have canvassed half
the street.

There is, of course, a pleasanter side to canvassing. It warms the
cockles of one's heart to be greeted with the words, "Don't waste your
time here, sir. My vote's yours before you ask for it. There's your
picture over the chimney-piece." And when a wife says, "My husband is
out at work, but I know he means to vote for you," one is inclined to
embrace her on the spot.

These are the amenities of electioneering; but a man who enters on a
political campaign expecting fair treatment from his opponents is indeed
walking in a vain shadow. The ordinary rules of fairplay and
straightforward conduct are forgotten at an election. In a political
contest people say and do a great many things of which in every-day life
they would be heartily ashamed. An election-agent of the old school once
said to me in the confidence of after-dinner claret, "For my own part,
when I go into a fight, I go in to win, and I'm not particular to a
shade or two." All this is the common form of electioneering, but in one
respect I think my experience rather unusual. I have been all my life as
keen a Churchman as I am a Liberal, and some of my closest friends are
clergymen. I never found that the Nonconformists were the least
unfriendly to me on this account. They had their own convictions, and
they respected mine; and we could work together in perfect concord for
the causes of Humanity and Freedom. But the most unscrupulous opponents
whom I have ever encountered have been the parochial clergy of the
Church to which I belong, and the bands of "workers" whom they direct.
Tennyson once depicted a clergyman who--

"From a throne
Mounted in heaven should shoot into the dark
Arrows of lightnings,"

and graciously added that he "would stand and mark." But, when the Vicar
from his pulpit-throne launches barbed sayings about "those who would
convert our schools into seminaries of Atheism or Socialism, and would
degrade this hallowed edifice into a Lecture-Hall--nay, a Music-Hall,"
then the Liberal candidate, constrained to "sit and mark" these bolts
aimed at his cause, is tempted to a breach of charity. The Vicar's
"workers" follow suit, but descend a little further into personalities.
"You know that the Radical Candidate arrived drunk at one of his
meetings? He had to be lifted out of the carriage, and kept in the
Committee Room till he was sober. Shocking, isn't it? and then such