Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/112

 attaching them to the other. It may possibly be said that the borough electors are, in the cases of towns situated like Shaftesbury, only another class of county electors, and that the addition of the county electors to the borough was of no other importance than that of giving them another polling-place, and a larger share in the election of a member. All such considerations are in truth but solemn trifling. The parade of distinct interests and distinct objects in the country and the town it is to be feared is now rarely used, except to blind the eyes of the public, and perplex the question of representation.

The addition of populous suburbs to the constituency of a city or borough, already possessing no more than its share in the general representation, is certainly a mode of removing the discrepancy between the electoral privileges of the inhabitants of the city and the suburb; but when a suburb, containing a thousand voters, is added to a city which already contains four thousand, it is very difficult to say in what sense the representation is improved. If anything be gained by the thousand new electors,—any power of infusing their opinions into the representative body,—it must be so much taken from the four thousand old electors. The representation must have been made less a reflex of their opinions. "Au lieu de dénaturer les droits politiques e, les exténuant, sous prétexte de les répandre, qu'il y ait partout des libertés locales, garanties par les droits réels."

Such annexations to boroughs, or extensions of the franchise to surrounding districts, are, however, still gravely proposed as amendments. They may remove an inequality between the inhabitants of two contiguous places, leaving the greater anomalies and inequalities which extend over the kingdom untouched; but this is to divert the amendment which pretends to make, and should make, the representation more perfect, to another, a distinct, and a far inferior, object,—the