So far as the reduction of the cost of elections is concerned, the English method of dealing with the subject has certainly been successful. According to the returns laid before Parliament, the total aggregate expenses incurred by candidates throughout the United Kingdom at the general election of 1880--the last that took place before the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883--was £1,736,781; at the next election in 1885 it fell to £1,026,645, and on every subsequent occasion it has been less than that. In 1900 it was £777,429, which is not far from the average in these days. The expense of English elections is, however, far from small to-day. In 1900 the average cost for the United Kingdom in constituencies that were not uncontested was four shillings and four pence, for every vote cast.[231:1] [Sidenote: Returns of Expenses Sometimes Incomplete.] Moreover the returns undoubtedly do not in every case include all that is spent. A recent series of letters to _The Times_, under the title "The worries of a parliamentary representative," throws light on this subject.[231:2] It opened with a letter from the member for a Welsh borough complaining that about a month after he had signed the return of his election expenses he received a note from his agent in regard to claims by workers at the election; that upon his refusal to pay any such claims in violation of the Corrupt Practices Act the agent wrote asking whether he would or would not fulfil the obligations made on his behalf during the election. His continued refusal, the member declared, had made him unpopular with many of his former supporters, who were now trying to prevent his renomination. In answer to this charge the agent, in a letter to _The Times_, explained that all he had meant was that the member "should find some way--legal, of course--of expressing his gratitude to men who had worked splendidly in his cause;" and he added that this way had eventually been found, its name being "undoubted distress." In his reply in _The Times_ the member denied that his relief of distress in the constituency had any relation to the election, or was a mode of expressing gratitude to men who had worked for him. It would be rash to assert that indirect means of rewarding party workers are not often found; and in fact another election agent stated in a letter to _The Times_[231:3] in the course of the foregoing controversy, that promises of such a nature, made in behalf of the candidate, were unfortunately too common. [Sidenote: Ease of Evasion.] [Sidenote: Difficult to Prove Agency;]