ON REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT AND NATIONAL EDUCATION. ADDRESSED TO THE INHABITANTS OF THE UNITED STATES BY R. D. OWEN AND FRANCES WRIGHT. "These are not the times in which it is safe for a nation to repose in the London: J. WATSON, HALL OF SCIENCE, COMMERCIAL PLACE, CITY ROAD, FINSBURY. THIS is a republic in which the voice of the people is in theory, and ought to be in practice, the director of the people's affairs. The voice of the people, that is to say, the majority of their votes, ought to decide all great measures. With a few exceptions, trifling except in the state of Virginia, all free male citizens of our country, above the age of twenty-one, have an equal voice in electing those men whose opinions and votes in the respective houses of representatives, afterwards determine the state laws, decide the state taxes, and direct the administration and appropriation of the same. That is to say the mass of the people legislates, or rather may legislate, indirectly. If those men whom they elect, do vote, not according to their own private opinion, merely because it is their own, but according to the interests and wishes of the majority of their constituents, then the people legislate through their constituents But if the men of their choice give their votes contrary to the known interests, or to the expressed wishes, of those who have elected them as their representatives, then these men cease to be, in strictness, the representatives of the people at all. They represent no one but themselves; and, in so far as they are concerned, the government is a pure oligarchy. I say not that this is an evil without a remedy-even perhaps an easy one; nor do I say that, in some instances, the people's representatives are not what the name implies. But it is a fact, than which scarcely any is more notorious, that many members of our legislatures do not even profess to vote with the known wishes of their electors, when these are at variance with their own; and that many more, while professing so to act, most flagrantly violate their profession. I do not say that a man ought to be compelled or expected |