ants from their probable education and means of acquiring knowledge, and when we know that of these thousands would in vain approach the hustings to give expression to their views or opinions, it is impossible to look on the nominal representation of the metropolis as other than a mockery of the name. Yet the House of Commons has been truly described as “a place where minorities, heresies, oppositions, remonstrances, and protests of all sorts are to be represented and entitled to a hearing, and it is intended to comprehend, and not to exclude them.”
“Le but du système représentatif, dans ses éléments généraux, comme dnas tous les détails de son organisation, est de recueillir, de concentrer toute la raison qui existe éparse dans la société, et de l'appliquer à son gouvernement.”[1]
If our present method of obtaining this concentration of the national reason be considered with analogy to operations connected with the material world, the comparison at once displays its unscientific character. Two-fifths of the intelligence of the country is lost in the process. It is a waste of material which would have been a reproach to any operation in physical science in its rudest day; even if the material so lost were only of the average value of that of which the constituencies are composed; but it is far more lamentable: it is considered that the material thus lost comprises a very large proportion of the best moral and intellectual elements of society, whilst the process of local condensation to which the numerical majorities owe their success has done much to extinguish independent thought, convert men into machines, and thereby deteriorate the result of the votes by which the supposed representative assembly has been actually chosen.
The first and greatest practical attempt which was made, at least in this country, to remedy this defect in representative institutions was the provision introduced by Lord John Russell in the bill of 1854. It was proposed that, in cities
- ↑ Guizot, Gouvemement Représentatif, vol. ii., p. 253.
