Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/142

 there is yet time, to commence the purification of the temple which has been thus defiled, lest we realise the other part of the Gospel parallel, and our last state be worse than our first.

There is not at present one legal or practical security, that the so-called representative of any borough or district shall possess a single quality fitting him for the high trust committed to his care. He has not been chosen for any special attainments, for there has been no test or examination; or for his superiority to others, for there has been no comparison. Much value has of late been attributed to administrative talent, and much importance has been attached to the exclusion from offices, in the public service, of persons who have not proved themselves to possess a certain positive amount of capacity, and even a superiority to others in comparative excellence. But in conferring the awful power of legislation, "which any man may well tremble to give or to receive," there is less of actual precaution and scrutiny, and absolutely none of the tests of competitive excellence, which are required in the appointment of an exciseman.

To delineate the election, for which the machinery has been prepared by the election agents in the manner referred to, would be an attempt to trespass on the province of the satirist. It is enough to say, that by reducing, as our system necessarily does, the literate and the ignorant, the high-minded and the corrupt, to one dead level, it probably ends in the return, as a member for a wealthy and populous borough, of some man whom it is a pure fiction to describe as its representative; and if it were to be considered other than as a fiction, it would be, as to half of the inhabitants, a mockery and an insult. "We find several very considerable classes of electors, who have little or no will in the matter." "Those who recognise, in any adequate degree, the importance of honestly exercising their judgments in the selection of legislators, and who give conscientious votes, mostly form but a minority; and the