This ten-pound franchise is in the towns practically equivalent to household suffrage. In the country the labourers in general have no votes, as they live rent-free in houses belonging to their employers. No lowering of the franchise has ever been seriously demanded or proposed, and indeed there has been hardly any such thing as a genuine democratic cry; but from time to time sham ‘poor man’s friend’ cries are got up for election purposes. Those who get them up are so notoriously worthless, that most honest people here are inspired with contempt for democratic cries and democrats everywhere, and when they read their English news have less toleration for noisy demagogues than an average English Tory would have. Yet here, as in England, such opinions are oftener expressed in private than in public, and there is apparently the same shrinking from plain outspoken denunciation of the evils of an unmixed democracy—evils the approach of which so true a lover of liberty as De Tocqueville constantly deplored, as certain to be, sooner or later, fatal to both freedom and patriotism. Intimidation of voters is out of the question in a country where there are scarcely any large employers of labour, and where the relation of landlord is comparatively rare, has none of the traditions of feudalism in it, and is subject to no obligation but that of money payment. In general a seat in the House of Assembly is not so much coveted as to have any money value, so that there is no inducement to bribery. The only constituency, I was told, amongst which it has been practised is that of Hobart Town itself. In this, the only instance in which the ballot could have been of use, it (on one occasion at least) signally failed. An ingenious method was practised of evading its secresy, and making it certain that the bribees carried out their contract. The system of voting was for each voter to be presented, on entering the polling-booth, with a voting-paper, duly signed, containing the names of _both_ the candidates. This the voter took into the room containing the ballot-box, where he erased the name for which he did _not_ wish to vote, and then deposited it in the box. The trick was done as follows: Bribee number one was instructed to pass through without depositing his voting-paper at all, but to give it after he came out to the bribing agent. The agent then erased from it the hostile candidate’s name, and gave it to bribee number two, who deposited it in the ballot-box, bringing out his _own_ paper entire, which, after the Opposition name had been erased, was in like manner handed to bribee number three, and so on, the bribees having thus no opportunity of voting wrong without being discovered.