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Whatever faults of taste or of method may be found in it, considering it as a speech delivered in the House of Representatives, with no more propriety or pertinence than hundreds of others which have been made under like circumstances, it is an extremely able speech, and it is by itself enough to show how remarkably effective he must have been as a canvasser in the remoter districts of his State where means of intellectual excitement were rare and a political meeting was the best-known form of public entertainment.
"Now, I have here," he said, exploring the capacious pockets of his overcoat, "a work entitled 'A Quarter of a Century in Congress, by the Honourable Lucius J. Howell, which, gentlemen, is issued upon subscription only, in half morocco or crushed levant at a hitherto unheard-of price." Abe ceased mopping his brow and turned a terrible glare upon the book canvasser. "What!" he roared.
He had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the Conservatives had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils, given their support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work for Mr. Tiemey. In a few minutes an apologetic "Pok!" was heard as the cork flew out of Mr. Lyons' bottle. Mr.
Whatever might have been the gratification of the squire, as a canvasser and a brother, at Mr.
The Genius discovered a pub in Sydney that kept the Ninemile brand of whisky, and drank himself to death; the Wombat became a Sub-Inspector of Police; Sloper entered the Christian ministry; Dodge was elected to the Federal Parliament; and a vague tradition about "a bloke who came up here in the horrors, and drownded poor old O'Grady," is the only memory that remains of that wonderful creation, the Cast-iron Canvasser.
Here was a type of the travelling canvasser for a manufacturing house a class which at that time was first being dubbed by the slang of the day "drummers."
Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep.
Obstinate drunks who had done nothing but lie on the ground and kick their feet in the air, would get up like birds, serpent-charmed, to go with him to durance vile. As soon as he saw the canvasser, and noted his fixed, unearthly stare, and listened to his hoarse, unnatural voice, the sergeant knew what was the matter; it was a man in the horrors, a common enough spectacle at Ninemile.
The ladies are indefatigable in their efforts against Home Rule, and one distinguished canvasser for signatures to the Roman Catholic petition has been warned by the police, as she values her life, to leave Dublin for a time.
Every priest who was examined was a canvasser; the canvas was everywhere on the altar, in the vestry, on the roads, in the houses." And while an election was in progress in County Tyrone in 1911 a parish priest announced that any Catholic who should vote for the Unionist candidate "would be held responsible at the Day of Judgment."
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