HECKLING AT ELECTIONS

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 22, 26 January 1924, Page 16

HECKLING AT ELECTIONS

ALMOST A FORGOTTEN ART.

One can hardly leave the election of 1923 without taking note of the deliberate verdict of Mr. Asquith on file subject of heckling, states a correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian."' Mr. Asqmth speaks from an experience' going back many years, and .he never speaks at random. "No art in the world had suffered such degradation, or was more nearly approaching extinction, than the art of heckling," he said in closing his campaign. Heckling, be it remembered, is essentially a product of the post-Re-form period. Brutal assault and beastly hellowing were the weapons of "the old hustijigs, and., it"was.only, when larger and larger proportions of the population began, with the gradual extension of the franchise, to acquire a political consciousness that heckling began. Now the pendulum seems to.have swung back again and -some of the scenes of the later stages of this election would have been quite m keeping with those of an election 150 years ago1. Even the establishment of schools for hecklers suggests a note of pessimism, for there would have been no need for such schools had the midVictonan tradition been maintained. _ let for those who take long views the situation, is not really hopeless. The heckler is a person who has studied political questions for himself; heckling was always more popular in Scotland and among the reading artisans of Yorkshire and Lancashire than in rural districts in the South: Heckling did not begin suddenly. At .least thirty years intervened between the first Reform m d the great days of the heckler. Nowadays those who might still heckle are shouted down by the newer electorate, by a mass of people not yet politically conscious in any intellectual sense. It i s a matter of time. Ten years hence the bawlers of to-day may ,be hecklers themselves. You cannot make vast additions to the elecorate_without paying the price; you cannot assimilate millions of new voters in a year or two.