Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/190

 siderations of duty will intervene with all their force. Every man will feel that he is personally responsible for his own error, or his own neglect. His understanding must teach him how to act, and his conscience guide him to the performance. It is the sense of individual duty that preserves every household in order and harmony. Each member of the household has his especial function, and knows that he is responsible for the manner in which he performs, and for his neglect if he omits it. If this were not so, all united action would cease; there would be no diligence, and no subordination. We may imagine the case of a family, in which no servant has power to act without the concurrence of a majority of his fellow-servants. and where but a few of them can agree together as to what they ought to do. In such an establishment there could be no certainty of the performance of any duty; for every one might cast the blame upon the others, and the household would be involved in inextricable confusion. The reasoning is the same of the multitude of families and persons who form the nation. As the individual restraints and sanctions become more feeble, certain breaches of duty and of justice are made the subject of municipal law. But all blame, and all punishment for error or misconduct in the family or in the State, assume the existence of a power to do right. If a man be prevented by others from performing a duty,—if he be precluded from doing it by a force which he has not himself assisted to create, and which he has no power to overcome, he must, in justice, be absolved from the blame of leaving the duty unperformed.

A system which first destroys individual freedom of action, and with it the higher inducements which connect action with duty, necessarily introduces and tolerates baser motives. Men tempt and are tempted by each other. One covets and seeks a public function for selfish purposes, by venal means, and another, for like ends, helps him to obtain it. The evil spreads. There ceases to be any belief in uprightness of