From despairing of a cure, there is too often
but one step to denying the disease; and from this follows dislike
to having a remedy proposed, as if the proposer were creating a
mischief instead of offering relief from one. People are so inured
to the evils that they feel as if it were unreasonable, if not
wrong, to complain of them. Yet, avoidable or not, he must be a
purblind lover of liberty on whose mind they do not weigh; who would
not rejoice at the discovery that they could be dispensed with. Now,
nothing is more certain than that the virtual blotting-out of the
minority is no necessary or natural consequence of freedom; that,
far from having any connection with democracy, it is diametrically
opposed to the first principle of democracy, representation in
proportion to numbers. It is an essential part of democracy that
minorities should be adequately represented. No real democracy,
nothing but a false show of democracy, is possible without it.
Those who have seen and felt, in some degree, the force of these
considerations, have proposed various expedients by which the evil may
be, in a greater or less degree, mitigated. Lord John Russell, in
one of his Reform Bills, introduced a provision, that certain
constituencies should return three members, and that in these each
elector should be allowed to vote only for two; and Mr. Disraeli, in
the recent debates, revived the memory of the fact by reproaching
him for it; being of opinion, apparently, that it befits a
Conservative statesman to regard only means, and to disown
scornfully all fellow-feeling with any one who is betrayed, even once,
into thinking of ends.
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