A modern community, not
divided within itself by strong antipathies of race, language, or
nationality, may be considered as in the main divisible into two
sections, which, in spite of partial variations, correspond on the
whole with two divergent directions of apparent interest. Let us
call them (in brief general terms) labourers on the one hand,
employers of labour on the other: including however along with
employers of labour, not only retired capitalists, and the
possessors of inherited wealth, but all that highly paid description
of labourers (such as the professions) whose education and way of life
assimilate them with the rich, and whose prospect and ambition it is
to raise themselves into that class. With the labourers, on the
other hand, may be ranked those smaller employers of labour, who by
interests, habits, and educational impressions are assimilated in
wishes, tastes, and objects to the labouring classes; comprehending
a large proportion of petty tradesmen. In a state of society thus
composed, if the representative system could be made ideally
perfect, and if it were possible to maintain it in that state, its
organisation must be such that these two classes, manual labourers and
their affinities on one side, employers of labour and their affinities
on the other, should be, in the arrangement of the representative
system, equally balanced, each influencing about an equal number of
votes in Parliament: since, assuming that the majority of each
class, in any difference between them, would be mainly governed by
their class interests, there would be a minority of each in whom
that consideration would be subordinate to reason, justice, and the
good of the whole; and this minority of either, joining with the whole
of the other, would turn the scale against any demands of their own
majority which were not such as ought to prevail.
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