Page:Ballot (Smith).djvu/36

 under the ballot, he is practising every day some fraud to conceal his first deviation from truth. The present method may produce a vicious act, but the ballot establishes a vicious habit; and then it is of some consequence, that the law should not range itself on the side of vice. In the open voting, the law leaves you fairly to choose between the dangers of giving an honest, or the convenience of giving a dishonest vote; but the ballot law opens a booth and asylum for fraud, calling upon all men to lie by beat of drum, forbidding open honesty, promising impunity for the most scandalous deceit, and encouraging men to take no other view of virtue than whether it pays or does not pay; for it must always be remembered and often repeated, and said and sung to Mr. Grote, that it is to the degraded liar only that the box will be useful. The man who performs what he promises needs no box. The man who refuses to do what he is asked to do despises the box. The liar, who says he will do what he never means to do, is the only man to whom the box is useful, and for whom this leaf out of the punicPunic [sic] Pandects is to be inserted in our statute book; the other vices will begin to look up, and to think themselves