ABSTRACT
The most urgent problem of our age for those who give most urgency to the preservation of democratic institutions is that of restraining the vote-buying process.
W. H. Hutt*
The loss of the original conception of the functions of a legislature
It cannot be our task here to trace the process by which the original conception of the nature of democratic constitutions gradually was lost and replaced by that of the unlimited power of the democratically elected assembly. That has been done recently in an important book by M. J. C. Vile in which it is shown how during the English Civil War the abuse of its powers by Parliament 'had shown to men who had previously seen only the royal power as a danger, that parliament could be as tyrannical as a king' and how this led to 'the realisation that legislatures must also be subjected to restriction if individual freedom was not to be invaded'.1 This remained the doctrine of the old Whigs until far into the eighteenth century. It found its most famous expression in John Locke who argued in effect that 'the legislative authority is the authority to act in a particular way\ Furthermore, Locke argued, those who wield this authority should make only general rules. They are to govern by promulgated established Laws, not to be varied in particular cases.'2 One of the most influential statements is met with in Cato's Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in which, in a passage already quoted in part, the former could maintain in 1721 that
when the deputies thus act for their own interest, by acting for the interest of their principals; when they can make no laws but what they themselves, and their posterity must be subject to; when
they can give no money, but what they must pay their share of; when they can do no mischief but what fall upon their own heads in common with their countrymen; their principals may then expect good laws, little mischief, and much frugality.3
