Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/71

 it must be through its influence in leading every voter at the election to do what in his own judgment he shall conclude to be best and wisest. The counsel is not to find out what the majority will do and blindly follow it. Everyone would feel that it would be of small use to ponder over any solution of social or economical problems, in order to select, for the business of government, those in whom he could most perfectly trust, if after all his study his conclusion could not be acted upon unless more than half of his constituency, by something in the nature of a miracle, arrived at precisely the same conclusion. When we would stimulate thought and inquiry as a guide to action, we intend the action to be directed by the thought, and not by some accident independent of it.

All systems by which hundreds or thousands of persons who are not associated by any pervading harmony of mind or feeling, but are gathered together by the mere accident of living in the same district or town, are led or forced, on pain of political extinction, always to agree in the choice of their representatives, are inconsistent with the free exercise of individual will, guided by those diversities of thought and sentiment upon which men form their various estimates of character; and their subjection to such compulsion tends to the mental and moral deterioration both of the electors and the elected. They degrade men from the rank of living and individually thinking and responsible beings, and treat them only as so many mechanical units making up a certain party. “I always feel,” says Dr. Walker, in his election sermon, “when I put my hand into the ballot box, that I am being used by somebody, I know not whom, for some purpose I know not what.” “The principle,” says Mr. Calhoun, “by which constitutional governments are upheld, is compromise, that of absolute governments is force” By giving full, and