Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/37

Rh all must be withdrawn or brought down to a conformity with those who possess the least of these qualities. The same injurious influences, in a measure, operate on the minorities, whenever they make a decided stand for the purpose of contesting a seat. The most intelligent will have submitted to the most numerous, except that, in the minorities, the greater apprehension of defeat may have led the more numerous classes within it to raise their standard of choice in order to increase their hopes of success.

Whilst this process of deterioration is going on throughout those who compose the active parties, a result even more fatal to the design of true representation is produced on another large, intelligent, and more scrupulous class of persons, who feel no disposition to make themselves the instruments of giving effect to the views of others with whom they have no common object or sympathy. These, therefore, take no part in the business of choosing thoe who are nominally to represent them. We find, as it has been observed, that, in the large constituencies, nearly half of the electors are, for all useful purposes, in the same position as if they were disfranchised.

A system which forms the electoral body into adverse parties,—arrayed under formal names which are themselves exaggerations calculated to excite hostility where none really exists,—has thus the effect of preventing the expression of the true and individual opinions of the members who compose either party. It lowers the force of thought and conscience, reduces the most valuable electoral elements to inaction,—and converts the better motives of those who act, into an effort for success and a mere calculation of the means of accomplishing it. It is not therefore surprising that we hear of the informities of representative institutions, and that many persons should be unable to look forward without terror to the aggra-