Page:Mr. John Stuart Mill and the ballot.djvu/13

11 those who thus work against pressure most desire the ballot, that their work may not be fruitless. The pressure against which the ordinary voter has to work is that of his landlord, customer, creditor, or employer.

Mr. Mill has written ably on individual liberty: surely the individual elector has, even under universal suffrage, the right to his own judgment. An aggregate of selfish units will not lose their selfishness, because they all have power. If they are unwise and disposed to tyrannise, the protection of the ballot may be more necessary than it is under an oligarchy. The tyranny of the many may be used quite as effectually as that of the few; and even under the widest franchise secret voting may be more than ever necessary as a safeguard of freedom.

The possible tyranny of the majority has been most forcibly commented upon by Mr Mill himself. In his noble essay on "Liberty" he says: "Society can and does execute its own mandates, and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all, in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling—against the tendency of society to impose by other means than civil penalties its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them: to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel