders and said: "It is a bad system!"
"And by what are yours?" said I.
At this the gravest and oldest of them, looking as it were far away
with his eyes, answered: "By the name of our country and a wholesome
terror of the people."
"Your system," said I, shrugging my shoulders in turn, but a little awkwardly, "is different from ours."
After this, we were silent all three. We remembered, all three of us,
the times when no such things were done in Europe, and yet men hung
well together, and a nation was vaguer and yet more instinctive and
ready. We remembered also—for it was in our common faith—the gross,
permanent, and irremediable imperfection of human affairs. There arose
perhaps in their minds a sight of the man they had sent to be the spirit
and spokesman, or rather the very self, of that golden plateau which
the train was crawling through, and certainly in my mind there rose the
picture of a man—small, false, and vile—who was, by some fiction, the
voice of a certain valley in my own land.
Then I said to them as I left the train at the town I spoke of:
"Days, knights!"—for so one addresses strangers in that country. And
they answered: "Your grace, we commend you to God."
~Hilaire Belloc
