Page:Americanisation - a letter to John Stuart Mill.djvu/17

 with regard to the need of the ballot, in 1869, should you continue to represent the Americanised constituency of Westminster for the next three years, must be left to conjecture. From what has already happened, I would not like to predict very confidently what your verdict may be, some three years hence, when the eloquent member for Birmingham brings forward his motion for the adoption of secret voting as the only effectual mode of suppressing bribery and corruption.

From the general tone of your treatise "On Representative Government" your friends and admirers naturally expected that, when the important question of Parliamentary Reform came under discussion, you would gladly embrace so excellent an opportunity of ventilating the enlightened ideas you had there expounded, with reference to the principles by which Reformers ought to be guided in dealing with this question. In the Preface to that work you remarked that "both Conservatives and Liberals have lost confidence in the political creeds which they nominally profess, while neither side appears to have made any progress in providing itself with a better." And yet, as you justly observe, "such a better doctrine must be possible; not a mere compromise, by splitting the difference between the two, but something wider than either, which, in virtue of its comprehensiveness, might be adopted by either Liberal or Conservative, without renouncing anything which he really feels to be valuable in his own creed."

This is true Liberalism, which differs as widely from the blatant, sham Liberalism of stump orators and Demos-worshipping journals as the Anglican idea of freedom differs from the American idea. The latter is founded on the false doctrine of the rightful supremacy of a mere numerical majority, and the equally false theory of the natural equality of mankind. The English idea of freedom is as much opposed to the