“Lord save us! How they dawdle over matters here!” thought the successful candidate. “In Dakota I’d just have run in thirty thousand miners, and the trick’d been done.” He almost, for an instant, regretted that he had forsaken the congenial country of mug-wamps and roar-backs, where the ten-dollar bill could satisfactorily circulate and settle everything, as the power of the purse should do. He was with difficulty restrained from exercising those feudal rights which he conceived were his through the possession of Vale Royal, and giving notice to quit to everybody on his estate who had voted against him. “If my hands had voted against me in the States,” he said, with his blackest frown, “they’d hev known a hotter hole than hell.” “Yes, Billy, but we are not in the States,” said his fair guide, philosopher and friend, “and there _are_ a _few_ people here who can’t be bought, and mustn’t be bullied.” “One don’t meet that sort in society, nor see ’em in church,” he growled under his breath. “Perhaps you don’t,” she replied, not well pleased. “But they are not a _quantité négligéable_. I mean, you mustn’t set their backs up and their tongues wagging. I don’t know what the Carlton wouldn’t do to you if you turned out the lowest Tommy Trot of them all from one of your cottages, because he voted against you. On the contrary, it is to that particular Tommy Trot who voted against you that you must send coals and blankets at Christmas, and port wine and beef tea when he gets fever.” He muttered that he couldn’t do more than that for the Tommy Trots who had voted for him. “Of course you can’t,” she answered. “And for them you may do less.” William Massarene pondered silently on this reply, and came to the conclusion that if political life in England was much less corrupt than in the States--as they all said--it was certainly, also, much more complicated. On the whole, he had preferred Limehouse to Southwoldshire; the London mechanics had understood him with a wink, and their stomachs had not “riz” at bribery direct or indirect. “My vote’s my own, ain’t it?” one rivet maker there had said to him. “Well, I can do what I like with my own, can’t I? I can wallup my old ’ooman, and my brats, and my dawg, and I can sell my vote, that’s flat. Yah!--hand the blunt over, old un.”