Walter Bagehot

If you do not want to throw your vote away, you must be guided by us: here are three very satisfactory gentlemen (and one is an Honourable): you may vote for either of these, and we will write your name down; but if you go voting wildly…

The member-makers would look, not for independence, but for subservience--and they could hardly be blamed for so doing.

Upon this (in theory) voluntary plan, you would get together a set of members bound hard and fast with party bands and fetters, infinitely tighter than any members now.

Whoever hopes anything from desultory popular action if matched against systematised popular action, should consider the way in which the American President is chosen.

Caucuses, or their equivalent, would be far worse here in constituency-making than there in President-making, because on great occasions the American nation can fix on some one great man whom it knows, but the English nation could not fix…

But though a common voter could only be ranged in an effectual constituency, and a common candidate only reach a constituency by obeying the orders of the political election-contrivers upon his side, certain voters and certain members…

At present the Dissenters are a most energetic and valuable component of the Liberal party; but under the voluntary plan they would not be a component--they would be a separate, independent element.

The full force of this cannot be appreciated except by referring to the former proof that the mass of a Parliament ought to be men of moderate sentiments, or they will elect an immoderate Ministry, and enact violent laws.

Instead of a deliberate assembly of moderate and judicious men, we should have a various compound of all sorts of violence.

Bad as these members would be, if they were left to themselves--if, in a free Parliament, they were confronted with the perils of government, close responsibility might improve them and make them tolerable.

A voluntary constituency will nearly always be a despotic constituency.

Even in the best case, where a set of earnest men choose a member to expound their earnestness, they will look after him to see that he does expound it.

At present the member is free because the constituency is not in earnest; no constituency has an acute, accurate doctrinal creed in politics.

But a voluntary constituency would be a church with tenets; it would make its representative the messenger of its mandates, and the delegate of its determinations.

As in the case of a dissenting congregation, one great minister sometimes rules it, while ninety-nine ministers in the hundred are ruled by it, so here one noted man would rule his electors, but the electors would rule all the others.

Thus, the members for a good voluntary constituency would be hopelessly enslaved, because of its goodness; but the members for a bad voluntary constituency would be yet more enslaved because of its badness.

In America there is a division of politicians into wire-pullers and blowers; under the voluntary system the member of Parliament would be the only momentary mouth-piece--the impotent blower; while the constituency-maker would be the latent…

Earnest constituencies would exact frequent elections; they would not like to part with their virtue for a long period; it would anger them to see it used contrary to their wishes, amid circumstances which at the election no one thought of.

A constituency collected by law and on compulsion endures this change because it has no collective earnestness; it does not mind seeing the power it gave used in a manner that it could not have foreseen.

But a self-formed constituency of eager opinions, a missionary constituency, so to speak, would object; it would think it its bounden duty to object; and the crafty manipulators, though they said nothing, in silence would object still more.

The voluntary plan, therefore, when tried in this easy form is inconsistent with the extrinsic independence as well as with the inherent moderation of a Parliament--two of the conditions which, as we have seen, are essential to the bare…

It is in vain to pile detail on detail when the objection is one of first principle.

I answer, no philosophy, no posterity, no external authority, but the English nation here and now.

Free government is self-government--a government of the people by the people.

The progress of the military art is the most conspicuous, I was about to say the most SHOWY, fact in human history.