Page:Mr. John Stuart Mill and the ballot.djvu/11

9 trade in corn long before the year 1846; yet it is well known that it required the Irish Famine with all its horrors to secure that great measure of justice. Why has Parliamentary Reform been so long delayed? All the constituencies, in which the middle class predominates, long since declared for Household Suffrage. It was the undue power of the higher classes alone which delayed the boon. Against this power it is that the advocates of every measure of Reform have most to contend; and this is the reason why session after session is wasted in fruitless efforts to obtain civil, religious, and legislative improvements which the majority of the country has endorsed.

Would that it were true that "at every election the votes are more and more the voters' own!" Were this the case there could be no possible objection to the use of voting papers. If men are really independent—if "a good tenant can now feel that he is as valuable to his landlord as his landlord is to him—if a prosperous tradesman can afford to feel independent of any particular customer," and give a perfectly independent vote, he could do so under the proposed system of voting papers. The absence of this feeling of independence is at once the most conclusive argument against their introduction, and in favour of secret voting.

The "unassailable" argument against the ballot because of the limitation of the constituencies is more specious than sound. If it be the right of the voter under an extended suffrage to act on his own judgment, influenced solely by the opinions of others in so far as he arrives at the same conclusions, it is so now. Coercion, whether exercised by the few or the many, is equally objectionable: argument will exercise its due weight whether the system of voting be open or secret.