Theory, I know, would suppose that every general election is to the
representative a day of judgment, in which he appears before his
constituents to account for the use of the talent with which they
intrusted him, and for the improvement he has made of it for the public
advantage. It would be so, if every corruptible representative were to
find an enlightened and incorruptible constituent. But the practice and
knowledge of the world will not suffer us to be ignorant that the
Constitution on paper is one thing, and in fact and experience is
another. We must know that the candidate, instead of trusting at his
election to the testimony of his behavior in Parliament, must bring the
testimony of a large sum of money, the capacity of liberal expense in
entertainments, the power of serving and obliging the rulers of
corporations, of winning over the popular leaders of political clubs,
associations, and neighborhoods. It is ten thousand times more necessary
to show himself a man of power than a man of integrity, in almost all
the elections with which I have been acquainted. Elections, therefore,
become a matter of heavy expense; and if contests are frequent, to many
they will become a matter of an expense totally ruinous, which no
fortunes can bear, but least of all the landed fortunes, incumbered as
they often, indeed as they mostly are, with debts, with portions, with
jointures, and tied up in the hands of the possessor by the limitations
of settlement. It is a material, it is in my opinion a lasting
consideration, in all the questions concerning election. Let no one
think the charges of elections a trivial matter.

The charge, therefore, of elections ought never to be lost sight of in a
question concerning their frequency; because the grand object you seek
is independence. Independence of mind will ever be more or less
influenced by independence of fortune; and if every three years the
exhausting sluices of entertainments, drinkings, open houses, to say