Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/25

 deliberation of the closet is a more instructive process than its reception from lips however eloquent.

After all, the end is “good government,”—but that includes the moral and intellectual development of the men and women to be governed. Institutions are good which call them habitually to perform such public functions as tend to awaken a true conception of their real interests and duties in respect to their households, their neighbourhood, the state, and the brotherhood of nations; and lead them to realize their endowments of conscience and intellect, the gifts by which God has fixed their high place in the order of creation, and in the great inheritance of humanity. But a government is not good which, as to numbers of its people, contemplates no more than protection from an external violence,—which allows them no voice in the choice of their legislators, or in framing the laws by which they are to be ruled, and which disdains any appeal to them in its consultations on the public welfare. Such a government differs from natural society only inasmuch as the individual is guarded by the civil power instead of his own strong arm. It fails to cultivate the higher qualities of his nature, to foster a love of country, a regard for public duty, or even a just self-respect. What it bestows is but the attention of the kind master to his horse or his dog. It misses even the poor end at which it aims. The classes usurping all power cannot confer even the physical and material comfort of which they boast. Where the right is absent, the corresponding duty or responsibility will not be felt. The classes treated as inferior beings, will discard the higher obligations of civil life and throw upon those who have assumed the charge of their destinies, the blame, if not the consequences, of their moral weakness and degradation,—thence our load of pauperism, our catalogue of crime. The wise parent admits his children to his counsels, and makes them partners of his labours and his hopes, not from caprice or by fits and starts,