Considerations of a Representative Government | Page 4

wrongs. In such a case, a civilized government, to be really
advantageous to them, will require to be in a considerable degree
despotic; one over which they do not themselves exercise control, and
which imposes a great amount of forcible restraint upon their actions.
Again, a people must be considered unfit for more than a limited and
qualified freedom who will not co-operate actively with the law and the
public authorities in the repression of evil-doers. A people who are
more disposed to shelter a criminal than to apprehend him; who, like
the Hindoos, will perjure themselves to screen the man who has robbed
them, rather than take trouble or expose themselves to vindictiveness
by giving evidence against him; who, like some nations of Europe
down to a recent date, if a man poniards another in the public street,

pass by on the other side, because it is the business of the police to look
to the matter, and it is safer not to interfere in what does not concern
them; a people who are revolted by an execution, but not shocked at an
assassination--require that the public authorities should be armed with
much sterner powers of repression than elsewhere, since the first
indispensable requisites of civilized life have nothing else to rest on.
These deplorable states of feeling, in any people who have emerged
from savage life, are, no doubt, usually the consequence of previous
bad government, which has taught them to regard the law as made for
other ends than their good, and its administrators as worse enemies than
those who openly violate it. But, however little blame may be due to
those in whom these mental habits have grown up, and however the
habits may be ultimately conquerable by better government, yet, while
they exist, a people so disposed can not be governed with as little
power exercised over them as a people whose sympathies are on the
side of the law, and who are willing to give active assistance in its
enforcement. Again, representative institutions are of little value, and
may be a mere instrument of tyranny or intrigue, when the generality of
electors are not sufficiently interested in their own government to give
their vote, or, if they vote at all, do not bestow their suffrages on public
grounds, but sell them for money, or vote at the beck of some one who
has control over them, or whom for private reasons they desire to
propitiate. Popular election thus practiced, instead of a security against
misgovernment, is but an additional wheel in its machinery.
Besides these moral hindrances, mechanical difficulties are often an
insuperable impediment to forms of government. In the ancient world,
though there might be, and often was, great individual or local
independence, there could be nothing like a regulated popular
government beyond the bounds of a single city-community; because
there did not exist the physical conditions for the formation and
propagation of a public opinion, except among those who could be
brought together to discuss public matters in the same agora. This
obstacle is generally thought to have ceased by the adoption of the
representative system. But to surmount it completely, required the press,
and even the newspaper press, the real equivalent, though not in all
respects an adequate one, of the Pnyx and the Forum. There have been

states of society in which even a monarchy of any great territorial
extent could not subsist, but unavoidably broke up into petty
principalities, either mutually independent, or held together by a loose
tie like the feudal: because the machinery of authority was not perfect
enough to carry orders into effect at a great distance from the person of
the ruler. He depended mainly upon voluntary fidelity for the obedience
even of his army, nor did there exist the means of making the people
pay an amount of taxes sufficient for keeping up the force necessary to
compel obedience throughout a large territory. In these and all similar
cases, it must be understood that the amount of the hindrance may be
either greater or less. It may be so great as to make the form of
government work very ill, without absolutely precluding its existence,
or hindering it from being practically preferable to any other which can
be had. This last question mainly depends upon a consideration which
we have not yet arrived at--the tendencies of different forms of
government to promote Progress.
We have now examined the three fundamental conditions of the
adaptation of forms of government to the people who are to be
governed by them. If the supporters of what may be termed the
naturalistic theory of politics, mean but to insist on the necessity of
these three conditions; if they only mean that no government can
permanently exist which does not fulfill