, or the
pretending the thing to be that is not. He is plain and uniform in
every thing that he professes, or to which he gives utterance; but, from
timidity or irresolution, he keeps back in part the offering which he
owes at the shrine where it is most honourable and glorious for man to
worship.

And this brings me back again to the subject of the immediately
preceding Essay, the propriety of voting by ballot.

The very essence of this scheme is silence. And this silence is not
merely like that which is prompted by a diffident temper, which by fits
is practiced by the modest and irresolute man, and by fits disappears
before the sun of truth and through the energies of a temporary
fortitude. It is uniform. It is not brought into act only, when the
individual unhappily does not find in himself the firmness to play
the adventurer. It becomes matter of system, and is felt as being
recommended to us for a duty.

Nor does the evil stop there. In the course of my ordinary
communications with my fellow-men, I speak when I please, and I am
silent when I please, and there is nothing specially to be remarked
either way. If I speak, I am perhaps listened to; and, if I am silent,
it is likely enough concluded that it is because I have nothing of
importance to say. But in the question of ballot the case is far
otherwise. There it is known that the voter has his secret. When I am
silent upon a matter occurring in the usual intercourses of life where I
might speak, nay, where we will suppose I ought to speak, I am at
least guilty of dissimulation only. But the voter by ballot is strongly
impelled to the practice of the more enormous sin of simulation. It
is known, as I have said, that he has his secret. And he will often be
driven to have recourse to various stratagems, that he may elude
the enquirer, or that he may set at fault the sagacity of the silent
observer. He has something that he might tell if he would, and he
distorts himself in a thousand ways, that he may not betray the hoard
which he is known to have in his custody. The institution of ballot
is the fruitful parent of ambiguities, equivocations and lies without
number.

ESSAY XIX. OF SELF-COMPLACENCY.

The subject of this Essay is intimately connected with those of Essays
XI and XII, perhaps the most important of the series.

It has been established in the latter, that human creatures are
constantly accompanied in their voluntary actions with the delusive