gain, prevents the statesman
from weighing or testing the forces in character, stability, persistency,
of the men by whom a majority has been built up, and on whose fidelity his
power of action must depend. This strain of argument was worked out by J.
S. Mill(238) and others, and drew from Mr. Bright, who belonged to a
different school of liberals, the gruff saying, that the worst of great
thinkers is that they so often think wrong.

Though the abstract reasoning might be unanswerable, the concrete case the
other way was irresistible. Experience showed that without secrecy in its
exercise the suffrage was not free. The farmer was afraid of his landlord,
and the labourer was afraid of the farmer; the employer could tighten the
screw on the workman, the shopkeeper feared the power of his best
customers, the debtor quailed before his creditor, the priest wielded
thunderbolts over the faithful. Not only was the open vote not free; it
exposed its possessor to so much bullying, molestation, and persecution,
that his possession came to be less of a boon than a nuisance.

(M119) For forty years this question had been fought. The ballot actually
figured in a clause of an early draft of the Reform bill of 1832. Grote,
inspired by James Mill whose vigorous pleas for the ballot in his
well-known article in 1830 were the high landmark in the controversy,
brought it before parliament in an annual motion. When that admirable man
quitted parliament to finish his great history of Greece, the torch was
still borne onwards by other hands. Ballot was one of the five points of
the charter. At nearly every meeting for parliamentary reform between the
Crimean war and Disraeli's bill of 1867, the ballot was made a cardinal
point. General opinion fluctuated from time to time, and in the sixties
journals of repute formally dismissed it as a dead political idea. The
extension of the franchise in 1867 brought it to life again, and Mr.
Bright led the van in the election of 1868 by declaring in his address
that he regarded the ballot as of the first importance. "Whether I look,"
he said, "to the excessive cost of elections, or to the tumult which so
often attends them, or to the unjust and cruel pressure which is so
frequently brought to bear upon the less independent class of voters, I am
persuaded that the true interest of the public and of freedom will be
served by the system of secret and free voting." J. S. Mill had argued
that the voter should