THE DEFEATED CANDIDATE.

Inangahua Times, Volume VII, Issue 1034, 11 January 1882, Page 2

THE DEFEATED CANDIDATE.

■» I have never been a defeated can didate, but I fancy I know how a [ defeated candidate feels. It is a mistake to picture him as utterly miserable. There are alleviations in the lot of even a defeated candidate. When first his calamity is revealed to him he has no doubt, what the French call a bad quarter of an hour. He is smitten with a sudden conviction of the hollowness of life and the vanity of all terrestrial things. He wishes he were a thousand miles away, and hardly knows which hurts him most — his own defeat or the other fellow's triumph. It is unseless to condole with him. The defeated candidate in this early stage of his malady doesn't want to talk or to be talked to. What he wants is a stiff whisky, and to get home the nearest way. And yet, perhaps, there is nothing he dreads so much as going home. How will his wife take it 1 Will she fling herself tragically upon his breast with tears and lamentations or will she adopt the equally disagreeable course of making nagging enquiries about his election expenses, and remarking that she " always told him so V There is no jolly little supper, with radiant committeenmen trapping in to fight the battle o'er again, with pipe and glass till the small hours. All that belongs to the triumphant other fellow ; and the defeated candidate after more whiskies goes to bed with a headache, and the conviction that he is an illused man, and that there is nothing in life worth living for. But his bad quarter of an hour probably dosen't last beyond

the first night. N>xt morning he begins to console himself by reading dates, from north to south, There is much comfort in that Next he begins to explain his defeat, and demonstrates to his own entire satisfaction that though at the bottom of the poll he has won a "moral victory." He then discovers that in reality it would not have been to his interest to go into Parliament. The grapes are out of his reach it is true, but he is quite certain the grapes are sour. The election contest had advertised him, and repaid for itself that way. Though he didn't succeed, it was a pleasant excitement while it lasted. Better luck next time. If I m don't misread human nature the rejected ones will pull themselves together again in some such faakion as this, and in the week after Friday's poll the sum of human happiness will not be a sum less than it was before the verdict of the ballot-box was taken. — ' Civis " in passing Notes," — Witness.