Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/67

 or corporate bodies known as Birmingham or Manchester, and to require that the individual interests and wishes of a third or more of them shall be sacrificed to the name by which the community is designated,—to an abstract conception which has no existence apart from the living beings whom it describes or indicates. The true way of reconciling the corporate influence of these great centres of industry with that of the individuals who inhabit them, is a fair distribution of seats, no longer assuming, as the present arrangement practically does, that one voter in Bury St. Edmunds is to be recognised as worth ten voters in Birmingham, or that the Irish and Scotch constituencies are reasonably treated, when “the inhabitants of Portarlington have 132 times as much representation as the inhabitants of Glasgow.” It will be well to compare the result upon the electoral power which Birmingham, for example, could gain by the reactionary efforts in favour of exclusive majority representation, supposing they were successful, with that which it would acquire by a just system of proportional representation. In the meantime it is surely desirable to secure the means of gathering the fullest expression possible of the views of all the inhabitants of our greater cities and districts, trusting that thereby their corporate interest and dignity will be best served and sustained.

It is possible that some of those who desire the repeal of the restrictive and the cumulative vote may be less offended by their effect on reducing the nominal power of the city or county than by their attack on the exclusive dominion of the local majority. In this right it is a painful symptom of the arbitrary and intolerant character of majorities. It affords an illustration of the principle which has been quoted from the work of Mr. Calhoun, a principle which all history corroborates, that government by numbers is not less insatiable of power, and certainly not more scrupulous of the claims