Book Description

Excerpt from Representative Government: The True Method of Reaching Concerted Action and of Finding the Will of a Concurring Majority in the Election of Representatives of the People; The Remedy for the Evils of the Delegate System and the Evils of Permanent Party Organization; The Civil Servic The following pages are intended to show the force and application of a method of direct voting, by which the people of a free government may at once reach concerted action in the election of their representatives. It requires but a superficial examination by any one familiar with the present methods of selecting our government officials, to discover that a large proportion of the corrupt political practices debasing our government at its every phase, are to be found in the method of making party nominations, by submitting to a series of delegatings, to caucuses, conventions, conferences and so on; and, that they still further result from our submission to a government conducted by and wholly emanating from the one or the other of two great permanent parties, into which the people are divided. Recognizing that delegates may disregard their instructions, or, may barter away their votes for personal ends, I asked myself the question: Why may not the instructions given to delegates, providing them with successive choices among the candidates so that they may finally reach concerted action, be placed upon paper, and a count from these papers when collected, in imitation of the repeated ballotings of a convention of delegates, be made to take the place of these delegates meeting in a convention. And then, the further question: If the instructions of a district intended for a delegate, may thus be placed upon a paper from which they may be counted, why not have each individual voter cast his own complete instructions as his vote, and thus have every election decided by the whole body of voters concerned, at one direct election. 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.