Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/91

love of country or of class—community of feeling—harmony of taste—may all form so many occasions of concord, and create innumerable circles, binding together in society all varieties of rank and station, with an attraction of such power that malignant influences will find no place, and the occupation of the demagogue will be gone. Inclination will thus be brought to the aid of duty. When no elector can, by the reflection that any exertion on his part would be vain, if not mischievous, as injuring the cause he desires to support, excuse his inaction to his conscience, he will then be sensible of the obligation which the service of his country imposes upon him. It is beyond the power of law to compel men to unite for a common purpose, and labour in it with energy of will, unless it be one in which their nature prompts them to agree. An electoral body, composed of the most heterogeneous and antagonistic materials, bound together by law, and told that they must act together, and find one person who can reflect the most dissimilar things, can be compared to nothing better than the melancholy spectacle of subdued and torpid natures, which is sometimes exhibited by the animal showman, in a cage, in the streets. With equal truth, or irony, one is called the “happy family,” where every instinct is quelled; and the other the “independent constituency,” where every man's action depends, not upon himself, but in most cases on those to whom, of all others, he would be least willing to trust either his honour or his purse. The indifference of hopelessness, and the languor of debility, are occasionally varied by fits of spasmodic animation when they are roused by those who extract a miserable profit from the exhibition. Is it too much to say, that instead of on one side constructing schemes which shall perpetuate a stereotyped expression of political sentiment, and, on another, contriving how it may be counteracted, by secret voting that may shroud every elector in a veil of obscurity, statesmen might more wisely employ themselves in discovering, in that great laboratory of science in which we find all we