Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/107

 of the minorities. They do not quench, but fan the generous flame. In the successful struggle of the majority to elect the man whom they regard as the most distinguished of the competitors, the minority may be vanquished without disgrace, and retire with all the honours of a capitulation, the terms of which they have been able to dictate. It is an Isthmian triumph. It has brought out what is vigorous and powerful, and encouraged or provoked to some effort even the weaker and the more feeble, and the nation rises stronger and purer from the contest.

The effect of the free action of every member of an electoral division, in elevating the motives and objects which govern the general choice, is no vain imagination, unless all those feelings by which men were formerly attached, or were supposed to be attached to their country,—to their native or adopted town,—to their place of education,—or to the special society of which they form a part, are now extinct, and that we are reduced to a miserable personality, in which no man regards aught but himself. But the feeling is not extinct. The man, whose virtue or whose genius has conferred honour upon his country and his age, is still thought to shed some reflected ray upon the persons and places he was more nearly connected with. Universities claim a merit from having given to the world men of exalted worth. There is still a pride in companionship with the good and great. To give full scope to these better sentiments in political life, the electors of the kingdom must be extricated from the ties which indissolubly bind together the instructed with the ignorant, the pure with the corrupt, the good with the evil, those morally living with those morally dead, and which swamp all high hopes, and almost all high desires, in “that great Serbonian bog,” where all are confounded together. Once set free, all the better elements existing in this great people would be brought into action, and encouraged to employ their most earnest thoughts and energies in assisting to gather and