Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/70

 here proposed had not proceeded from any pen or tongue, and not a word implies that the speaker thought it undesirable if it were possible; not the smallest intimation that he was adverse to giving every considerable section of opinion in the nation, whether it be more or less centred in any particular locality, its just expression in the national council. On the contrary there are to be found in Mr. Bright's speeches the most powerful arguments for the necessity and duty of exercising individual thought, the strongest appeals to the intellect and conscience of every elector, addressed to them as persons capable of meditation in silence, and not to conglomerate masses who can only act upon one another through external signs. To the people of Birmingham, on the eve of the election, he says:—“Bear in mind that you are now going to make a machine more important than any that is made in the manufactories of Birmingham—you are going to make a parliament that shall legislate directly for the United Kingdom, and indirectly for two hundred millions of men—a parliament that will levy taxes in the United Kingdom, and in India, to the amount of £110,000,000, and a parliament that, when it once takes its seat in Westminster, is all-important for all these things; and every member you send is a part of that grand machine, and every elector throughout the United Kingdom who shall vote at the coming contest is partly the manufacturer of that stupendous machine whose power no man could measure.” The force of this exhortation is lost if it fails to lead those whom it reaches to recall facts, and thereupon to awaken reflection in their minds—that faculty which is the exclusive possession of each individual brain. In this process everyone must work alone; though the physical force of a hundred or a thousand arms may be combined to accomplish a mechanical result, there can be no common cerebral action of so many heads to solve a problem in moral science, any more than to invent a steam engine or write ‘Paradise Lost.’ Those who thus address the people know that if their advice be fruitful