Considerations on Representative GovernmentMill, John Stuart
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Considerations on Representative Government
Mill, John Stuart
Representative government and representation
It is always under great difficulties, and very imperfectly, that a
country can be governed by foreigners, even when there is no extreme
disparity in habits and ideas between the rulers and the ruled.
Foreigners do not feel with the people. They can not judge, by the
light in which a thing appears to their own minds, or the manner in
which it affects their feelings, how it will affect the feelings or
appear to the minds of the subject population. What a native of the
country, of average practical ability, knows as it were by instinct,
they have to learn slowly, and, after all, imperfectly, by study and
experience. The laws, the customs, the social relations for which they
have to legislate, instead of being familiar to them from childhood,
are all strange to them. For most of their detailed knowledge they
must depend on the information of natives, and it is difficult for
them to know whom to trust. They are feared, suspected, probably
disliked by the population; seldom sought by them except for
interested purposes; and they are prone to think that the servilely
submissive are the trustworthy. Their danger is of despising the
natives; that of the natives is, of disbelieving that any thing the
strangers do can be intended for their good. These are but a part of
the difficulties that any rulers have to struggle with, who honestly
attempt to govern well a country in which they are foreigners. To
overcome these difficulties in any degree will always be a work of
much labor, requiring a very superior degree of capacity in the chief
administrators, and a high average among the subordinates; and the
best organization of such a government is that which will best insure
the labor, develop the capacity, and place the highest specimens of it
in the situations of greatest trust. Responsibility to an authority
which has gone through none of the labor, acquired none of the
capacity, and for the most part is not even aware that either, in any
peculiar degree, is required, can not be regarded as a very effectual
expedient for accomplishing these ends.
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