expeditious and less expensive mode of procedure. In the South these practices were introduced, after the Civil War, to "save civilization from the new coloured electors; but gradually people got into the habit of committing the voting frauds at the expense of white political opponents. The Australian Ballot has remedied this abuse1 not only by supplying official voting-papers, but by providing that the ballot-boxes shall be placed in the voting-room so as to be under the eyes of the public; that they shall be examined before the polling begins, and that the parties or the rival candidates shall be at liberty to station watchers and challengers within the polling rooms; and, lastly, that the counting of the vote shall take place in public and forthwith. These measures have stopped the frauds to a very considerable extent, but they have not been sufficient to put an end to them altogether. To make them quite impossible, in spite of the dishonesty of "election inspectors" and the want of vigilance of the public, voting machines have been invented in which the elector has only to touch a knob or knobs to record his vote for one or more candidates, and in which an automatic counter registers the number of votes obtained by each candidate. It appears that there are still technical difficulties to be overcome to make the machines thoroughly answer their purpose, while safeguarding the secrecy of the vote; yet voting machines have already been used in a certain number of elections, and not without success.

No doubt the most effective invention would be one that would touch the public conscience, for if the voting frauds and the bribery of electors occur so frequently, and if they are inadequately repressed by the law which, however, has no lack of prohibitory clauses, if the candidate ventures to make a joke of the enactment which requires from him an account of his election expenditure - if all this is possible, the fault must lie in the tolerance shown by public opinion. Not that public opinion approves these practices; on the contrary, they are most strongly reprobated, and not only by the public in general; the better set of politicians, with certain exceptions, also look on them with disgust. But this is more in theory,

1 Except in the South, where most of the States have not adopted the Aus tralian Ballot.

66

in principle. When it comes to fighting the opposite party, people shut their eyes; they acquiesce in buying "floaters" as in one of those melancholy necessities with which "politics," as well as war, is fraught, but which must be faced if the battle is to be won. And it must be won, for if you are a man," an American, you cannot let yourself be beaten; even if you leave yourself out of account, there is the sacred cause of the party whose triumph must be assured at all hazards, for the salvation of the country. The opposite party resorts to bribery; then why should not your own party, which is the good, the just one, also benefit by it? If the other side would leave off bribing, one would be only too pleased to follow its example; but no one will be the first to disarm. And so it comes about that men who are perfectly honourable in private life stoop to organize electoral bribery, to superintend the details of it, or, at all events, to knowingly supply the material for it; they subscribe to the "campaign fund," with more than a suspicion that part of their money will be spent in buying votes. The elector who sells himself, including the well-to-do and pious farmer of New Hampshire, has still fewer scruples: he has been brought up by the Caucus and Machine system in the notion that "politics" is a "business" in which, as in any other business, some people buy commodities and others sell them; and why should he let people who will make money out of his vote have it for nothing?

IV

The money spent in bribery adds very perceptibly to the election expenditure considered as legitimate and which by itself is very heavy, in spite of the Australian Ballot, which has curtailed it by introducing official voting-papers prepared by and at the cost of the State, of the city, etc. The legitimate heads of expenditure are as follows: the hire of halls; the payments made to speakers, to canvassers, to "workers" of every kind; the making up and distribution of "political literature"; advertising, postage, and telegrams; the distribution of campaign emblems and "buttons," uniforms, banners, and torches used in processions and parades;

the conveyance of electors on the polling-day, etc.1 In addition to the expenses actually incurred, large sums remain in the hands of the go-betweens, of the agents, but they none the less help to swell the total. Election expenses are, in consequence, extremely high in the United States. Where does the money come from? It is supplied by the candidates, by the office-holders, and by private donors. The candidates, who have, as a rule, already paid the party organization a certain sum for their nomination, contribute their quota toward the election expenses; sometimes the contribution, which is often pretty high and perhaps exceeds the whole salary of the office, is voluntary; sometimes it is levied under the "assessments" system. In some States (for instance, Massachusetts, Montana) the legislator has taken the trouble to forbid the committees to demand "contributions" from the candidates and the latter to comply with the demand - a platonic prohibition, as the candidate has a direct interest in coming to an understanding with the committee. On the other hand, the legislator of New York, acting perhaps on the saying "we preach what we practise," which was the preface to the famous formula of "the spoils to the victor," and on the more recent utterance of the present boss of Tammany Hall, who declared that "they [the Tammany men] were not hypocrites," the legislator of New York provides that "the authorized representatives of the political party, of the organization, or of the association, to which the candidate belongs, shall have the right of demanding money contributions from the latter. The presidential candidates themselves subscribe to the "campaign fund"; if they are not rich, they must, and this applies to all candidates, have rich friends ready to step into the breach and to loosen their purse-strings. Often the candidate, to forward his election campaign, launches into personal expenditure independently of that which will be incurred with his money by the committee.

