THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1908. THE SECRECY OF THE BALLOT.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 3050, 21 November 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1908. THE SECRECY OF THE BALLOT.

The secrecy of the ballot, which is regarded Jas one of the bulwarks of our liberty, is thirty-eight years old in New Zealand, and thirty-six in Great Britain. In tha Old Country the on for forty years before the reformers won. It is curious to note that Liberals were by no means unanimously in favour of abolishing open voting. Lord Morley says that all the highest abstract arguments were against secret voting. The secret vote, it was argued, was power without responsibility. Secrecy was held to sap the citizen's courage, promote evasion, tempt to downright lying. If publicity and its checks were removed, then all the mean motives of mankind would skulk to the polling booth under a cloak. These arguments were put forward by Mill and others, and drew from the blunt John Bright the saying that the worst of great thinkers was that they so often thought wrong. "On the ottier hand," says Lord Morley, "the concrete case for the change is irresistible. Experience showed that without secrecy in its exercise the suffrage was not free. The

farmer was afraid of his landlord, and the labourer was afraid of the farmer; the employer could tighten the screw on the workman, the shopkeeper feared the power of his best customers, the debtor quailed before his creditor, the priest wielded thunderbolts over the faithful. Not only was the open vote not free; it exposed its possessor to so much bullying, molestation, and persecution, that his possession came to be less of a boon than a nuisance." Mr Gladstone himself, whose Government put the measure on the Statute Book, was a late convert, confessing in 1870 that he voted for it with a lingering reluctance. The House of Lords threw the Bill out in 1871, stating, among other reasons for their action, that to enact voting by ballot would eventually overthrow the Monarchy. This view was also held by the great Daniel Webster. "Above all things," the American orator had adjured Lord Shaftesbury, "resist to the very last the introduction of the ballot; for, as a Republican, I tell you that the b?llot can never co-exist with monarchical institutions." With the Monarchy firmly established in Great Britain to-day—-perhaps more firmly than it was in 1872—this argument causes a smile. But so good a Liberal as Mr Herbert Paul says that while the gloomy predictions of the advocates of open voting have not been fulfilled, the ballot has not done everything that was [claimed for it. The old corruption has gone, but, he argues, a more subtle form of improper appeal has taken its place. In his "Governance of England," Mr Sidney Low comments on the unimpressiveness of the modern parliamentary election. "Nothing is required from the elector but the expenditure of a few minutes of his time atfcinfrequent intervals," he parliamentary election, the choosing of a new Grand Council of the Empire, need give him tia more trouble than taking out a doglicense. . . The election has been divested of every circumstance of significance and dignity." The poll- | ing booth, with its unimpressive table and sentry-boxes of rough boarding, and its quiet proceedings, often disappoints and disconcerts the elector, who "fancies that there must be something more for him to do that this high privilege, this urgent duty, of which he has heard so much, ought not to be rattled through with so scant a ceremony, so little expenditure of energy on his own part." The case was different in the old days. The slow and cumbrous process of recording the vote made Q mands upon the leisure "^ti. ' ehce of line SleClor, and sometime 7 -' upon his momland physical courage. Every voter must have felt that he was taking a personal part in the contest, and in most cases he must have developed "that individual interest which at present is often confined to a mere handful of active political 'workers' in the constituency." Mr Low draws attention to the pictures of elections in the literature of the earlier part of the nineteenth century—"the rowdy nomination day, •the speeches of the rival candidates on the hustings, the excited mobs clambering round the booths, the electors marching up to vote for the Blue or Buff candidate, proudly or defiantly, conscious that the public eye was upon them, and perhaps aware that consequences not uninteresting to themselves might follow."