the register beside him; and his business is to
send out emissaries to influence the electors, to
take notes of promises, to calculate chances, and
to vary these occupations with frequent
adjournments to the bar to drink. I visited several
of those committee-rooms in our borough, and
in one of them I was told that Mr. Short had
no chance, because he was only giving three
pounds for his committee-rooms, while Mr. Long
was giving six. " Lor' bless you, sir! Mr. Long's
agent knows how to do things! He went to the
White Lion to engage a committee-room, and
the landlord told him he hadn't got one. But
the agent soon persuaded him that he had!"

As to cabs. There are many electors who
don't care about voting, who have no opinion
one way or other, and who won't come to the
poll, unless you send for them. These electors
would sell themselves any day for a crown.
If you can afford to send a cab for them, they
will come up and vote for you. If you can't,
they won't trouble themselves to exercise their
right, or their trust, or their proud privilege,
or whatever you please to call it. And for the
rest, it will be significant to mention that all cab-
owners have votes, and that a good many cab-
drivers have votes; while printers, stationers,
and bill-stickers, have both votes and influence.
A general election is the funeral of all principle,
and the rats who come from their holes at
that time represent the undertakers' men. As
you see some loved one carried away from you
on the shoulders of a set of drunken ribald
ruffians, so you see the ægis of our " glorious
constitution " raised on high by loafers and sots,
by the vilest scum boiled up from the bottom
of the pot of society. And all this is made
worse by the unblushing speeches of the
Candidates (who know all about it) concerning
integrity and purity of election.

The stench of the Thames in the old days before
main drainage, the advertising vans, the garotters,
the mad dogs, none of these have been such
a nuisance as the recent electioneering. For
weeks, the summer air has been tainted with the
false fumes and vapours of a political orgie. After
my experience of it in our borough, the thought
comes across me that the state of things could
not well be worse, if the right of voting were
in the hands of the upper ten thousand of the
working classes. Nay, the thought comes across
me that the state of things might be better; that
the new voters might have a higher sense of
their responsibility, might know better how to
appreciate worth and merit in those who seek
their suffrages, and might set an example of
integrity and patriotism which might leaven
our electoral system for great good.

Does our electoral system want leavening for
good? Consider its present working with a
reference to one " Interest" alone. There is a
certain interest called the Railway Interest,
seeking representation at the hands of contractors,
agents, and scrip-jobbers—very unfortunately
and very expensively for railway shareholders.
By a thousand indirect means (not least among
them by " putting on" at election time, in little
out-of-the-way places, gangs of men who are
not wanted there for any other purpose than to
spend wages, and make uproarious crowds)
such candidates, favoured by unworthy voters,
get into parliament. The minister, who must
have his majority, is afraid to touch the
"Interest" that can give him so many votes. The
"Interest" is left untouched, in the face of the
most appalling preventable accidents, and the
most horrible destruction and mutilation of life,
over and over again repeated. The Vice-
President of the Board of Trade, with the " Interest"
behind him, is as cool about these calamities as if
his fellow-creatures were flies, and rather boasts
than otherwise that he does not know which is
the "up-line" of a railway, and which the
"down." If the electors sent the elected to
parliament in the public interest, and not in
this "Interest," or in that, is it not probable
that they would very emphatically teach such
public servants which is the "In" side of a
House of Commons (not to say of a government),
and which the " Out"?

On this head of the Vice-President of the
Board of Trade, and the "Interest" he is so
afraid of, and so daintily uninformed and
humorous upon, there is a passage in an obscure
work of fiction called HARD TIMES, which would
be almost prophetic but for its absurd
shortcoming in respect of the damage done by a
railway accident. It may fitly conclude this
paper, as a hint to free and independent electors.

"Among the fine gentlemen not regularly
belonging to the Gradgrind school, there was one
of a good family and a better appearance, with a
happy turn of humour which had told immensely
with the House of Commons on the occasion of
his entertaining it with his (and the Board of
Directors') view of a railway accident, in which
the most careful officers ever known, employed
by the most liberal managers ever heard of,
assisted by the finest mechanical contrivances ever
devised, the whole in action on the best line
ever constructed, had killed five people and
wounded thirty-two, by a casualty without which
the excellence of the whole system would have
been positively incomplete. Among the slain,
was a cow, and among the scattered articles
unowned, a widow's cap. And the honourable
member had so tickled the House (which has a
delicate sense of humour) by putting the cap on
the cow, that it became impatient of any serious
reference to the Coroner's Inquest, and brought
the railway off with Cheers and Laughter."

GERMAN OPERA AND ITS MAKERS.

IN THREE CHAPTERS. CHAPTER III.

IT would have been easy to encumber the
outlines conveyed in the two foregoing chapters
on Opera, by mentioning the names of many
industrious persons and carefully-trained
musicians who fed the theatres of Germany in the
interval which elapsed betwixt the times of
Keyser and Bach, and that breaking out of
Beethoven's amazing genius, which brought to a
head, so to say, the revolution in German opera;
and fixed the form under which it has since
presented itself. But such enumeration would