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Untitled Article
needless stirring up of angry passion ; the symptoms of a mischievous power , too strong for the public peace . Evil in themselves , they are the fruits of a culpability which calls for reprobation , if not for retribution , which it is necessary to quell , though it may not be magnanimous to punish .
How long is it to be endured that an election should be merely a party conflict ? That the most dignified act of free men , the choice of representatives for protecting the honour and interests of the community , for revising its institutions , and accommodating them from time to time to the people ' s wants and opinions , and for facilitating national improvement by the wise application of
national resources , —should be degraded into a convulsive effort to repel a faction struggling for place and power , that it may rule for its own advantage . The Tories complain of demagogues ; there would be no demagogues but for themselves . There is no party in the country but their own ; no set of men , that is , banded together for the purpose of gaining and keeping possession of
public property and political authority . Could we imagine the whole faction deported , the next election might , for all that appears , be simply the choice of persons supposed to be the best qualified to legislate for the country ; from whom again , on account of capacity or station , would be selected the requisite number of
individuals for the executive department . The great good of the Reform Bill was in its being a step towards this state of things . The selfishness of party , now concentrated in Toryism , is the great obstacle in the way of our arriving at it si realization , and therefore a nuisance which requires to be abated .
That the country should have any interest in being governed by a party , is a manifest absurdity . Legislative wisdom and executive impartiality and energy , these are what the nation needs . That a party has a strong interest in governing the nation is an obvious truth . They become possessed thereby of an enormous mass of that material of enjoyment for which mankind are
continually striving . All public offices and appointments , diplomatic , judicial , colonial , the church , the army , the navy , corporations , together with the influence of legislation upon class interests , all become the prizes of an organized body , instead of being simply the machinery of social order and prosperity . The late change
in the Administration was a barefaced attempt to appropriate these advantages , or rather to recover that monopoly of them which Reform had broken up ; and the dissolution was an endeayour to deceive or to corrupt the electors into an acquiescence in this attempt ; with what measure of success will soon appear .
The elections have been conducted in the spirit which corresponds with this view of the occasion . With scarcely more than one or two exceptions , the known and hitherto avowed enemies of Reform , the men who occasioned or took advantage of the late change for the very purpose of obstructing the progress of Reform ,
Untitled Article
74 The Elections *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1835, page 74, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2641/page/74/
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