Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/34

xxx natural means of arriying at political representation than it would be a natural result of any other association that it should be divided into two parties, one perpetually labouring to counteract the wishes of the other. The order and the occupations of mankind,—the distribution of population, and the supply of its necessities, are all provided for by physical and moral laws operating on the diversities of nature and of character which are found amongst men. These differences preserve the harmony and the vitality of social life. In political sentiment there is not less variety than in the other motives of human conduct; and abstractedly it would be no more likely that the political opinions of the electors of a borough should fall into two or three antagonistic divisions, than that they should be composed of twenty, fifty, or a hundred distinct views or conceptions. The dissimilarity would be much more probable than the similarity. Opinion and action in politics would be as various as opinion and action in other sciences, if there were not causes that enter into political bodies, and create a disturbed and unhealthy movement, provoking antagonistic divisions.

On the occasion of adverse desires in a society composed, of many free agents, the majority must necessarily decide; but in the formation of a representative body, the purpose is that the body thus to be created, and not the constituent body, is to be intrusted with the power of decision. If that were the function of the constituent body, there would be no necessity for appointing the representative. It is, consequently, by the majority of the representative body that the decision must be pronounced. It is that majority which speaks for the whole, and is irresistible. It may be likened to an engine of enormous power which crushes all opposing forces. The election is the process by which this engine is constructed; but it is not necessary to the efficiency of the engine that the same overpowering force should have been employed in the process of its construction. It is when the engine is formed that we