Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/15

 that body twenty were nominated by the Crown for twelve years, and the remaining sixty were elected for eight years; thirty being chosen indirectly by the provincial assemblies, and thirty directly by the people. The system of quotas was adopted in both, the popular vote extending to the thirty elected directly. This limited application of the method, moreover, was for the election of an assembly whose ordinary sittings were only two months in every second year, and the membership of which conferred no great accession of dignity or influence, and opened but a very small, if any, field for political rivalry or effort. A seat in it had so little to invite activity or tempt ambition, that Mr. Andræ found it necessary to provide in his law for the case of a candidate who, after having been duly elected, should decline the seat. Even a simple declaration of candidature, it was said, would be distasteful; and it is the practice for those who desire the election of a particular person, to ascertain privately beforehand that he will not disappoint the electors. This condition of the national mind, and the antipathies of race in the Duchies, which were all the time on the point of breaking out into open war, together with the restricted measure in which the popular voice would be thus collected, caused the experiment to be made under circumstances as unfavourable as can well be conceived. A part of the kingdom repudiated the constitution, not owing to any opinion as to the mode of election, but from hatred of the union; and this reduced the directly elected representatives to twenty-two. A scheme, therefore, devised to abate the fierceness of electoral conflicts among people of great political activity, to moderate the bitterness of struggles by which parties labour for the extinction of each other, and to regulate and hold within reasonable bounds the force of passions that, pursuing with intense desire objects of personal and party ambition, too often threaten to sweep away in their resistless torrent the virtues, the moralities, and even the decencies of life, came thus, in