ambition; much greater apprehension of danger from thence than from want
of representation. One would think that the ballast of the ship was
shifted with us, and that our Constitution had the gunnel under water.
But can you fairly and distinctly point out what one evil or grievance
has happened, which you can refer to the representative not following the
opinion of his constituents? What one symptom do we find of this
inequality? But it is not an arithmetical inequality with which we ought
to trouble ourselves. If there be a moral, a political equality, this is
the _desideratum_ in our Constitution, and in every Constitution in the
world. Moral inequality is as between places and between classes. Now,
I ask, what advantage do you find, that the places which abound in
representation possess over others in which it is more scanty, in
security for freedom, in security for justice, or in any one of those
means of procuring temporal prosperity and eternal happiness, the ends
for which society was formed? Are the local interests of Cornwall and
Wiltshire, for instance--their roads, canals, their prisons, their
police--better than Yorkshire, Warwickshire, or Staffordshire? Warwick
has members; is Warwick or Stafford more opulent, happy, or free, than
Newcastle or than Birmingham? Is Wiltshire the pampered favourite,
whilst Yorkshire, like the child of the bondwoman, is turned out to the
desert? This is like the unhappy persons who live, if they can be said
to live, in the statical chair; who are ever feeling their pulse, and who
do not judge of health by the aptitude of the body to perform its
functions, but by their ideas of what ought to be the true balance
between the several secretions. Is a committee of Cornwall, &c.,
thronged, and the others deserted? No. You have an equal
representation, because you have men equally interested in the prosperity
of the whole, who are involved in the general interest and the general
sympathy; and perhaps these places, furnishing a superfluity of public
agents and administrators (whether, in strictness, they are
representatives or not, I do not mean to inquire, but they are agents and
administrators), will stand clearer of local interests, passions,
prejudices, and cabals than the others, and therefore preserve the
balance of the parts, and with a more general view and a more steady hand
than the rest.

In every political proposal we must not leave out of the question the
po