Such a Parliament could not be composed of moderate men.  The electoral districts would be, some of them, in purely agricultural places, and in these the parson and the squire would have almost unlimited power.  They would be able to drive or send to the poll an entire labouring population.  These districts would return an unmixed squirearchy.  The scattered small towns which now send so many members to Parliament, would be lost in the clownish mass; their votes would send to Parliament no distinct members.  The agricultural part of England would choose its representatives from quarter-sessions exclusively.  On the other hand a large part of the constituencies would be town districts, and these would send up persons representing the beliefs or unbeliefs of the lowest classes in their towns.  They would, perhaps, be divided between the genuine representatives of the artisans—­not possibly of the best of the artisans, who are a select and intellectual class, but of the common order of workpeople—­and the merely pretended members for that class whom I may call the members for the public-houses.  In all big towns in which there is electioneering these houses are the centres of illicit corruption and illicit management.  There are pretty good records of what that corruption and management are, but there is no need to describe them here.  Everybody will understand what sort of things I mean, and the kind of unprincipled members that are returned by them.  Our new Parliament, therefore, would be made up of two sorts of representatives from the town lowest class, and one sort of representatives from the agricultural lowest class.  The genuine representatives of the country would be men of one marked sort, and the genuine representatives for the county men of another marked sort, but very opposite:  one would have the prejudices of town artisans, and the other the prejudices of county magistrates.  Each class would speak a language of its own; each would be unintelligible to the other; and the only thriving class would be the immoral representatives, who were chosen by corrupt machination, and who would probably get a good profit on the capital they laid out in that corruption.  If it be true that a Parliamentary government is possible only when the overwhelming majority of the representatives are men essentially moderate, of no marked varieties, free from class prejudices, this ultra-democratic Parliament could not maintain that government, for its members would be remarkable for two sorts of moral violence and one sort of immoral.

I do not for a moment rank the scheme of Mr. Hare with the scheme of the ultra-democrats.  One can hardly help having a feeling of romance about it.  The world seems growing young when grave old lawyers and mature philosophers propose a scheme promising so much.  It is from these classes that young men suffer commonly the chilling demonstration that their fine plans are opposed to rooted obstacles, that they are repetitions of other plans which failed long ago, and that we must be content with the very moderate results of tried machinery.  But Mr. Hare and Mr. Mill offer as the effect of their new scheme results as large and improvements as interesting as a young enthusiast ever promised to himself in his happiest mood.