Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/38

xxxiv vation of their more obvious evils by any large extension of some of the causes which produce them.

If these consequences be inevitable—if in the progress of constitutional government we are exposed to the danger of excluding from their just share in representation the more educated and intelligent classes,—and of paralysing in political life the action of the infinite varieties of disposition and sentiment which are found in society,—if there be no means of making representation a reality,—the infirmity of the institution must be borne. It is useless to lament that for which no remedy can be found. It must be accepted as the lot, and part of the discipline, of humanity. But, at least, every effort of the understanding should be brought to bear on the question, whether the representative system be not capable of more perfect development than it has yet received. No time perhaps was ever more favourable to the inquiry. The inconsistencies and anomalies of the existing system have been long felt, and successive governments have addressed themselves to its improvement. The patriotism of every class has been challenged, and at no former period has so general a disposition been evinced to abandon long-cherished traditions and opinions, and adopt such a revision of the representative system as may appear most likely to be conducive to the public good.

If, after the construction of the representative body shall have received the aid of all that thought which the importance of the subject imperatively demands, it be held impossible to render it a perfect expression of the sense of the people, or more than of the will of a multitude of detached majorities, that should be recorded as a fact, and received as a distinct constitutional principle. If it be a necessity of government that a multitude of petty majorities,—for petty they must be compared with the nation,—shall exclusively elect the representative assembly, let it be the declared and acknowledged form of the constitution. It is due to the more