Page:Mr. John Stuart Mill and the ballot.djvu/16

14 election under present circumstances. Election riots, moreover, are not unknown in England: quiet voters are frequently intimidated by mob violence who would, if voting were secret, be able to record their votes in peace.

Mr. Mill stigmatises the ballot as a "necessary evil: necessary," he says, "it might have been, but an evil it could never fail to be." Why? If all men were honest and perfectly independent, it would be quite immaterial whether votes were given openly or secretly. In that case no one would seek to interfere with his neighbour otherwise than by the pressure of legitimate argument. In itself, under such circumstances, the ballot would be neither better nor worse than open voting.

If the ballot be an evil, it is so in the sense in which many other necessary things are evils. It is not to be affirmed that locks, bars, and bolts, magistrates, police officers, and prisons, are abstractedly good in themselves. If all mankind were honest, there would be no necessity for any one of them. No one, however, dreams of dispensing with them—at present at all events: they are necessary evils equally with secret voting. If none sought to exercise undue or improper influence, the ballot would not be required. It is to be feared, however, that we are as far removed from that milleniummillennium [sic] as we are from the time when locks will be abandoned as unnecessary.

Neither is it true that concealment is an evil which "the moral sentiment of mankind, in all periods of enlightened morality, has condemned." There are occasions in which it becomes a virtue. The highest authority urges that some actions are to be performed in secret, and the left hand is not to know what the