SECTION III
PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURE
CHAPTER I
FRANCHISE
My colleagues have recommended that the franchise in urban areas should remain as it is and that in rural areas the land revenue assessment should be halved. I am unable to agree to this. My colleagues have treated the question of franchise as though it was a question of favour rather than of right. I think that such a view is too dangerous to be accepted as the basis of political society in any country. For if the conception of a right to representation is to be dismissed as irrelevant; if a moral claim to representation is to be deemed as nothing but a metaphysical or sentimental obstruction ; if franchise is considered a privilege to be given or withheld by those in political power according to their own estimate of the use likely to be made of it, then it is manifest that the political emancipation of the unenfranchised will be entirely at the mercy of those that are enfranchised. To accept such a conclusion is to accept that slavery is no wrong. For slavery, too, involves the hypothesis that men have no right but what those in power choose to give them. A theory which leads to such a conclusion must be deemed to be fatal to any form of popular Government, and as such I reject it in toto.
My colleagues look upon the question of franchise as though it was nothing but a question of competency to put into a ballot box a piece of paper with a number of names written thereon. Otherwise they would not have insisted upon literacy as a criterion for the extension of the franchise. Such a view of the franchise is undoubtedly superficial and involves a total misunderstanding of what it stands for. If the majority had before its mind the true conception of what franchise means they would have realised that franchise, far from being a transaction concerned with the marking of the ballot paper, “stands for direct and active participation in the regulation of the terms upon which associated life shall be sustained and the permit of good carried on.” Once this conception of franchise is admitted, it would follow that franchise is due to every adult who is not a lunatic. For, associated life is shared by every individual and as every individual is affected by its consequences, every individual must