The Pontefract by-election ended in the return of the Gladstonian
by the narrow majority of 32,—Mr. T. W. Nussey receiving 1,191 votes, against 1,159 given for Mr. Elliott Lees, the Conservative. For ourselves, we bad ex- pected this result ever since the publication of the judgment which unseated Mr. Reckitt, the Gladstonian Member. That judgment was so honorific to the unseated candidate, and threw so much blame on the Conservatives for bringing serious charges which they had not even attempted to prove, that we were persuaded that the borough would show its irritation at the petition and the purely technical unseating of Mr. Reekitt by returning the candidate for whom he used his influence ; and we only wonder that Mr. Nussey's majority was not more substantial. At the election in February, Mr. Reckitt's own majority was 63, or nearly double that of his successor. As for the view of the Gladstonian papers that this very narrow victory in one of the smallest constituencies now left to us, moans a direction to Mr. Gladstone to put on "full steam ahead,"—every one who knows how much the local considerations in a contest of this kind outweigh the strictly political considerations, knows that the inference is pure folly.
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