The poet Lucilius (c. 180-102 BC) writes about political life in the Forum of the Roman Republic:
“Now in fact from morning to night, weekend and weekday,
the whole population and likewise senators, too,
all bustle about in the Forum and never leave;
they all devote themselves to one and the same endeavour and trade—
to cheat if they can get away with it, to fight dirty,
to vie in flattery, to pretend to be a gentleman,
to hatch plots, as if everyone were everyone’s enemy.”
In 1818, William Cobbett writes in his newspaper, The Political Register: “After seeing that about three or four hundred Boroughmongers actually possess all the legislative power, divide the ecclesiastical, judicial, military and naval departments amongst their own dependents, what a fine picture we find of that wise system of checks and balances, of which so much has been said by many great writers! What name to give such a government it is difficult to say. It is like nothing that was ever heard of before. It is neither a monarchy, an aristocracy, nor a democracy; it is a band of great nobles, who, by sham elections, and by the means of all sort of bribery and corruption, have obtained an absolute sway in the country, having under them, for the purposes of show and of execution, a thing they call a King... a company of false moneymakers whom they call a Bank... and a talking, corrupt and impudent set of fellows, whom they call a House of Commons. Such is the government of England.”
Walt Whitman describes a Democratic Party convention in the United States in the 1850s: “The members who composed it were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train’d to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels... terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers... duellists, carriers of conceal’d weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr’d inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlots’ money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came they? From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the customhouses, marshals’ offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the President’s house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch’d at midnight... Such, I say, form’d... the entire personnel, the atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our municipal, State, and National politics—substantially permeating, handling, deciding, and wielding everything—legislation, nominations, elections, “public sentiment,” &c.—while the great masses of the people, farmers, mechanics, and traders, were helpless in their gripe.”
Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton write in their 1911 book, The Party System: “The House of Commons has ceased to be an instrument of Government. Its ancient functions have been killed under the prolonged and continuous action of hypocrisy. It affords today... no more than an opportunity for highly lucrative careers. That career is founded upon the bamboozlement of the public (whose faculty for being duped these professionals hope to prey upon indefinitely), with the complicity of nobodies content to write MP after their name as a sufficient reward for supporting the Party System; to whom, of course, must be added the lawyers and businessmen for whom Parliament offers definite financial rewards, and that in proportion to their indifference to their representative duties. All modern scholarship would tend to say of any institution which had fallen into such a condition that it is past praying for; and history is there with a hundred examples to support this modern conclusion… “It would seem that changes in political machinery will prove either impossible or ineffective, unless the people can be reawakened to political consciousness and to a resolution to make their will prevail. An alert democracy, even with unchanged machinery, could knock the bottom out of the Party System tomorrow by refusing to elect party hacks and by sending to Parliament men fully determined to make an end of the corruption and unreality of our politics.”
Patrick Marnham, Paris correspondent of The Independent, describes the French Senate in 1989: “It is a curious institution. Unlike the House of Lords it is elected, but it is elected by local councillors, an overwhelming majority of them from small country communes... Chesterton said that ‘tradition is the democracy of the politically dead,’ but in France ‘the politically dead’ get a seat in parliament, together with three secretaries each, interest-free loans, subsidised foreign travel and an income of £40,000 half of which is tax free...
“It is true that three senators have been accused of fraud, bribery and tax evasion in the past three years, but they have been cleared of all these charges—by other senators.”
In 1818, William Cobbett writes in his newspaper, The Political Register: “After seeing that about three or four hundred Boroughmongers actually possess all the legislative power, divide the ecclesiastical, judicial, military and naval departments amongst their own dependents, what a fine picture we find of that wise system of checks and balances, of which so much has been said by many great writers! What name to give such a government it is difficult to say. It is like nothing that was ever heard of before. It is neither a monarchy, an aristocracy, nor a democracy; it is a band of great nobles, who, by sham elections, and by the means of all sort of bribery and corruption, have obtained an absolute sway in the country, having under them, for the purposes of show and of execution, a thing they call a King... a company of false moneymakers whom they call a Bank... and a talking, corrupt and impudent set of fellows, whom they call a House of Commons. Such is the government of England.”
Walt Whitman describes a Democratic Party convention in the United States in the 1850s: “The members who composed it were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train’d to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels... terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers... duellists, carriers of conceal’d weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr’d inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people’s money and harlots’ money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence came they? From back-yards and bar-rooms; from out of the customhouses, marshals’ offices, post-offices, and gambling-hells; from the President’s house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed by-places, where devilish disunion was hatch’d at midnight... Such, I say, form’d... the entire personnel, the atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our municipal, State, and National politics—substantially permeating, handling, deciding, and wielding everything—legislation, nominations, elections, “public sentiment,” &c.—while the great masses of the people, farmers, mechanics, and traders, were helpless in their gripe.”
Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton write in their 1911 book, The Party System: “The House of Commons has ceased to be an instrument of Government. Its ancient functions have been killed under the prolonged and continuous action of hypocrisy. It affords today... no more than an opportunity for highly lucrative careers. That career is founded upon the bamboozlement of the public (whose faculty for being duped these professionals hope to prey upon indefinitely), with the complicity of nobodies content to write MP after their name as a sufficient reward for supporting the Party System; to whom, of course, must be added the lawyers and businessmen for whom Parliament offers definite financial rewards, and that in proportion to their indifference to their representative duties. All modern scholarship would tend to say of any institution which had fallen into such a condition that it is past praying for; and history is there with a hundred examples to support this modern conclusion… “It would seem that changes in political machinery will prove either impossible or ineffective, unless the people can be reawakened to political consciousness and to a resolution to make their will prevail. An alert democracy, even with unchanged machinery, could knock the bottom out of the Party System tomorrow by refusing to elect party hacks and by sending to Parliament men fully determined to make an end of the corruption and unreality of our politics.”
Patrick Marnham, Paris correspondent of The Independent, describes the French Senate in 1989: “It is a curious institution. Unlike the House of Lords it is elected, but it is elected by local councillors, an overwhelming majority of them from small country communes... Chesterton said that ‘tradition is the democracy of the politically dead,’ but in France ‘the politically dead’ get a seat in parliament, together with three secretaries each, interest-free loans, subsidised foreign travel and an income of £40,000 half of which is tax free...
“It is true that three senators have been accused of fraud, bribery and tax evasion in the past three years, but they have been cleared of all these charges—by other senators.”
