Foxes and False Teeth

"An election is coming," wrote George Eliot, in her mid-19th-century novel Felix Holt, adding dryly, "Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."

Over a hundred years later, the British administrator Lord Rothschild referred to "The promises and panaceas that gleam like false teeth in the party manifestoes."

It would of course be wrong to believe that all comments about elections are negative or cynical. The American abolitionist and suffragist Lydia Maria Child, looking to the future, declared in 1856, "Woman stock is rising in the market. I shall not live to see women vote, but I'll come and rap at the ballot box."

Nearer our own time, Winston Churchill thought that, "No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections" But it has to be admitted that some of the more colourful quotations about election campaigns are less than positive.

Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister three times between 1855 and 1902, commented while out of office in 1861 that, "We do not care to scrutinize too closely, the moral boundary which separates a reckless hustings pledge from premeditated fraud."

Disraeli (according to what is probably an apocryphal story) is said to have rejected firmly on practical grounds the suggestion that his party make political capital out of Lord Palmerston's affairs. "Palmerston is now seventy. If he could provide evidence of his potency in his electoral address he'd sweep the country."

In the following century, the American critic H. L. Mencken said of the 1948 presidential campaign of Harry Truman, "If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised to provide them with free missionaries at the taxpayer's expense."

Perhaps comments of that kind led to the view of the American lady who is said to have asserted, "I never vote. It only encourages them."

For more quotes on elections and voting, see the Oxford Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations.

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