The majority of refined persons in our day may generally be heard abusing the practice of canvassing.  In the same way the majority of refined persons (commonly the same refined persons) may be heard abusing the practice of interviewing celebrities.  It seems a very singular thing to me that this refined world reserves all its indignation for the comparatively open and innocent element in both walks of life.  There is really a vast amount of corruption and hypocrisy in our election politics; about the most honest thing in the whole mess is the canvassing.  A man has not got a right to “nurse” a constituency with aggressive charities, to buy it with great presents of parks and libraries, to open vague vistas of future benevolence; all this, which goes on unrebuked, is bribery and nothing else.  But a man has got the right to go to another free man and ask him with civility whether he will vote for him.  The information can be asked, granted, or refused without any loss of dignity on either side, which is more than can be said of a park.  It is the same with the place of interviewing in journalism.  In a trade where there are labyrinths of insincerity, interviewing is about the most simple and the most sincere thing there is.  The canvasser, when he wants to know a man’s opinions, goes and asks him.  It may be a bore; but it is about as plain and straight a thing as he could do.  So the interviewer, when he wants to know a man’s opinions, goes and asks him.  Again, it may be a bore; but again, it is about as plain and straight as anything could be.  But all the other real and systematic cynicisms of our journalism pass without being vituperated and even without being known—­the financial motives of policy, the misleading posters, the suppression of just letters of complaint.  A statement about a man may be infamously untrue, but it is read calmly.  But a statement by a man to an interviewer is felt as indefensibly vulgar.  That the paper should misrepresent him is nothing; that he should represent himself is bad taste.  The whole error in both cases lies in the fact that the refined persons are attacking politics and journalism on the ground of vulgarity.  Of course, politics and journalism are, as it happens, very vulgar.  But their vulgarity is not the worst thing about them.  Things are so bad with both that by this time their vulgarity is the best thing about them.  Their vulgarity is at least a noisy thing; and their great danger is that silence that always comes before decay.  The conversational persuasion at elections is perfectly human and rational; it is the silent persuasions that are utterly damnable.