For, precisely in this supreme branch of
the public life are we most menaced by the rule and license of the
leading spirit. To appreciate this fact, we need only examine the
Constitution of the House of Commons. Six hundred and seventy persons
chosen from a population numbering four and forty millions, must
necessarily, whatever their individual defects, be citizens of more than
average enterprise, resource, and resolution. They are elected for a
period that may last five years. Many of them are ambitious; some
uncompromising; not a few enthusiastically eager to do something for
their country; filled with designs and aspirations for national or social
betterment, with which the masses, sunk in the immediate pursuits of
life, can in the nature of things have little sympathy. And yet we find
these men licensed to pour forth at pleasure, before mixed audiences,
checked only by Common Law and Common Sense political utterances which
may have the gravest, the most terrific consequences; utterances which
may at any moment let loose revolution, or plunge the country into war;
which often, as a fact, excite an utter detestation, terror, and
mistrust; or shock the most sacred domestic and proprietary convictions
in the breasts of vast majorities of their fellow-countrymen! And we
incur this appalling risk for the want of a single, or at the most, a
handful of Censors, invested with a simple but limitless discretion to
excise or to suppress entirely such political utterances as may seem to
their private judgments calculated to cause pain or moral disturbance in
the average man.
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