Considerations on Representative GovernmentMill, John Stuart
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Considerations on Representative Government
Mill, John Stuart
Representative government and representation
However this may be, I regard it as required by first principles that
the receipt of parish relief should be a peremptory disqualification
for the franchise. He who can not by his labor suffice for his own
support, has no claim to the privilege of helping himself to the money
of others. By becoming dependent on the remaining members of the
community for actual subsistence, he abdicates his claim to equal
rights with them in other respects. Those to whom he is indebted for
the continuance of his very existence may justly claim the exclusive
management of those common concerns to which he now brings nothing, or
less than he takes away. As a condition of the franchise, a term
should be fixed, say five years previous to the registry, during which
the applicant's name has not been on the parish books as a recipient
of relief. To be an uncertificated bankrupt, or to have taken the
benefit of the Insolvent Act, should disqualify for the franchise
until the person has paid his debts, or at least proved that he is not
now, and has not for some long period been, dependent on eleemosynary
support. Non-payment of taxes, when so long persisted in that it can
not have arisen from inadvertence, should disqualify while it lasts.
These exclusions are not in their nature permanent. They exact such
conditions only as all are able, or ought to be able, to fulfill if
they choose. They leave the suffrage accessible to all who are in the
normal condition of a human being; and if any one has to forego it, he
either does not care sufficiently for it to do for its sake what he is
already bound to do, or he is in a general condition of depression and
degradation in which this slight addition, necessary for the security
of others, would be unfelt, and on emerging from which this mark of
inferiority would disappear with the rest.
In the long run, therefore (supposing no restrictions to exist but
those of which we have now treated), we might expect that all, except
that (it is to be hoped) progressively diminishing class, the
recipients of parish relief, would be in possession of votes, so that
the suffrage would be, with that slight abatement, universal. That it
should be thus widely expanded is, as we have seen, absolutely
necessary to an enlarged and elevated conception of good government.
Yet in this state of things, the great majority of voters in most
countries, and emphatically in this, would be manual laborers, and the
twofold danger, that of too low a standard of political intelligence,
and that of class legislation, would still exist in a very perilous
degree. It remains to be seen whether any means exist by which these
evils can be obviated.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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