No one who does not thoroughly know the modes of action
which common experience has sanctioned is capable of judging of the
circumstances which require a departure from those ordinary modes of
action. The interests dependent on the acts done by a public
department, the consequences liable to follow from any particular mode
of conducting it, require for weighing and estimating them a kind of
knowledge, and of specially exercised judgment, almost as rarely found
in those not bred to it, as the capacity to reform the law in those
who have not professionally studied it.
All these difficulties are sure to be ignored by a representative
assembly which attempts to decide on special acts of administration.
At its best, it is inexperience sitting in judgment on experience,
ignorance on knowledge: ignorance which never suspecting the existence
of what it does not know, is equally careless and supercilious, making
light of, if not resenting, all pretensions to have a judgment
better worth attending to than its own. Thus it is when no
interested motives intervene: but when they do, the result is
jobbery more unblushing and audacious than the worst corruption
which can well take place in a public office under a government of
publicity. It is not necessary that the interested bias should
extend to the majority of the assembly. In any particular case it is
of ten enough that it affects two or three of their number.
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