Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 7.djvu/143



an elector. As soon as the government is established, when the Constitution is guaranteed, there is only a common interest for those who live on their property, and those who toil honestly. Then can be distinguished those who desire a stable government from those who seek only revolution and change, since they increase in importance in the midst of trouble as vermin in the midst of corruption.

If it be true, then, that under an established constitutional government all its well-wishers have the same interest, the power of the same must be placed in the hands of the enlightened who can have no interest pressing on them, greater than the common interest of all citizens. Depart from these principles and you fall into the abuses of representative government. You would have extreme poverty in the electorate and extreme opulence in the legislature. You would see soon in France what you see now in England—the purchase of voters in the boroughs not only with money, but with pots of beer. Thus incontestably are elected many parliamentary members. Good representation must not be sought in either extreme, but in the middle class. The committee have thus placed it by making it incumbent that the voter shall possess an accumulation the equivalent of, say, forty days of labor. This would unite the qualities needed to make the elector exercise his privilege with an interest in the same. It is necessary that he own from one hundred and twenty to two hundred