Considerations on Representative GovernmentMill, John Stuart
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Considerations on Representative Government
Mill, John Stuart
Representative government and representation
An army composed of various nationalities has no other patriotism than
devotion to the flag. Such armies have been the executioners of
liberty through the whole duration of modern history. The sole bond
which holds them together is their officers and the government which
they serve, and their only idea, if they have any, of public duty, is
obedience to orders. A government thus supported, by keeping its
Hungarian regiments in Italy and its Italian in Hungary, can long
continue to rule in both places with the iron rod of foreign
conquerors.
If it be said that so broadly-marked a distinction between what is due
to a fellow-countryman and what is due merely to a human creature is
more worthy of savages than of civilized beings, and ought, with the
utmost energy, to be contended against, no one holds that opinion more
strongly than myself. But this object, one of the worthiest to which
human endeavour can be directed, can never, in the present state of
civilization, be promoted by keeping different nationalities of any
thing like equivalent strength under the same government. In a
barbarous state of society the case is sometimes different. The
government may then be interested in softening the antipathies of the
races, that peace may be preserved and the country more easily
governed. But when there are either free institutions, or a desire for
them, in any of the peoples artificially tied together, the interest
of the government lies in an exactly opposite direction. It is then
interested in keeping up and envenoming their antipathies, that they
may be prevented from coalescing, and it may be enabled to use some of
them as tools for the enslavement of others. The Austrian court has
now for a whole generation made these tactics its principal means of
government, with what fatal success, at the time of the Vienna
insurrection and the Hungarian contest the world knows too well.
Happily there are now signs that improvement is too far advanced to
permit this policy to be any longer successful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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