Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/191

 purpose. The only confidence left is of that miserable kind which relies solely upon that being done which it is the interest of another to do.

The restraints imposed by penal laws are but a feeble and insufficient protection. The degradation spreads widely and becomes inveterate when the moral restraint is gone, and rich and poor, great and small, lend themselves to the same iniquity. There is no Ithuriel upon whose touch the insidious temptation starts up discovered and surprised. There is no spear of celestial temper to lay bare these foul cabals. We have no hope but in removing the causes which have tainted political life, and thereby striving to re-establish on its seat that faith in one another which we have overthrown and lost; to search through our land for men either worthy to lead, or to embody and represent all that is best and noblest amongst us, and having found such—for we need not doubt that such can be found; to give them our just reverence and implicit trust,—a reverence and trust which no man gives but by his own free consent,—which none can be forced to confer.

A system which asserts for itself the power of preventing every influence by which one man, or set of men, can control the acts of others, is necessarily brought into comparison with the ballot, which is put forward as a remedy for such evils. The advocates of the ballot cannot be supposed to have an attachment to the ballot for its own sake, and they will only contend for its introduction so long as it shall appear to them the most perfect scheme of electoral liberation. Many persons are misled by the use, in countries in which that system has been adopted, of the term "appeal to the ballot-box," and