Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/27

 time to time, such alterations as the withdrawal of old and the introduction of new candidates, the progress of opinion and of events, might occasion. It will thus be a political register, and the act of framing it anew at each election will be an instructive lesson. The admission or rejection of every name may involve a conclusion on the domestic, social, or international questions of which he may be the type or exponent. The precipitancy with which the mind approves or rejects the claims which are put before it, and the caution it uses in sifting, weighing, and examining them, is the touch-stone of the order of intelligence. “Where the consciousness is not awake except under a very broad difference, we consider the mental constitution the opposite of intellectual. In whatever department of impressions the nicest sensibility to difference prevails, in that department will reside, in all probability, the intellectual aptitude of the individual.” The mere act of voting may thus be made the basis of a study widely diffusing a knowledge of the principles of social polity. “If the human mind grow dwarfish and enfeebled, it is ordinarily because it is left to deal with commonplace facts, and never summoned to the effort of taking the span and altitude of broad and lofty disclosures. The understanding will gradually bring itself down to the dimensions of the matters with which alone it is familiarized, till having long been accustomed to contract its powers, it shall lose wellnigh the ability to expand. The laws of the body are those of the mind. Exercise and excitement strengthen and energize—indolence and habits of insensitiveness, contract, debilitate, and at length kill.”

Everything which in political life liberates and increases the scope and influence of enlightened judgment and cultivated reason, is of inestimable service also to those who occupy the higher places in social rank, and possess in the greatest measure the advantages of education and leisure.