Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/10

 quite prepared to take those calm and considerate views of the Suffrage question which you so ably expounded, as "a writer of books," before you entered that House; and which you might have been expounding still more effectively now, as a member of Parliament, through the columns of every daily newspaper in the United Kingdom—aye, and even through all the best American papers—had you wisely entered the House as the independent member of a small borough, and not as the delegate of so thoroughly Americanised a constituency as that of Westminster. You may possibly object to my characterising the "free and independent" electors whom you represent as "an Americanised constituency;" but a little reflection will convince you that I am perfectly justified in using that phrase. Should any one question its correctness, my only reply would be to point to the notable alteration which has taken place in your opinions, since you exchanged the peaceful seclusion and fearless independence of a student's life, for the feverish excitement and mental subjugation which must always be the lot of any man—whatever intellectual eminence he may have attained—who aspires to represent a Democracy like that of Westminster.

In your excellent little treatise "On Representative Government," there is a passage on the dead-levelling tendency of Democracy which ought to be frequently and thoughtfully read by every Liberal member of the House of Commons, and especially by all those—a pretty large number—who have not yet learned the real meaning and full significance of the word "Americanisation." I use that term to express what you describe so well in the following paragraph:—

"Political life is indeed, in America, a most valuable school, but it is a school from which the ablest teachers are excluded, the first minds in the country being as effectually shut out from the national representation, and from public functions generally, as if they were under a formal disqualifcation. The Demos, too, being the one source of power in America, all