His extraordinary industry in 1834 can be confidently accounted for by the need of money. In 1833 he had taken effectual means to lighten his purse by standing for Parliament. The constituency chosen for the venture was the Tower Hamlets, and Marryat stood as a Reformer. Although the year immediately following the passing of the Reform Bill was as good a one as he could well have found in which to try in that character, he was not successful. His reforming zeal was possibly too purely naval for the constituency, and he was wanting in the very necessary readiness to say ditto to a popular fad. Marryat seems to have considered that his dislike of the press-gang was claim enough to the character of Liberal Reformer. But in the midst of profound peace the press-gang was not a burning grievance, and on some other points he took a line not likely to prove pleasing to the sentimental among the Liberals, for whose votes he was asking. He could not be got to show a burning interest in the sorrows of the slave. He took up the logically strong, but practically ineffective, position of the man who declined to be troubled for the slave while there was so much suffering unremedied at home. This might be a very sensible decision, but unfortunately it was discredited by the fact that it had been a favourite one with the slave-holders, whose tenderness for sufferers at home was never heard of till their own property in the West Indies seemed to be in danger. On another question, which proved a trying one to candidates till very recently, Marryat took a disastrously sensible course. He was called upon to give his opinion of the practice of flogging in the navy--and committed himself to the side of discipline most fatally. “Sir,” he said to a heckler, who wanted to know whether the “gallant captain” would be capable of flogging him or his sons; “Sir, you say the answer I gave you is not direct; I will answer you again. If ever you, or one of your sons, should come under my command, and deserve punishment, if there be no other effectual mode of conferring it, I shall flog you.” After that it is not surprising to hear that “Captain Marryat and the Chairman left the room together, amidst a tumult of united applause and disapprobation”--in the midst, in fact, of an uproar, in which the part of the meeting which admired his pluck was engaged in shouting against the other part which detested his good sense. There was something of Colonel Newcome in the politics of Captain Marryat, and he had not the good fortune to contend against a Barnes Newcome. His parliamentary ambition had to take its place with the other schemes of his life which came to nothing. A plan for the establishment of brevet rank in the navy, which he sent in about this time to Sir James Graham, was part of his activity as a political naval officer. It also came to nothing, and nobody can well regret that it was still-born.