Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/187

 nature. Then history may be of use, and after a time, reflection, consciousness. But our first care ought to be for institutions, in which the spirit of our country lives, without being uttered in words, and takes possession of men's minds involuntarily. For a love derived from precepts is none."

The representation in its theory, or in any worthy view of it, should be of all that is best and most instructed, omitting, as far as the separation is possible, all that is ignorant and vicious. The representative embodiment is to be of man, approaching, as near as his infirmity of thought and will permits him to approach, that which a lofty imagination has pictured of his pristine dignity, when,—

The design is to represent the qualities with which man is divinely gifted,—the noble heritage of his nature,—not their absence and negation. Such an assembly should present "the awfdl image of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into a focus." The first introduction of representatives to constituents may be viewed as the contact of two intelligences,—a higher and a lower. How is this contact to be obtained? It must be by the higher descending to and looking down to the lower, or the lower searching for and raising its views to the higher. It is easier for the superior intelligence to make itself intelligible to the lower, than for the lower to ascend to and appreciate the excellence of the higher order of mind. But as the latter is more difficult, so also is it an infinitely more wholesome and beneficial exercise in human and social progress. Consider the opposite tendencies of two conditions of things:—one in which the gjreat mass of society remains the passive subject of any attacks which misdirected talent may