and forced to appear before them with the government ballot only? There is the best of authority for affirming that in many instances the mayors not only seized and destroyed nonofficial ballots, but that they also declared that whatever the number of votes procured by the candidate of the opposition, the government candidate would be elected. It is further to be said that the law requires the ballot-boxes to be sealed, a requirement which it would not seem very difficult to fulfil ; and yet we are gravely assured that the means for carrying out this law were in many of the communes so incomplete that the votes were actually cast sometimes into a hat, sometimes into a soup or salad bowl, and sometimes even into the mayor's pocket, held open for that purpose by the mayor himself and by an assistant.†

It would be easy to multiply examples similar to those which we have already given, but out of consideration for the patience of our readers we desist. We should not, indeed, have prolonged the subject so far as we have already done but for the necessity of bringing forward actual proofs of the pressure which was so constantly and so successfully used. Nothing but a presentation of facts is a sufficient answer to the arguments of those who found their approval of Napoleon III. on the belief that from first to last he enjoyed the unswerving support of his people. It is our unalterable belief that a support gained in the manner which we have attempted to show is far worse for a nation than any open and honest opposition to its government can be. It is making use of popular institutions as a mask behind which to hide a system of oppression

* "Un grand nombre de maires ouvrent les bulletins et déchirent ceux de l'opposition, affirmant, d'ailleurs, que quelque soit le nombre de suffrages obtenu par le candidat de l'opposition, le candidat du gouvernement sera élu, et, comme pour donner plus de poids à leur affirmation, ils offrent de parier cent contre un que les choses se passeront ainsi."— Delord, III. 417.

The statement of M. Delord (III. 417) on this subject is so curious that we cannot but quote it. He says: "L'apposition des scellés sur la bôîte du scrutin ne préoccupait guère ces fonctionnaires. Ils laissaient au brigadier de gendarmerie ou un maître d'école le soin de se conformer à cette prescription de la loi, assez difficile, du reste, à remplir avec un matériel électoral tellement incomplet que dans un grand nombre de communes on votait soit dans un chapeau, soit dans un saladier, soit dans une soupière, et, à défaut de ces récipients, dans la poche du maire tenue entrebâillée par lui et par l'adjoint ou par le garde champêtre."

and tyranny; it is prostituting the cause of freedom, and making it subordinate to the ends of despotism. If a people are to be made political slaves, let them at least be spared the mockery of sham liberty, lest they bring all liberty into discredit, and all free institutions into contempt. It may be that an imperial government is the best government for France (though we do not believe that such is the case); it is certain that so long as moral principles apply to the welfare of nations as they do to the welfare of men, any government founded and sustained by such a system of duperie, to use the forcible word of Taine, as was that of Napoleon III. will end in weakness and ruin. What Shelley said of men as a possibility may be said of governments as a certainty; and for the reason that with governments the end of all things is in this life:

He who gains by base and armed wrong,

Or guilty fraud, or base compliances,
May be despoiled; even as a stolen dress
Is stript from a convicted thief, and he
Left in the nakedness of infamy.

But even this is not all. Not only is the government overthrown, but the political life of the nation is paralyzed. "Nous n'avons pas de vie publique en France," wrote M. Taine, two years after the fall of Paris; and the explanation of the truth is in the fact that the public has been so often duped and deceived by the government that it no longer cares what the government is. That the nation is not yet cured of its political ills the world had startling evidence the other day, when M. Gambetta produced in the Assembly the circular of the Minister of the Interior, asking the préfets for the names of such political journals as were capable of becoming friendly to the government. The incident affords new proof of the truth of Virgil's declaration :

Facilis descensus Averni;

Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis,

Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras

Hoc

opus, hic labor est.

CHARLES KENDALL ADAMS.

ART. IV. OUR ELECTORAL MACHINERY.

