Excerpt from Mr. John Stuart Mill and the Ballot: A Criticism of His Opinions as Expressed in "Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform" Would that it were true that at every election the votes are more and more the voters' own 1 Were this the case there could be no possible objection to the use of voting papers. If men are really independent - if a good tenant can now feel that he is as valuable to his landlord as his landlord is to him - if a prosperous tradesman can afford to feel independent of any parti onlar customer, and give a perfectly independent vote, he could do so under the proposed system of voting papers. The absence of this feeling of independence is at once the most conclusive argument against their introduction, and in favour of secret voting. The unassailable argument against the ballot because of the limitation of the constituencies is more specious than sound. If it be the right of the voter under an extended suffrage to act on his own judg ment, influenced solely by the opinions of others in so far as he arrives at the same conclusions, it is so now. Coercion, whether exercised by the few or the many, is equally objectionable: argument will exercise its due weight whether the system of voting be open or secret. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.