The situation of a candidate is apt to find out a man’s weaker places.  Burke stood the test.  He showed none of the petulant rage of those clamorous politicians whose flight, as he said, is winged in a lower region of the air.  As the traveller stands on the noble bridge that now spans the valley of the Avon, he may recall Burke’s local comparison of these busy, angry familiars of an election, to the gulls that skim the mud of the river when it is exhausted of its tide.  He gave his new friends a more important lesson, when the time came for him to thank them for the honour which they had just conferred upon him.  His colleague had opened the subject of the relations between a member of Parliament and his constituents; and had declared that, for his own part, he should regard the instructions of the people of Bristol as decisive and binding.  Burke in a weighty passage upheld a manlier doctrine.

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents.  Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention.  It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.  But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.  Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient to yours.  If that be all, the thing is innocent.  If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior.  But government and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that in which the determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of men deliberate and another decide, and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?... Authoritative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest convictions of his judgment and conscience—­these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution.[1]

[Footnote 1:  “Speech at the conclusion of the Poll.”]