Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/125

 elector they contain will have his electoral privileges for every good purpose largely extended. Like the other electors of the kingdom, instead of being confined within the narrow boundaries of their respective boroughs, they will be enabled to seek for concurrent views and opinions in the kingdom at large. Modern facilities and habits of locomotion have gone far "to remove national and provincial antipathies, and bind together all the branches of the human family. In the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of London were, for almost every practical purpose, farther from Reading than they now are from Edinburgh, and farther from Edinburgh than they now are from Vienna." It is probable that many, if not most of the voters, will add their votes to those of their townsmen and neighbours, especially when the chief causes of jealousy and discord are taken away. Contiguity of place produces a tendency to union. It will always assert its influence. It is certain to affect more or less the conduct, and control the ties of social and political life,—but it is not, therefore, necessary that it should tyrannize over them. The destruction of a city in China affects us less than a broken limb happening before our eyes. It is a happy provision that our sympathies are most excited where they are most useful. But in the wider relations of national life, it is desirable that we should be governed less by impulse and more by reason—less by merely proximate, and more by general and universal causes. It is better to trust to the qualities of the person, than to the contiguity of place. Geographical limits, made the sole basis of political action and association, is not the development of a power, but the aggravation of a natural incapacity.