What especially delighted him (for he was a zealous admirer of the
society he described) was the method of government.
"There was no possibility of going wrong," he said to me with curious
zeal, "not a shadow of danger! It would be difficult for you to
understand now how easily the system worked!" And here he sighed
profoundly. "And why on earth," he continued, "men should have destroyed
such an instrument when they had it is more than I can understand. There
it was in every country in Europe; there were elections; all the men
voted. And mind you, the elections were not so very far apart. Most
people living at one election could remember the last, so there was no
time for abuses to spring up.... Well, everybody voted. If a man wanted
one thing he voted one way, and if he wanted another thing he voted the
other way. The people for whom he voted would then meet, and with a
sense of duty which I cannot exaggerate they would work month after
month exactly to reproduce the will of those who had appointed them. It
was a great time!"
"Yet," said I, "even so there must have been occasional divergences
between what these people did and what the nation wanted."
"I see what you mean," he said, musing, "you mean that all the devotion
in the world, the purest of motives and the most devoted sense of duty,
could not keep the elected always in contact with the electors.
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