Right and Wrong in Politics [pp. 265-293]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIEW.
and scrupulous conscientiousness. In some countries-as in
England, for instance the very structure of the state has
-almost inevitably connected a base personal interest with the
discharge of the highest representative functions. Under the
nomination-borough system, which prevailed before the English
Reform Act of I832, it was almost inevitable that the right to
send and therefore to choose a member of Parliament was, in the
popular consciousness, an essential ingredient in the aggregate
of property rights vested in the local potentate whose will deter mined the election. So soon as these boroughs were abolished, it
.might well have seemed that the new constituencies were the
universal "heirs" for electoral purposes of the aristocracy whose
-place they took. This dangerous and confusing notion is even
-still supported by the anomalous circumstance that Peers of
Parliament are constitutionally and legally entitled to make
monetary contracts with railway companies in respect of their
Vote for or against a proposed railway scheme before the House
of Lords. They are not held to be representatives of the
-public, and on behalf of the interests of themselves and their
families they may do what they choose. Thus, just after the
passing of the Reform Act of I832, it is probable that not only
did corruption reach its highest point in England, but the
popular conscience in respect of it was at its weakest. The great
extension, however, of the suffrage has been gradually working
its own cure, and the House of Commons has only reflected,
however tardily, the promptings of the national conscience by
the improved machinery for trying imputations of bribery by a
judicial process, closely resembling that of a criminal trial, conducted on the spot by one of the judges of the High Court of
Judicature, and by the institution of the ballot. As to this
last institution, indeed, some controversy has taken place among
critical moralists as to its direct and indirect bearing on the
public sense of honor and of political responsibility. It has
been said that giving a vote is the discharge of a trust, and that
every trust ought to be discharged openly and courageously.
To shelter a voter from the consequence of his vote is said to be
merely nursing him in habits of political timidity, not to say
cowardice. This reasoning, however, is certainly opposed to
the universal experience of the action of the ballot in the
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