of blackmail.

Let us suppose that each county in England had its legislature of two
chambers, as every State has in America, the members of these
legislatures being elected necessarily only from constituencies in which
they lived, so that a slum district of a town was obliged to elect a
slum-resident, a village a resident of that village; let us further
suppose that by the mixture of races in the population certain districts
could by mere preponderance of the votes be expected to elect only a
German, a Scandinavian, or an Irishman--in each case a man who had been
perhaps, but a few years before, an immigrant drawn from a low class in
the population of his own country; give that legislature almost
unbridled power over all business institutions within the borders of the
county, including the determination of rates of charge on that portion
of the lines of great railway companies which lay within the county
borders--is there not danger that that power would be frequently abused?
When one party, after a long term of trial in opposition, found itself
suddenly in control of both houses, would it always refrain from using
its power for the gratification of party purposes, for revenge, and for
the assistance of its own supporters? Local feeling sometimes becomes,
even in England, much inflamed against a given railway company, or some
large employer of labour, or great landlord, whether justly or not. It
may be that in the case of a railway, the rates of fare are considered
high, the train service bad, or the accommodations at the stations poor.
At such a time a local legislature would be likely to pass almost any
bill that was introduced to hurt that railway company, merely as a means
of bringing pressure to bear upon it to correct the supposed
shortcomings. It obviously then becomes only too easy for an
unscrupulous member to bring forward a bill which will have plausible
colour of public-spirited motive, and which if it became a law would
cost the railway company untold inconvenience and many tens of thousands
of pounds; and the railway company can have that bill withdrawn or
"sidetracked" for a mere couple of hundred.

Personally I am thankful to say that I have such confidence in the
sterling quality of the fibre of the English people (so long as it is
free, as it is in England, from Irish or other alien influence) as to
believe that, even under these circumstances, and with all these
possibilities of wrong-doing, the lo