Direct election has been the constant practice of England; and America has adopted the same system. It has been otherwise in most of the European States in which representative government has been established in our own times. This is one of the most important facts presented to our view by the British electoral system. In this system, direct election has been the natural consequence of the idea that was then entertained regarding political rights. Not only were these rights unshared by all, but they were not even distributed systematically, or upon one general plan. They were recognized wherever the capacity of exercising them was actually to be met with. The importance of freeholders and citizens had entailed upon them the right of interference in public affairs. This intervention was their right when these affairs related to themselves. Being unable to exercise this right personally, they elected representatives. In the spirit of the time, this right of election corresponded exactly to the right that the powerful barons exercised of being represented in Parliament by delegated agents. The individual importance of a powerful baron being very great, his proxy was individual. The freeholders and citizens also possessed an individual right, but not the same importance, and they therefore had one proxy to represent many of them. But, fundamentally, the representation was founded on the same principle—the individual rights of the electors to debate on and consent to such matters as interested them.
Its Relation To Representative Government.
In this point of view, it is easy of comprehension that direct election prevailed, and that no other idea presented itself to the public mind. All indirect election, every new medium placed between Parliament and the elector, would have appeared, and would in fact have been, a diminution of the right, a weakening of the importance and political intervention of the electors.
Direct election, then, is the simple idea, the primitive and natural electoral system of representative government, when representative government is itself the spontaneous produce of its true principle,—that is to say, when political rights are derived from capacity.
In considering this mode of election under a purely philosophical point of view, and as it respects not merely the electors alone, but society in general, does it remain equally preferable to every other more artificial combination?
It is necessary to examine it first in its relation to the rational principle of representative government; and, in the second place, in its practical results.
We have in a previous lecture laid down the rational principle of representative government. In right, this principle asserts, that true sovereignty is that of justice; and that no law is legitimate if it is not conformable to justice and to truth, that is to say, to the divine law. In fact, this principle recognizes, that no man or assembly of men, in a word, no terrestrial force, is fully conscious and constantly desirous of reason, justice, and truth—the true law. Connecting this right and fact together, the inference is, that the public powers which actually exercise sovereignty ought to be constantly required and constrained on every occasion to seek after the true law, the sole source of legitimate authority.
Qualifications Of Representatives.
The object of the representative system, in its general elements as well as in all the details of its organization, is, then, to collect and concentrate all the scattered elements of reason which exist in society, and to apply it to its government.