thought may cross him that he shall save a few pounds or shillings in his year’s expenditure if the side he votes for wins.’  He votes as a matter of fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong.  ’His motive, when it is an honourable one, is the desire to do right.  We will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter’s frame of mind a solemnity that does not belong to it.’  But ideas of right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge that we act under the eyes of our neighbours.  ’Since then the real motive which induces a man to vote honestly is for the most part not an interested motive in any form, but a social one, the point to be decided is whether the social feelings connected with an act and the sense of social duty in performing it, can be expected to be as powerful when the act is done in secret, and he can neither be admired for disinterested, nor blamed for mean and selfish conduct.  But this question is answered as soon as stated.  When in every other act of a man’s life which concerns his duty to others, publicity and criticism ordinarily improve his conduct, it cannot be that voting for a member of parliament is the single case in which he will act better for being sheltered against all comment.’[75]

[75] Letter to the Reader, Ap. 29, 1865, signed J.S.M., quoted as Mill’s by Henry Romilly in pamphlet, Public Responsibility and Vote by Ballot, pp. 89, 90.

Almost the whole civilised world has now adopted the secret Ballot; so that it would seem that Mill was wrong, and that he was wrong in spite of the fact that, as against the consistent utilitarians, his description of average human motive was right.  But Mill, though he soon ceased to be in the original sense of the word a utilitarian, always remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of political impulses.  It is true that men do not act politically upon a mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and disadvantages.  They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results of political action.  If an election were like a jury trial, such inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which publicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those ’acts of a man’s life which concern his duty to others,’ to which Mill refers—­the paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment of one’s relatives.  But under existing electoral conditions, trains of thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense.  Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, the excitement of one’s