WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 190, 14 May 1928, Page 8

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM

(By T.D.H.)

China is appealing to the League of Nations to order Japan to quit.—The League, however, will not impair its prestige by ordering anybody to do anything.

It cost about £20,000 in campaign expenses to elect Abraham Lincoln President of the United States in 1860. Now, according to the news messages, they are endeavouring to discover what the various candidates for the Presidency are spending in the first round—the preliminary gallop for the party nomination—and the total of £50,000 for Mr. Hoover emerges. President Coolidge’s election expenses in 1924 ran to about £900,000. That at least was the sum accounted for by the Republican National Committee, but it was asserted that outside this expenditure there was a “slush fund” of £3,000,000 that was used to buy the election in the western States. Conning over the official party campaign expenditures in 1.924, the New York “Nation” pointed out that the Republicans had paid 27 cents for every vote they got, the Democrats 11 cents, and the Progressives 4| cents. The Republicans won, and this commentator observed: “Either money bought the election, or money was wasted.”

In a British general election the sum total of the candidates’ expenses, as given in the official returns, runs at slightly under £1.000,000. Away back in the ’eighties, before the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883 was passed, it ran at nearer two millions. As there are over COO seats to be filled, and more than double that number of candidates, the cost runs out at an average of about £l6OO for all candidates in each electorate. This is moderation itself compared with what some Ameri. can elections cost. In Michigan two or three years back, Senator Newberry spent £60,000 to secure his election to the United States Senate. His expenditure, however, was a trifle beside the £200,000 spent in Illinois merely to secure the party nomination of two candidates for the Senate. One of the chief contributors to this huge outlay was Mr. Samuel Insull, of Chicago, who passed* out thousands of pounds for both the Republican and Democratic candidates. As one journal remarked, Mr. Insult's relations with the politicians in office would thus be pleasant no matter which side came out on top. Mr. Insull has huge business interests in Chicago, providing that city with light, heat, power, transportation, and incidentally, United States Senators.

Money talks, and talks pretty loudly in American politics, and historians have pointed out that it has been ever thus. President Washington, the Father of his Country, was the richest man in Virginia in his day, and probably the richest man in any of the original thirteen States of the Union. Practically all the Founding Fathers were among the most opulent men of the period. A man of high personal merit but who lacks an organisation is without funds and without powerful interests at the back of him has a mighty poor chance of bursting into the arena of politics in the United States and winning a party nomination.

If in the United States big business pays up liberally towards politicians expenses in a lively expectation of favours to come, in Britain the political parties get quite a lot of money for their candidates from gentlemen who desire to be made lords—(or, at any rate, whose wives are determined to have handles to their names). Even Sir Austen Chamberlain, speaking in the House of Commons in 1922, said that contributions to party funds should not bar a man from receiving a peerage. “I think,” he added, it is one of the considerations which may properly be taken into account by ’those who are concerned in the recommendations for political honours. Lord Birkenhead, when Lord Chancellor did not hesitate to admit that in British politics when honours were being considered subscription to the party funds “never had been treated as an irrelevant consideration.” In other words, as Mr. Chesterton remarked, “there is a market for peerages at Westminster just as there is a market for cabbages at Covent Garden.”

Among the staunchest objectors to plebian persons being converted into noblemen in return for the payment of a sum of money are the members ot the House of Lords themselves. They have the most substantial grounds for their objections, too, for the more people are made Lords the more does tlie value of a title depreciate. • In King Arthur’s day it was a very great honour to be a simple knight, but knights later became so/common that higher grades of titles.had to be invented, and naturally if Mr. Lloyd George had gone on making everybody a lord in return for cash down a time must eventually have come when dukes were three a penny.

A candidate for Parliamentary honours in tlie North of Ireland not long . ago, when appealing for the working man’s vote, said: “I was born without a penny in mv pocket.” . Mr. Patrick Murphv, a well-known Irish politician in America, is responsible for the following: “In political life many a false step is taken by standing still. And I must not omit Daniel O Connell, s champion bull. Referring to births in / Dublin having decreased by 5000 for four vears, he exclaimed: I charge the British Government with the murder of the 20,000 infants who were never born.”

“I don't enjoy eating.” “Why?” ... „ “Because it spoils my appetite.

GLAD DAY.

( After a Colour Print by Blake.) Come day, glad day, day running out

of the night With breast aflame and your generous arms outspread; With hands that scatter the dawn and lingers busy with light, And a rainbow of fire to flicker about your head.

Come soon, glad day, come with the confident stride Of the sun in its march over mountains, of the wind on its way through the air; Naked and noble and new, throwing the darkness aside; Come, with your gesture of space, aud the heavens loosed in your hair.

For the waiting is lifeless, and dawn is a lingering doubt, And our feet arc confused in shadows that tangle and rend. Come day, glad day, come with a wordless shout; Clean with rejoicing, complete in outgiving, come day without end. .—Louis Untermeyer in the Loudon "Observer."