Electioneering Experiences.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 49, 4 December 1902, Page 1

Electioneering Experiences.

Although the new candidate has generally, as we have indicated, to go through much tribulation, yet, if he is endowed with a sense of humor, he can scarcely go through the whole of a campaign without finding that he has many compensations. Amusing incidents are continually occurring, though most of them need to be seen to be properly appreciated. The candidate already referred to has placed a number of his experiences at our disposal, and one or two of them at least are sufficiently interesting to be worth reproducing.

' My first amusing experience,' he says, ' was at a meeting I addressed at a large coal-mining town. I was standing as a Liberal candidate and as the miners were enthusiastic Liberals they gave me a great reception, When " heckling " time came on one cantankerous individual, apparently out of touch with the rest of my hearers, stood up with a sheaf of questions evidently intending to floor me by firing the whole lot of them at my devoted head. As soon as he had read his first question the miners saw he was an enemy and he was greeted with cries of " Shut up. Sit down. Go and boil your head," etc. However I answered his question, and then he proceeded to No. 2 and this time he was not content with putting the question but proceeded further to make a long and rambling speech. There was a good deal of interruption and boo-hooing, but the man kept on talking until at last a sturdy old miner got up from his seat at the back of the hall, stalked away to the front where the questioner was standing, grabbed him by the shoulders, and giving him a very significant shake roared out, " Are you going to shut up, you idiot. If you don't, I'll take you outside and punch your head." The old man meant business and the questioner knew it for he dropped into his seat and we had never another word out of him that night. That was the miners' little way of settling an elector who tried to spoil their man by asking awkward questions, and I couldn't help reflecting that if it was unconventional it was at least decidedly effective.

' One of the worst worries of a candidate — at least of a Liberal candidate — is the long journeys he sometimes has to make to small out-lying, out-of-the-way places where the people are for the most part hopelessly Conservative, and where he knows that his visit will for all practical purposes be labor in vain. I had one such place in my electorate which was particularly notorious for its immovable Conservatism. The gentleman who had been Liberal candidate at the previous election told me that the seven or eight electors who had attended his meeting had all promised to vote for him but that when the numbers came out the voting was, for the Conservative, 25 ; for the Liberal, o ; so that they had all played him false. I knew pretty well therefore what I had to expect and didn't mind much what I said to electors of that stamp. About thirty rolled up to my meeting and they gave me a fair hearing ; then at the close an old man got up and solemnly pro-

posed a vote of thanks and confidence — confidence, mind you, —in me as a fit and proper person to represent them in Parliament. I allowed the motion to be duly seconded and solemnly carried, and then I rose to acknowledge the vote, I thanked them, I said, for their vote of confidence, and I hoped they -meant it, but I had taken the precaution before coming out to look up the returns for the previous election and they were certainly not calculated to make me expect a vote of confidence seeing that the previous Liberal candidate had not received a single vote in the district. I hoped they meant the vote they had so solemnly passed, but at all events, I continued, there was one thing I would do. I would keep my eye on the man that proposed that vote of confidence and if I didn't get at least one vote in Circular Hill I would know one .man who had played it low down on me. From the way in which the audience laughed and cheered I could see I had struck home and that the man had certainly at the time no intention whatever of voting forme. Strangely enough, when the polling was announced on Tut-sday night the voting wis, for the Conservative, 30 ; for the Liberal, 1 ; and I have been wondering ever since whether I did after all rally the old man into giving me his vote.'