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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 67

Cause Not Understood

Cause Not Understood.

In contemplation of such deplorable results public opinion is apt, while deploring them, to lay the blame on the stupidity, ill education, or partially corrupt character of the voters, and to rest content with thus accounting for an evil, taking for granted that while the cause is thus rightly assigned there is no avoidance of the thing itself.

A little reflection will, however, soon convince any fair-minded enquirer that, admitting to the fullest truthful degree the incapacity of numbers of average voters to rightly value or use their electoral privileges, sufficient reason has not thus been assigned for the existence of that profound feeling of dissatisfaction which exists in the minds of a large section of electors in every electoral district after each general election; those electors being, as a rule, generally of the better kind in point of ability, character, and patriotism. No ! the cause of the discontent lies much deeper. It is to be found in the fact that a very large proportion of the people, from causes at present utterly beyond their control, are not represented in Parliament at all. If this statement can be established, with any degree of certainty, there will he but little difficulty experienced in understanding why, during the whole history of so-called representative Government in this Colony—not to extend the enquiry further afield—we have been subjected to spasmodic, contra dictory, ruinous legislation: legislation oftimes opposed to the good sense and feeling of the thinking people outside Parliament, supposed to be represented there- page 5 in; and admittedly, by consent of the legislators themselves, partaking largely of the character of expediency, tentative in the fullest degree, as each slight alteration made in the personnel of Parliament constantly reverses all that has gone before.

Nor has administration been less of a shifty non-final character than legislation, and from the same cause. The Minister of to-day—the representative man of a temporary majority, brought to act together from motives of self or local aggrandisement—governed by no fixed political principles, undoes in a day what his predecessor in office for similar reasons had put in substitution for the work of his predecessor, just as the man of to-morrow will ignore the work of all the lot. The object of this paper is to arraign our present system of representation; to show that "it is a gross imposition upon the understanding of mankind, an insult to their feelings," and "a contrivance destructive of the best and most valuable interests of the people," and responsible for most of the evils attributed by thinking taxpayers to the present deplorable state of political corruption and selfishness into which our country has fallen. Having done this the remedy which the writer believes to be required will be noticed, and, as far as seems necessary, explained in detail.