One afternoon Polly met us in the yard. “Jerry, a gentleman has been here. He wants to hire your cab for the election.”
“Tell him my cab is busy, Polly. I don’t want it covered with their big posters, and I won’t make Jack and Captain race about to the pubs to fetch half-drunk voters. That would be an insult to the horses. And I shall not vote for him. He doesn’t understand what working men need.”
On the morning before the election, Dolly came into the yard crying. Her little blue dress was covered with mud.
“Those bad boys threw dirt all over me,” she said, “and called me a little raga… raga…”
“They called her a little ‘blue’ ragamuffin, Father,” said Harry, who ran in looking very angry. “But I gave them a beating they will remember, the cowardly ‘orange’ lot!”
Jerry kissed Dolly and sent her in to her mother. Then he turned to Harry, very serious.
“My boy, I hope you will always defend your sister. That is right. But I won’t have any election quarrels in my house. There are as many ‘blue’ rascals as ‘orange’ ones. Even women and children quarrel about a colour, and not one in ten knows what it is about.”
“But Father, I thought blue was for liberty.”
“Liberty does not come from colours, my boy. They only show the party. All the liberty you get from them is the liberty to get drunk at other people’s cost and to shout about things you only half understand. An election is a serious thing, or it should be. Every man should vote by his own conscience, and let his neighbour do the same.”