The office-holders, who are liable to the tribute of " assessments" for the benefit of the party, have been a little less squeezed since the law of 1883 has taken the federal employees

1 These last categories, as well as the payment of canvassers, are, as the reader will remember, declared illegal by the English law, and would ipso facto unseat the M. P. on whose behalf they had been incurred.

appointed by competitive examinations out of the clutches of the parties, and has forbidden the officials of the Union to demand and to collect "political contributions " in the federal departments. The law is sometimes infringed and often evaded; to avoid coming within its scope, the party committees who ask for subscriptions are composed of persons who are not federal office-holders, and they do not solicit the contributions in the offices themselves. Yet, as I have already had occasion to remark, the law, as a whole, has checked the abuse of the assessments in the comparatively limited sphere to which it applied; the mischief is no longer epidemic, it occurs in a sporadic fashion only in the federal service. But in the service of the States and the municipal service, the personnel of which is much more numerous, there is no legal obstacle to the levy of the assessments, and no means of refusing them with impunity; and they are still demanded and paid. It is a remarkable fact that often they are not paid solely by the office-holders, federal and others, belonging to the party in power, but also by the employees belonging to the party in opposition; for they "feel that the desk, not the man at it, owes just so much to the party in power.' 99 1 Such is the hold which the custom of assessments has obtained over the public mind that it has become, in the eyes of many people, almost a part of the natural order of things.

The gifts of private individuals who are not candidates nor office-holders make up a very large proportion of the "campaign fund." It is on the committees, each in its own sphere, from the national committee downward, that the duty devolves of procuring these offerings to the sacred cause of the party. In the very great majority of cases they are due to anything but disinterested considerations; they are a pure speculation, an investment of money which later on should yield a good return in favours that the men elected with the money of the donors have at their disposal. First and foremost come the representatives of the big industrial or financial concerns, "corporations," or individual capitalists, which by a heavy contribution to the "campaign funds" obtain a sort of mortgage over the future administration or legislature; we are already aware that for the sake of greater security many a

1 Eleventh Report of the U. S. Civil Service Commission, p. 227.

corporation subscribes to the funds of both parties at the same time. Wealthy private individuals give money with the same object, to establish a claim on the gratitude of the future administration which will repay them with honours for themselves, extending to a seat in the Cabinet or an embassy, or with places for their friends and their protégés. Lastly, there is a category of donors who expect and desire nothing but the success of the party; some subscribe out of pure "patriotism," pure devotion to the "cause," while others are actuated by sporting motives which make them enjoy a good fight for its own sake; they "plunge" for their party as they would for a race-horse. More often than not both kinds of motives, of "patriotism" and of sporting excitement, are blended in the minds of the donors and make them submit cheerfully to pecuniary sacrifices, which sometimes reach a high figure.

V

But still greater and more profitable than these funds subscribed by zealous partisans, is the capital which consists of the feeling of loyalty to the party, diffused throughout the great mass of the electorate. Not to mention numerous employees of all classes who owe their position to the party, and aspirants to offices, several times as numerous, who hope to obtain places through it, — most of the electors are bound to one or the other of the two great parties by various ties, the strongest of which are personal associations, the company which a man keeps, tradition, habit, the prejudice created by these factors or engendered by considerations of private and public interest of a more or less rational or irrational kind. After all, the name of the party is its own justification, in the eyes of millions of electors. They say, with a well-known politician, an ex-Senator of New York, "I am a Democrat" (or "I am a Republican," as the case may be), just as a believer says, to explain and justify his faith, "I am a Christian!" The reader knows how, and through what political circumstances, party devotion, which is rather an unreasoning sentiment all the world over, has been intensified in the United States and raised to the level of a dogma,

VOL. II-2A