HUMOUR OF ELECTIONS

Taranaki Daily News, 9 December 1931, Page 12

HUMOUR OF ELECTIONS

SOLACE FOR VANQUISHED GENIALITY AND HUMBUG. WEAKNESSES OF VOTERS. Some entertaining sidelight on electioneering and the delights and sorrows of those who hold office in more or less elevated positions are contained in an editorial of the lighter vein variety published by the Timps just after th® British elections, under the heading of “Consolation in Deafeat.” The writer says:—■ “If there is one thing that every good man prefers to a seat in Parliament it is an elevated character, and, though the two are not exclusive alternatives, events which have just occurred at Hazelcrest in Illinois show that public life is a threat to private virtue. Politics easily ruin a man’s character, and, what is hardly less momentous, may break up his domestic happiness as well. "The wife of the Mayor in that growing town, or ‘nifty burg,’ has just secured a divorce on the plea that being elected Mayor has proved the undoing of her husband. He —who had been a man who not only did not drink or swear, but who did not even smoke —was changed by public office, she said, into a man who did all three things; and, what was worse, the smokes he smoked were big black cigars. He Who had always been home early kept late hours. He let the dinner get cold, and he refused to put the cat out, being puffed up with the greatness of being a Mayor. JUDGE GRANTS A DIVORCE. “The judge granted the divorce, but the real culprit is plainly democracy. To run for Mayor of Illinois is to lead, people to expect a good deal from you in the way of indiscriminate heartiness; but under modern democratic institutions no one can put himself up for election without assuming a habitual apparent geniality which may well become discreditable humbug. “The pleasures of being sincere to the point of rudeness belong to private men, and unsuccessful candidates have, tho agreeable thought that moral deterioration threatens not them but their successful opponents. It will be the successful ones, the elected representatives of the people, who will have to make that show of jollity which leads men to exchange black cigars and to stand each other unwanted drinks.” , Proceeding, the Times says: “There may be glory in the political life, but there is not health. Above all there is no early bed. The Mayor of Hazelcrest with his late hours is but a type of public man the world over for whom the sun goes down in vain. Yet all proverbial philosophy is strong against late hours, and now the world, which is being driven back to good habits by poverty, is seeing the beginning of a back-to-cur-few movement. IN BED BY 10 O’CLOCK. “If the Mayor of Hazelcrest has set a bad example, the local Council of Bratislava, which is the capital of the whole province of Slovakia in Czecho-Slovakia, has restored the balance and saved the fair name of municipal government. It has brought in the curfew, nine in the winter and 10 in the summer, and imposed a fine, after the manner of college authorities, for all who are out after hours, the proceeds to go to the unemployed. “Revenue devices quickly spread, from country to country, and at first sight it might look as if one of the privileges of the successfully elected is going, to be that of sending their opponents, with all other merely private persons, to bed. But a moment’s thought makes it plain who has the best of the bargain those who sit on benches till the grey and. chilling dawn appears, or those who keep their health and looks by early sleep or, what is even better, enjoy their lives by long and delicious reading in bed. "And if, lying back against the pillow and gazing at the ceiling, its stainless white reminds them too poignantly of their irreproachable political pasts, and their pleasure is marred by a feeling that they have been insufficiently appreciated, there is always the reflection, that electors are, after all, very average people with all the weaknesses common to the ordinary run of mankind. POLITICS AND CIRCUSES. “And to the news from Illinois and Czecho-Slovakia there is to be added a third item rich in encouragement .for those who have missed election. All of them, and particularly the Communist candidate who has received no votes at all, can find in Ceylon support for a low view of electoral intelligence. “Many of the voters in a local option poll which has just been held in Colombo have now come forward to explain that they imagined, when they voted, that they were applying for free seats at a circus. What ignorance indeed, the defeated ones may exojaim, not to know that political events,' though they may often resemble a circus, have never yet proved, to be free spectacles in the end.”