But there is no analogy whatever between the admission of new members into a club, and the election of representatives to serve in parliament. The elector, by his vote, does not admit the parliamentary candidate into a private club or association with himself, but in the exercise of an important public trust is instrumental in raising him to the office and the responsibility of a legislator. Every speech, every vote in parliament, is known to the nation. Why then should the member be kept in the dark respecting his constituents, their principles, and their opinions? The object of the ballot is to enable the electors to exercise their public trust privately and by stealth, while their representative must speak, act, and vote openly. Men wear a mask and hide themselves, not when going to discharge public duties, but to commit secret crimes. If however electors honestly think that any particular candidate deserves their support, what reason have they to be ashamed and afraid of what they do?

"If a man is sheltered from intimidation," says that clever and amusing writer, the Rev. Sydney Smith, "is it at all clear that he would vote from any better motive than intimidation? If you make so tremendous an experiment, are you sure of attaining your object? The landlord has perhaps said a cross word to the tenant; the candidate for whom the tenant votes in opposition to his landlord has taken his second son for a footman, or his father knew the candidate's grandfather: how many thousand votes, sheltered (as the ballotists suppose) from intimidation, would be given from such silly motives as these? how many would be given from the mere discontent of inferiority? or from that strange simious schoolboy passion of giving pain to others, even when the author cannot be found out? -motives as pernicious as any which could proceed from intimidation. So that all voters screened by ballot would not be screened for any public good.

"The Radicals, (I do not use this word in any offensive sense, for I know many honest and excellent men of this way of thinking,)—but the Radicals praise and admit the lawful influence of wealth and power. They are quite satisfied if a rich man of popular manners gains the votes and affections of his dependents; but why is not this as bad as intimidation? The real object is to vote for the good politician, not for the kind-hearted or agreeable man: the mischief is just the same to the country whether I am smiled into a corrupt choice, or frowned into a corrupt choice,—what is it to me whether my landlord is the best of landlords, or the most agreeable of men? I must vote for Joseph Hume, if I think Joseph more honest than the Marquis. The more mitigated Radical may pass over this, but the real carnivorous variety of the animal should declaim as loudly against the fascinations as against the threats of the great. The man who possesses the land should never speak to the man who tills it. The intercourse between landlord and tenant should be as strictly guarded as that of the sexes in Turkey. A funded duenna should be placed over every landed grandee. And then intimidation ! Is intimidation confined to the aristocracy? Can any thing be more scandalous and atrocious than the intimidation of mobs? Did not the mob of Bristol occasion more ruin, wretchedness, death, and alarm, than all the ejection of tenants, and combinations against shopkeepers, from the beginning of the century? and did not the Scotch philosophers tear off the clothes of the Tories in Mintoshire? or at least such clothes as the customs of the country admit of being worn?-and did not they, without any reflection at all upon the customs of the country, wash the Tory voters in the river?

"Some sanguine advocates of the ballot contend that it would put an end to all canvassing: why should

it do so? Under the ballot, I canvass (it is true) a person who may secretly deceive me. I cannot be sure he will not do so-but I am sure it is much less likely he will vote against me, when I have paid him all the deference and attention which a representative bestows on his constituents, than if I had totally neglected him: to any other objections he may have against me, at least I will not add that of personal incivility.

"Scarcely is any great virtue practised without some sacrifice; and the admiration which virtue excites seems to proceed from the contemplation of such sufferings, and of the exertions by which they are endured: a tradesman suffers some loss of trade by voting for his country; is he not to vote? he might suffer some loss of blood in fighting for his country; is he not to fight? Every one would be a good Samaritan, if he was quite sure his compassion would cost him nothing. We should all be heroes, if it were not for blood and fractures; all saints, if it were not for the restrictions and privations of sanctity; all patriots, if it were not for the losses and misrepresentations to which patriotism exposes us. The ballotists are a set of Englishmen glowing with the love of England and the love of virtue, but determined to hazard the most dangerous experiments in politics, rather than run the risk of losing a penny in defence of their exalted feelings."

Although a few may be willing to hide their heads with that political timidity which Mr. Sydney Smith has so well described in the above passage, surely such is not the general wish and feeling of the people of England. The ballotists dislike open voting, and they ask for the ballot to shelter themselves from intimidation. What should we think of a sailor or a soldier who, because he had a very great dislike to open fighting, should ask leave to hide among the casks in the

ship's hold, or in the bottom of a ditch, by way of shelter from intimidation?

In the army that sort of tremulous aversion to looking the enemy in the face is commonly called "shewing a white feather." Most of us prefer to shew our colours, and to stand by them like men. Britons scorn to skulk from their adversaries, and are accustomed to fight their naval, their military, and why not also their political battles, in open and gallant style. Because some persons consent to lose, in the ballot box, the courageous, manly quality of a free and a brave people, why should those, who are neither ashamed nor afraid, submit to be taken in that trap for the timorous, and there to be curtailed of their national and characteristic honours?

The fox in the fable, who had lost his tail in a trap, cunningly endeavoured to render his own personal defect fashionable, by persuading the rest of his species to part with their brushes likewise. But the wily foxes kept their own wise counsel, and their own handsome tails, and left their brother Reynard alone in his glory.

The ballot, in order to be effectual, must be followed up by a course of double dealing and hypocrisy, which would cast suspicion upon every man's honesty. To quote again from Mr. S. Smith's amusing pamphlet:"The single lie on the hustings would not suffice; the concealed democrat who voted against his landlord must talk with the wrong people, subscribe to the wrong club, huzza at the wrong dinner, break the wrong head, lead (if he wished to escape from the watchful jealousy of his landlord) a long life of lies between every election; and he must do this, not only eundo, in his calm and prudential state, but redeundo from the market, warmed with beer and expanded by alcohol; and he must not only carry on his seven years of dissimulation before the world, but in the very bosom

of his family, or he must expose himself to the dangerous garrulity of wife, children, and servants, from whose indiscretion every kind of evil report would be carried to the ears of the watchful steward. And when once the ballot is established, mere gentle, quiet lying will not do to hide the tenant who secretly votes against his landlord: the quiet passive liar will be suspected, and he will find, if he does not wave his bonnet and strain his throat in furtherance of his bad faith, and lie loudly, that he has put in a false ball in the dark to very little purpose. Not only you do not protect the tenant who wishes to deceive his landlord, by promising one way and voting another, but you expose all the other tenants, who have no intention of deceiving, to all the evils of mistake and misrepresentation.

"The noise and jollity of a ballot mob must be such as the very devils would look on with delight. A set of deceitful wretches wearing the wrong colours, abusing their friends, pelting the man for whom they voted, drinking their enemies' punch, knocking down persons with whom they entirely agreed, and roaring out eternal duration to principles they abhorred. A scene of wholesale bacchanalian fraud, a posse comitatus of liars, which would disgust any man with a free government, and make him sigh for the monocracy of Constantinople."

The ballot is a cover to political fraud. Even in England, where every elector's vote may be known and scrutinized, disgraceful attempts are sometimes made to obtain a majority by personation, double voting, and other nefarious arts. To such evil practices there would be no check whatever, under a system of secret voting.

Such are some of the reasons why the vote by ballot, which is not acknowledged by the British constitution, has hitherto been resisted by the leaders both of the Conservative and the Whig parties, as a dangerous