Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/255

 further representation by the members to whom their votes have been specifically appropriated. The spontaneous testimony of public admiration thus offered will not,—because it is an unsolicited tribute to high qualities, adding only to the moral influence of him to whom it is given,—be therefore less honourable to the givers than to the receiver. In a time when every effort is devoted to the acquisition of material riches, nothing is without its worth that confers extrinsic dignity or power. We are too prosaic to clothe

with the symbolic value given to them by a more imaginative people in an earlier age; but we have not yet lost the estimation of what is great, and no means should be neglected which our institutions can offer of giving prominence to true worth, and impressing upon it the seal of the general approbation. That "virtue is its own reward" is for the individual a sublime truth, but for society it would be a niggard maxim. We cannot afford to part even with the faint and reflected gleams of human glory. Divinely taught wherein true heroism consists, we may restore again our long-forgotten shrines of hero-worship, and find something better and nobler than an universal idolatry of money. When we have undone the fetters of our electoral bodies,—shaken off, so far as any human arrangements can do so, all that is mercenary and degrading, and given them health and elasticity,—the free spirit, no longer enslaved by the lower desires and appetites, will ever rise and soar towards that which shall be more and more excellent; and the law should encourage a disposition in every constituency to nominate as their representative him whom they regard as the highest living model of worth.