IT is a curiosity of our electoral machinery, that while it still continues in active operation, and is working apparently as well as ever, it yet gauges the total departure that has been made from the political conditions for which it was originally devised. In nearly every respect its use is different from that which was intended. The framers of the Constitution thought that in the electoral college they had provided a carefully selected deliberative body, near enough to the people to feel public sentiment, and yet sufficiently removed to express with entire independence the national judgment, and who should thus choose the President and Vice-President of the United States "without fear, favor, or affection," to use Jefferson's words in another relation. Instead of this, we merely have the electors as so many expressions of the Presidential votes cast by their respective States, of no more personal independence, of no more political vitality, in fact, than the paper upon which their names are written; for eighty years' experience has not furnished a single instance of a Presidential elector casting his vote otherwise than as the organ of the party which procured his nomination. Here is a case, certainly, where the Fathers of the Republic, so accurate in their perceptions of the national wants in most respects, and so almost prophetic in their discernment of the national future in its essential drift, missed the mark entirely. Their mistake, however, has fared in practice not unlike "Lord Timothy Dexter's" venture of sending a cargo of warming-pans to the West Indies, where, with the covers wrenched off, those Northern utensils were found to work admirably as scoops for use at the sugar-mills. Still better scoops could undoubtedly have been made expressly for the business; and so in regard to our electoral machinery, time and again, indeed, after every Presidential election,- agitation has sprung up in favor of substituting some other arrangement which shall be both more simple and safe, and at the same time more equitable and effectual, a problem which, like so many others, it has been found easier to state than to solve.

The first point of consideration relates to the real objections resting against the present mode of choosing Presidents and Vice-Presidents. Generally, whenever this subject comes under consideration, there is pointed out a formidable list of faults, each one of which is assumed to be sufficient, if abetted by suitable and not improbable circumstances, to plunge the country into all the horrors of civil war. Forty-five years ago the Hon. Mr. McDuffie, of South Carolina, in the course of that speech in favor of the district system of choosing Presidential electors which was luridly lighted up by the celebrated passage on political corruption, so well known to our school-boys on declamation days, said to his Congressional hearers: "The destiny, not only of the rising millions that are to come after us here, but that of the whole civilized world, hangs trembling on the issue of our deliberations!" And yet nothing was then and there done, while the whole package of the perils of inaction was left to be unrolled afresh by Senator Morton at the last session of Congress. The truth is, the institutions of the United States repose on no such ticklish basis as to be upset by one imperfect or even fraudulent election, especially if the trouble is seen to come through defects of law. We have already had minority Presidents more than once chosen by the people, and we have had a President chosen by Congress when one of the defeated contestants was unmistakably the popular favorite; while there never has been an election exempt from charges, and, what is worse, some evidences, of fraud. It is precisely the same in the working of other parts of our political and governmental machinery, -rogues slip through the courts, bad judges may get on the bench, defalcations too frequently signalize unfit civil appointments, Congressmen, as we have seen, may prove far from immaculate, laws are sometimes passed which have to be speedily repealed, and even Presidents, duly installed, have been threatened with impeachment. All this, of course, affords no reason why any evil or defect attaching to our electoral system that can be remedied should be tolerated any longer; but it does warrant the assurance that, in the treatment of this question, there is no occasion for panic or for hurrying into any change which shall not prove a reform. The objection to the present system which is more frequently

urged than any other is, that it throws the whole electoral vote of a State solidly on one side or the other, thus, as it were, annihilating the voice of a minority, of perhaps hundreds of thousands in a great State like New York, where a bare majority of votes may elect thirty-five Presidential electors, and so possibly neutralize the will of, say, five of the New England States, pronounced by heavy aggregate majorities the other way. It is an objection so valid that there is great danger of its being exaggerated. We will therefore copy the most cogent defence of the general system, as contrasted with the district system, that we remember to have met with, namely, the following passage in the speech of Edward Everett, delivered in the House of Representatives in 1826.

"I conceive the practical operation of the two systems to come nearly to the same thing. I say this on grounds of reasoning, and I am not aware that there is anything in experience to bring us to a different conclusion. On the general ticket system, supposing it to be generally adopted throughout the United States, the unrepresented majorities would be balanced by each other; or, in other words, the minority, whose voice is not heard in one State, on one side of the question, would be balanced by the minority, whose voice is not heard, in another State, on another side of the question. On the district system, the same result would take place. The minority represented in the electoral colleges, on one side of the question, in one State, would be balanced, and, being balanced, would be neutralized, by the minority represented in another State, on the other side of the question; and therefore, in their practical operation, there would be very little to choose between the two systems."

It is really a question of the degree to which the political community shall be divided up, in voting for President and Vice-President. In the one case the States are units for choosing a body, larger or smaller, of Presidential electors; in the other, the districts are units for choosing one elector each. Precisely the same process which is now gone through with by Pennsylvania, for instance, in choosing its twenty-nine electors, would, under the district system, characterize the choice of its one elector by each district, that is, the majority does and would elect, the minority is and would be absorbed; only, the whole minority of a State would be silenced in the