Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/179

 ought to be more strongly impressed upon the minds of those who compose the collective sovereignty, than upon those of single princes."

The power given to the electors, first by the information which the gazetted lists afford to them of the persons who are candidates for the representation throughout the kingdom, and, secondly, by the opportunity the voting papers afford of separating, distinguishing, and bringing out every form and shadow of political opinion, will give an immeasurable increase of force and strength to the true representative principle; and it will, at the same time, wholly extinguish the operation of the pseudo-principle of representation under which nations have suffered, and by which they are obstructed in their progress towards settled constitutional government. "In the present state of our knowledge," a late writer has observed, "politics, so far from being a science, is one of the most backward of all the arts" and certainly nothing can well be imagined more resembling a condition of barbarism than a parliamentary election. Five, ten, or twenty thousand men, comprising every diversity of education, of thought, of moral quality, and of mental endowment, are called together to elect one or two persons to represent them. If they were only, as in old times, delegates, to grant "a tenth or a fifteenth" for a foreign war, the representation might be sufficient; but a representation so created at this day, with all the varied questions which are opening and agitating mankind, is a simple impossibility, and the name is a delusion. We are rejecting the aid of letters and the facilities of locomotion, ignoring the popular intelligence, and obstinately resolving to subject ourselves to the same difficulties as our ancestors struggled with when they had no roads to travel on, when not one in a hundred had learnt to read, and not one in a