Postscript

SINCE this pamphlet was sent to the press, I have seen a plan of reform communicated to the committee of correspondence by the Duke of Richmond,³² which if I had been so fortunate as to have met with a few weeks sooner, would have prevented me from troubling the public with my sentiments on that subject. His Grace, with as much liberality as good sense, advises that mechanics, day labourers, beggars, et hoc genus omne, shall be allowed to vote at elections for members of parliament, in short, that all men shall vote, as men, in right of their manhood. If this plan were to be carried into execution, we should have our senators probably, like the Roman Dictators taken from the plough. Such men as these, when they should be invested with the chief power of the state, we may be certain (for it is a maxim in ethics, that they who have nothing to lose, may, without any impeachment of their prudence, risk all they have) would not be over cautious or timid, or servile, through fear of hazarding their property. And, on the other hand, being entirely free from prejudices of education, there is no danger they would overturn the present constitution from any partiality to one in preference to another form of government. Besides, who are so proper to judge between the government who demand, and the people who are to pay taxes, as they who having no property themselves, must be perfectly disinterested in their decisions? It has indeed / been asked, does his Grace intend that English, Scotch, and other adventitious beggars, shall vote at elections; and if not, how are they to be distinguished from Irish. Which objection, when seriously considered, will be found to be totally groundless. If the right to vote was to be determined by the fundamental principle his Grace has endeavoured to establish, Irishmen and Jews would be very easily distinguished from electors natives of other countries. Then Dr. Tucker³³ himself would be obliged to acknowledge that mankind would have at least one unalienable political right, that would coincide exactly with his most ingenious definition of an unalienable right, that is, “a right which one man cannot for a moment transfer to another, even with the consent of the parties, a right which every man must exercise in person.” But this is not all. Besides giving us above seven hundred thousand additional electors, his Grace would have every parish return a member to parliament, and 82to prevent vexatious delays, and the electors from voting in different parishes, he would have all the elections in the kingdom held on the same day. To this it is objected, though they should all begin, it does not follow they should all end on the same day; nay, from the prodigious multitude of additional electors, they could not possibly end for twenty days; and then they ask what would prevent the electors from voting in every parish in the same province, not to say, in the whole kingdom. And as there would thus be above an hundred and fifty thousand electors to poll in every parish, the books most probably could not be shut in three years. But these objections are all obviated by a single clause in his Grace’s bill (a copy of which his Grace would have transmitted but there’s no such thing as getting a clerk in London) which enacts that the electors as / fast as they are polled shall be thrust into a large prison erected near the Hustings for that purpose, there to remain, (like jurors,) till the election shall be over. From which imprisonment two good consequences would follow: 1st, by bringing the electors thus happily together, all party animosities would subside in a sense of the common calamity: 2dly, the candidates through commiseration for their incarcerated friends, would prevent their lawyers from protracting the election with long speeches; so that the electors would be polled as fast as guineas are told by a banker’s clerk, and all the elections would be over in twenty-four hours. – How the age of a beggar from the county of Antrim could be ascertained in the county of Kerry, or why a man on this broad principle should be allowed to vote at 21 and not at 20, or who are fools and who are not, are objections too trifling to merit serious consideration. Upon the whole I would recommend his Grace’s plan as the most orderly, rational, and above all, as his Grace says himself, by much the most practicable that has been yet suggested. How the British parliament could have so little virtue or so little regard to common sense as to reject a plan in the contrivance of which there appears to be such extraordinary judgment, and in which there must be such a wonderful felicity in the execution, I am utterly at a loss to conceive.