as possible, would be greatly relieved if they withdrew.  Generally their agents are an integral part of his fighting organisation, and often the whole of their expenditure at an election is covered by a special subscription made by him to the central fund.  Every one sees that this system drives a coach and horse through those clauses in the Corrupt Practices Act which restrict election expenses and forbid the employment of paid canvassers, though no one as yet has put forward any plan for preventing it.  But it is acknowledged that unless the whole principle is to be abandoned, new legislation must take place; and Lord Robert Cecil talks of the probable necessity for a ’stringent and far-reaching Corrupt Practices Act.’[74] If, however, an act is carried stringent enough to deal effectually with the existing development of electoral tactics, it will have to be drafted on lines involving new and hitherto unthought-of forms of interference with the liberty of political appeal.

[74] Times, June 26, 1907.

A hundred years ago a contested election might last in any constituency for three or four weeks of excitement and horseplay, during which the voters were every day further removed from the state of mind in which serious thought on the probable results of their votes was possible.  Now no election may last more than one day, and we may soon enact that all the polling for a general election shall take place on the same day.  The sporting fever of the weeks during which a general election even now lasts, with the ladder-climbing figures outside the newspaper offices, the flash-lights at night, and the cheering or groaning crowds in the party clubs, are not only waste of energy but an actual hindrance to effective political reasoning.

A more difficult psychological problem arose in the discussion of the Ballot.  Would a voter be more likely to form a thoughtful and public-spirited decision if, after it was formed, he voted publicly or secretly?  Most of the followers of Bentham advocated secrecy.  Since men acted in accordance with their ideas of pleasure and pain, and since landlords and employers were able, in spite of any laws against intimidation, to bring ‘sinister’ motives to bear upon voters whose votes were known, the advisability of secret voting seemed to follow as a corollary from utilitarianism.  John Stuart Mill, however, whose whole philosophical life consisted of a slowly developing revolt of feeling against the utilitarian philosophy to which he gave nominal allegiance till the end, opposed the Ballot on grounds which really involved the abandonment of the whole utilitarian position.  If ideas of pleasure and pain be taken as equivalent to those economic motives which can be summed up as the making or losing money, it is not true, said Mill, that even under a system of open voting such ideas are the main cause which induce the ordinary citizen to vote.  ’Once in a thousand times, as in the case of peace or war, or of taking off taxes, the