A DEFEATED CANDIDATE.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 1015, 22 December 1881, Page 3

A DEFEATED CANDIDATE.

I have never been a defeated candidate, but I fancy I know how a defeated candidate feels. It is a mistake to suppose him as utterly miserable. There are alleviations in the lot of even a defeated candidate. When first his calamity is revealed to him he has, no doubt, what the French call a bad quarter of an hour. He is smitten with a sudden conviction of the hollowness of life and the vanity of all terrestrial things. He wishes he were a thousand miles away, and hardly knows which hurts him most—his own defeat or the other fellow’s triumph. is useless to condole with him. The defeated candidate in this early stage of his malady doesn’t want to talk or be talked to. What he wants is a stiff whisky, and to get home the nearest way. And yet, perhaps, there is nothing he dreads so much as going home. How will his wife take it ? Will she fling herself tragically upon his breast with tears and lamentations, or will she adopt the equally disagreeable course of making nagging inquiries about his election expenses, and remarking that she “ always told him so ?” There is no jolly little supper, committeemen trooping in to fight the battle o’er again, with pipe and glass, till the small hours. All that belongs to the triumphant other fellow ; and the defeated candidate, after more whiskies, goes to bed with a headache, and the conviction that he is an ill-used man, and that there is nothing left in life worth living for. But his bad quarter of an hour probably doesn’t last beyond the first night. Next morning he begins to console himself by reading the list of all the other defeated candidates, from north to south. There is much comfort in that. Next he begins to explain his defeat, and to his own entire satis- ' faction that though at the bottom of the poll he has won a “ moral victory.” He then discovers that in reality it would not have been to his interest to go into Parliament. The grapes are out of reach it is true, but it is quite certain that the grapes are sour. The election contest has advertised him, and paid for itself that way. Though it didn’t succeed, it was a pleasant excitement whilst it lasted. Better luck next time. If I don’t misread human nature the rejected ones will pull themselves together again in some such fashion as this, and in a week after Friday’s poll the sum of human happiness will not be much less than it was before the verdict of the ballotbox was taken.—Otago Witness.