Representation

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S. Sonnenschein and Company, 1885 - 90 pages

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Page 72 - ... nation, though a majority of that portion of it, whom the institutions of the country have erected into a ruling class. If democracy means the certain ascendancy of the majority, there are no means of insuring that, but by) allowing every individual figure to tell equally in the summing up. Any minority left out, either purposely or by the play of the machinery, gives the power not to a majority, but to a minority in some other part of | the scale.
Page 5 - American democracy,, which is constructed on this faulty model, the highlycultivated members of the community, except such of them as are willing to sacrifice their own opinions and modes of judgment, and become the servile mouthpieces of their inferiors in knowledge...
Page 13 - The absence (they say) of any provision for the representation of minorities in the States of the South when rebellion was plotted, and when open steps were taken to break the Union, was unfortunate, for it would have held the Union men of those States together, and have given them voice in the electoral colleges and in Congress. But they were fearfully overborne by the plurality rule of elections, and were swept forward by the course of events into impotency or open hostility to our cause. By that...
Page 62 - ... and emoluments of the government into means of rewarding partisan services, in order to secure the fidelity and increase the zeal of the members of the party. The effect of the whole combined, even, in the earlier stages of the process, when they exert the least pernicious influence, would be to place the control of the two parties in the hands of their respective majorities ; and the government itself, virtually, under the control of the majority of the dominant party, for the time, instead...
Page 61 - But as such is not the case, as the numerical majority, instead of being the people, is only a portion of them, such a government, instead of being a true and perfect model of the people's government, that is, a people selfgoverned, is but the government of a part over a part — the major over the minor portion.

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