WOOING THE BASHFUL VOTER

Evening Post, Volume LXXXV, Issue 57, 8 March 1913, Page 13

WOOING THE BASHFUL VOTER

In the second volume, just published, of his somewhat discursive "Reminiscences" that most anomalous of socialists, Mr. W. M. Hyndman, relates an experience his wife once had when solici* ting for him the vote of an agricultural labourer: — "She held forth tto him upon his miserable wages, his tumble-down and cramped cottage, hie lack of opportunities of enjoyment, the manner in which the common land hard by had been filched from him, the shameful fact that he could not get ta nice bit of garden ground at anything at all within hail of the yearly rent paid by the farmers for their acres, the way in which all the old perquisites and easements had been taken away, the long winter in which, now that threshing was performed by machinery and there was little arable land around, there was little to do, and therefore little to get. !Dhe man listened attentively, and oeemed to agree with' her, so my wife felt encouraged. , . There he sat listening stolidly, with the land about him, which I myself remembered as well-tilled and prosperous, going steadily out of cultivation, and the active village of the, last century becoming a deserted Sleepy Hollow of to-day. When my wife- had quite finished— and it took a long time to put all this after a fashion to be understanded of the Sussex mind' — he took his clay-pipe slowly out of his mouth, and spat and spoke. 'Thank you, marm. You thinks sol I thinks otherwise 1'"