Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/97

 national life, in order to render the representation of that body more perfect, would appear to be a strange kind of progress towards the political perfection at which reformers profess to aim. You have, by your artificial restraints, prevented the blood from freely circulating, and caused in one part of the body a diseased or unhealthy action—and the remedy of these physicians is, to amputate the limb! Surely, instead of this mutilation, instead of leaving the body politic a maimed, a disfigured, and dismembered frame, the physician of the State should rather seek to restore and give strength and vigour to that free circulation, to the want of which the peccant humours owe their origin.

In favour of the formation of groups of contributory boroughs, there is much more to be said. The consideration of this subject is reserved to the next chapter, which treats of the method by which the electors of small towns or districts may contribute with other electors to form a constituency. For the present it is sufficient to suggest the question, whether the advocates of the system of contributory boroughs connected together by reason of their contiguity, and acting by the aggregate majority of their electors, have satisfied themselves that it is impossible to leave the question of incorporation to the voluntary choice of the individual electors? This impossibility should, in common justice, be proved, before any group is permanently incorporated without any regard to the will of the electors, from time to time, within it. It must be asked,—what insurmountable necessity arises from the circumstance that the town A. is half a dozen miles, or an hour's ride, from the town B., that the towns A. and B. must necessarily agree together in the choice of a representative; whilst it is at least equally possible that there may be less sympathy between many of the electors of A. and the electors of B. than between them and others in distant towns, or in the metropolis? If the accident of geographical propinquity, or any other