Scene four of Hogarth's "An Election" is a bit like a scene from Auguste Rodin’s Gates of Hell: in every corner, there is a human horror is playing out. 

The winner of the elections in Oxfordshire is ‘chaired’ through the village in a victory tour. In the back, cleaver-wielding voters confront members of the opposing party. 

The winning candidate is being upended from his chair by two guys who are having a go with big sticks.

And it goes downhill from there:

• The lad in a red coat is beating his donkey, while the bear is pilfering the lad’s barrel of produce. 
• An armed monkey, riding the bear (?!), is freaking out because a chimney sweep is peeing on his back.
• A big old sow has upended her owner and is making a dash for it with her five piglets (one has fallen into the stream). 
• Why on earth is there a goose flying over the whole scene? Maybe Hogarth tells us that the voters got ‘goosed.’
• If that’s not enough drama for you, there’s a fainting lady, a blind fiddler, Whig party officials peering out of the window with expressions of mirth and dismay, a bloodied soldier eating a pie… 

William Hogarth’s An Election IV: Chairing the Member depicts a chaotic event dedicated to the winner of an election.

Chairing the Member  is the fourth and last part of Hogarth's series referencing the notoriously corrupt 1754 Oxfordshire county election. It illustrates the 18^th-century custom of carrying the winners of an election around town on a decorative chair. The custom often included a celebratory feast and if the candidate was thought of as corrupt, an angry and violent mob joined in.

William Hogarth’s chaotic scene is perfected by the running pigs who have knocked over a woman. They are a reference to the miracle of the Gadarene Swine, a bible story about Jesus performing an exorcism in which the demons transfer into some pigs. The unfortunate pigs then ran into the sea and subsequently died. Here, the reference suggests that thesepeople are thoughtlessly heading for destruction due to a broken political system.

The group carrying the candidate on a chair is fittingly led by a blind musician who is completely unaware of the absolute mess around him, partly caused by the two people fighting in the middle of the picture. They ultimately cause the candidate’s fall since the one in the white shirt unintentionally hits one of the people carrying the chair in the head. One of the men has a bear with him who is eating entrails out of a donkey’s barrel who himself stopped to eat some thistle off the ground – which if it’s a metaphor just goes over my head.

The goose flying over the candidate’s head is supposed to be mocking him during his tragic downfall. As if the mocking goose wasn’t already enough, the wife of the carried candidate - who is watching from behind the wall - faints when she sees her husband fall. The literal and metaphorical fall of the candidate completes the Hogarth's cautionary tale.