Secret Service; or, Recollections of a City DetectiveForrester, Andrew
General
Secret Service; or, Recollections of a City Detective
Forrester, Andrew
Detective and mystery stories, English; Fiction; Short stories
One other remarkable fact I discovered in this town. I hope the reader
will not be startled by it. I relate it as a truth. I state it as an
undeniable proposition. I am open to be convinced if I am wrong; but if
I am right it is a thing to be laid before Parliament, as a great
argument in favour of something or against something else. Every fact
surely leads up to an inference. Every truth has a moral. This fact I
commend to all whom it doth concern, and I declare it. It is this: the
representation of N---- is usually determined by the brothel-keepers of
the town. All the men who ever sat for that borough since the Reform
Bill passed have been returned by these despicable human creatures, who
derive means of sustaining their own existence out of the most
loathsome, although we are told incurable, evil. How do I prove my fact
and moral? the reader asks. Thus: when all the really honest electors
have been polled, the operators or agents exhaust the comparatively
decent section of the bribable part of the town, and the result of the
whole gives to the Conservative, it may be, a majority of four, or it
may be a majority to the Liberal of four, or it may be five, six, seven,
eight, nine, ten, or eleven,--according to circumstances. We may suppose
this to be late in the day. But there are still from twenty-three to
twenty-five of the morally unclean ten-pound householders or burgesses
in a particular street of N----, who regularly pay their rates and taxes
within the date prescribed for exclusion from the register, and who are,
therefore, duly-qualified voters. Neither Liberal nor Conservative will
lose an election if he can help it. In the emergency of the time I speak
of, the Liberal, finding himself in a minority of four, goes into Stew
Street and buys up the twenty-three, four, or five occupiers of these
leprosy-distilling houses, and pays any price the occupiers think fit to
demand. They are taken up to poll like free, independent, honest, and
moral electors. They turn the scale. They return the member. All the
rest has been a farce. Printing the addresses of rival candidates,
engaging committee-rooms, every thing in the way of machinery or
principle, up to the visit of the operator or agent in Stew Street, has
been useless. I hate shams. I detest mockeries. Why not leave Stew
Street to return the gentleman or blackguard who is to be called M.P.
for N----?
Apropos to this, or by way of postscript to my moralising, let me inform
the reader that a cabinet minister has been returned for N----, and
that, beyond all earthly doubt, Stew Street alone, or its voters, and
the cabinet minister's money, returned him to Parliament in the way I
have pointed out.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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