Seo. 3. Promise to endeavour to procure. or conversations, unaccompanied by any acts, should be much more strongly proved in evidence than where some clear definite act has followed the alleged offer or conversation" (Mallow, 2 O. & H. 22; cp. Hereford, 1 O. & H. 195; Cheltenham, ib. 64; Carrickfergus, 30. & H. 92). So, in the Aylesbury case (W. & Br. 15), the sitting member was unseated for having, through his agent, bribed voters by promising them money for the hire of conveyances if they would vote for him. But the practice of the election committees was by no means uniform in this respect (Ipswich, B. & Aus. 260; Wigton Burghs, 2 P. R. & D. 137), although the common law, as laid down by Lord Mansfield (R. v. Vaughan, 4 Burr. 2,501), appears to have regarded the bribe as "complete on his side who offers it." The mere offer of a bribe being an offence, whether accepted or not, it follows that where a voter is sent money to vote one way and then votes on the opposite side, that is bribery (Blackburn, 1 O. & H. 202); and à fortiori, "A man who votes for one candidate, after having received money for promising to vote for the other, is guilty of bribery equally as if he voted according to his promise, even if at the time he promised he had no intention of fulfilling it" (Lichfield, 1 O. & H. 29). And so, it is equally bribery to attempt to bribe a voter who, though on the register, was disqualified by nonresidence from voting, and in fact did not vote (Guildford, 1 O. & H. 15). So, too, a "promise to endeavour to procure money, &c.," is made equivalent to actual bribery. This had already been decided to be bribery under 66 the common law of Parliament, as appears from ,, Sec. 3. -The words Any money or وو (pr. valuable "valuable consideration" have been held to mean consideration. "valuable consideration estimated in money Alderson, B., in Cooper v. Slade, 6 E. & B. 447, and 6 H. L. C. 747); but it need not be shown that the gift consisted of money. So a promise of refreshment in futuro as distinguished from food, given to be consumed on the spot, is bribery (Bodmin, 1 O. & H. 124, and Tynemouth, 2 P. R. & D. 186); and "when a thing is done in the way of bribery, though it may be a valueless thing, it is still bribery" (Bewdley, 44 L. T. 283). The offer of office or employment, which is specially provided for in the following sub-section, would not be a valuable consideration in this sense. But in the Launceston case (2 O. & H. 122), where the sitting member, on whose estate, near the town, the large quantity of rabbits had given rise to great dissatisfaction to his tenants, refused to abate the nuisance until just before the poll, when he gave his tenants leave to destroy and sell them, Mellor, J., avoided the election, saying, "What was done was done, not so much from an abstract sense of justice, as from a desire to influence the election." So a gift of boots has been held to be bribery (Barnstaple, 2 P. R. & D. 208). In the Huddersfield case (ib. 130), bribery took the form of "colourable payments in their bills for the last election, of the discounts taken off from their previous bills," &c. (cp. Cambridge, B. & Arn. 190). The following decisions as to what constitutes bribery are but a few out of the almost endless variety of ways, in which corruption may be practised. In the Harwich case (1 P. R. & D. 75) one man was bribed by discharging a debt due from him, and so releasing his vessel, which had been seized as security therefor, and others received money under the pretence of loss of time and demurrage on the detention of themselves and their vessels during the election. Gifts under colour of charity, as in the Boston case (2 O. & H. 161), where a person intending to contest the seat distributed large quantities of coal among the poor about a month before the election, but when in fact a vacancy was not immediately anticipated (cp. Youghal, 1 ib. 294; Windsor, ib. 2). But subscriptions to charities are not necessarily corrupt (Westbury, 1 O. & H. 50) unless the circumstances show them to be so, as when a candidate, having been in the habit of spending £300 in that way, increased it in view of an election to £720 (Stafford, ib. 230); nor, of course, are isolated gifts to poor persons in distress and need of assistance necessarily bribery, unless the circumstances in each case warrant the inference of a corrupt motive. Thus the gift by one candidate of £1 to a voter who had promised him his vote (Windsor, 1 O. & H. 2), and by another of 5s. to the wife of his tenant, who was in great distress (Tamworth, 20 L. T. 181), was, under the special circumstances of each case, held not to be bribery. As was seen in the case of "Undue Influence" Sec. 3. (suprà p. 54), a candidate may indulge his charitable When due to very instincts under the influence of mixed motives, and it then becomes very difficult to say which predominated, the bona fide desire to relieve distress, or the political anxiety to secure votes. In such cases, the Court would probably incline to give the respondent the benefit of the doubt, as was apparently Lord Bramwell's view in the second Windsor case (20. & H. 89). Here the candidate, some long time before the election, distributed £100 among his tenants, from whom he received some £3,000 a-year in rent, and who had been caused great distress by a flood. The learned Judge said, "It is certain that the coming election must have been present to the respondent's mind when he gave away these things. But there is no harm in it, if a man has a legitimate motive for doing a thing, although, in addition to that, he has a motive which, if it stood alone, would be an illegitimate one. He is not to refrain from doing that which he might legitimately have done on account of the existence of this motive, which, by itself, would have been an illegitimate one." (cp. Carrickfergus, 3 0. & H. 90). See the dictum of Pollock, B., to the same effect in the Salisbury case (4 O. & H. 21). And in the Boston case (2 0. & H. 161), Grove, J., used these words: "It might be a doubtful question whether, assuming two motives to exist, the one being pure and the other with the intention to corrupt, you could exclude the corrupt intention and rely wholly upon the pure intention. I think that must be rather a question of degree.' mixed motives. Sec. 3. Charity at election times But as it is unquestioned that, if a corrupt purpose "is found to be the object of the donor, it matters to be avoided. not under what pretext or in what form, to what persons, or through whose hands the gift may be bestowed, or whether it has proved successful or not" (Plymouth, 3 O. & H. 107); the recent remarks of Bowen, L.J., in the Wigan case (4 O. & H. 14), will be generally deemed to contain the soundest advice: "Charity at election times ought to be kept by politicians in the background. I think it will Over payments. be generally found that the feeling which distributes relief to the poor at election times, though those who are the distributors may not be aware of it, is not really charity, but party feeling, following in the steps of charity, wearing the dress of charity, and mimicking her gait.” An excessive price paid for a horse (Cockermouth. 2 P. R. & D. 167), or for pigs (Huddersfield, W. & B, 38), was held to be bribery. But overpayment of agents was not considered bribery in the Youghal case (1 0. & H. 296); this, however, will no longer be the case. In the first Sligo case (2 P. R. & D. 258) bribery took the form of inducing a voter to absent himself by the payment of an outstanding election account; while in the second Sligo case (ib. 299) voters were bribed to refrain from voting by having sums paid to themselves or their wives, which they afterwards returned. The hiring of rooms has frequently been held bribery (Huddersfield, ubi sup.); and in the Dartmouth case (W. & B. 21), £20 paid for a room in a house, the yearly rent of which was £18, for the candidate's wife to hear the speeches from, was declared to be bribery. |