hoice of candidates and the formation of programmes.
That will lead to a great increase in the complexity of the process by
which the Council, the Executive, and the officers of each local party
association are appointed. Parliament indeed may find itself compelled,
as many of the American States have been compelled, to pass a series of
Acts for the prevention of fraud in the interior government of parties.
The ordinary citizen would find then, much more obviously than he does
at present, that an effective use of his voting power involves not only
the marking of a ballot paper on the day of the election, but an active
share in that work of appointing and controlling party committees from
which many men whose opinions are valuable to the State shrink with an
instinctive dread.

But the most important difficulties raised by the extension of political
interest from a very small to a large fraction of the population would
be concerned with political motive rather than political machinery. It
is astonishing that the early English democrats, who supposed that
individual advantage would be the sole driving force in politics,
assumed, without realising the nature of their own assumption, that the
representative, if he were elected for a short term, would inevitably
feel his own advantage to be identical with that of the community.[81] At
present there is a fairly sufficient supply of men whose imagination and
sympathies are sufficiently quick and wide to make them ready to
undertake the toil of unpaid electioneering and administration for the
general good. But every organiser of elections knows that the supply is
never more than sufficient, and payment of members, while it would
permit men of good-will to come forward who are now shut out, would also
make it possible for less worthy motives to become more effective. The
concentration both of administrative and legislative work in the hands
of the Cabinet, while it tends to economy of time and effort, is making
the House of Commons yearly a less interesting place; and members have
of late often expressed to me a real anxiety lest the _personnel_ of the
House should seriously deteriorate.

[81] E.g. James Mill, _Essay on Government_ (1825), 'We have seen in
what manner it is possible to prevent in the Representatives the rise of
an interest different from that of the parties who choose them, namely,
by giving them little time not dependent upon the will of those parties'
(p. 27)