he street, and entered the Corn-Exchange amid what the Liberal paper
called "thunders of applause," and the opponent's organ whittled down to
"cheers."

But canvassing cannot, I think, be reckoned among the pleasures of a
candidature. One must be very young indeed to find it even tolerable. A
candidate engaged in a house-to-house canvass has always seemed to me
(and not least clearly when I was the candidate) to sink beneath the
level of humanity. To beg for votes, as if they were alms or broken
victuals, is a form of mendicancy which is incompatible with common
self-respect, and yet it is a self-abasement which thirty years ago
custom imperatively demanded. "If my vote ain't worth calling for, I
suppose it ain't worth 'aving" was the formula in which the elector
stated his requirement.

To trudge, weary and footsore, dusty and deliquescent, from door to
door; to ask, with damnable iteration, if Mr. So-and-so is at home, and
to meet the invariable rejoinder, "No, he isn't," not seldom running on
with--"And, if he was, he wouldn't see you;" to find oneself (being
Blue) in a Red quarter, where the very children hoot at you, and
inebriate matrons shout personalities from upper windows--all this is
detestable enough. But to find the voter at home and unfriendly is an
experience which plunges the candidate lower still. A curious tradition
of privileged insolence, which runs through all English history from the
days when great men kept Jesters and the Universities had their _Terrae
Filii_, asserts itself, by immemorial usage, at an election. People who
would be perfectly civil if one called on them in the ordinary way, and
even rapturously grateful if they could sell one six boxes of lucifers
or a pound of toffee, permit themselves a freedom of speech to the
suppliant candidate, which tests the fibre of his manhood. If he loses
his temper and answers in like sort, the door is shut on him with some
Parthian jeer, and, as he walks dejectedly away, the agent says--"Ah,
it's a pity you offended that fellow. He's very influential in this
ward, and I believe a civil word would have won him." If, on the other
hand, the candidate endures the raillery and smiles a sickly smile, he
really fares no better. After a prolonged battle of wits (in which he
takes care not to be too successful) he discovers that the beery
gentleman in shirtsleeves has no vote, and that, in the time which he
has spent in these fruitless pleasantries, he might