cyclops of judicial arrogance ultimately resolved in his‘amotion’(removal) in
- But the significance of the disaster lay in the absence of one response: it
appears to have constituted no impulse to democratize the choice of judges,
American style. Any such democratization of the choice of judges would, of
course, have been perfectly alien to centuries of British tradition. Just as the
secret ballot was.
The impression left by these events is that in the years of the ballot’s birth
Australia was much deeper steeped in government, and much less steeped in
democracy, than was the USA. Australia’s landscape in these years was studded
with handsome and sometimes entirely redundant courthouses,‘palatial’
government houses (the‘best of any British colony’(Trollope 1874, p. 246);
‘incredible’(Martineau 1869, p. 22)), along with‘stupendous’house of parlia-
ment, with carefully maintained Hansards (at least in Queensland), and a
ceaseless gush of parliamentary papers.^6 The machinery of government, if
new cast, was elaborate and robust for a new society of fewer than a million
inhabitants. And this is seen in the detailed crafting and effective dispatch of
the secret ballot legislation.
Fortuitously for Australia’s reputation for democracy, in the secret ballot
‘government’and‘democracy’were complementary. But perhaps‘Bentham-
ism’identifies the complementary agent better than‘government’. For while
the secret ballot had engaged the interest of no significant theorist of democ-
racy (Tocqueville ignores it; and Mill notoriously opposed it), Bentham was a
strenuous advocate of it. Indeed, consonant with his‘method of details’—the
method of technical trivia—Bentham wrote in remarkable detail on how a
secret ballot would be actually implemented (Bentham 1819, section V,
article V). It might be said that in the secret ballot Bentham’s faith in oper-
ational detail bore fruit. The man who crafted the technology of the secret
ballot, Henry Chapman, was a vehement Philosophic Radical, who, in the
decade prior to his emigration to Australasia, had been a contributor to the
Westminster Review, and was the active ally of John Roebuck, the House of
Commons’most heated Utilitarian, and the‘intimate friend’of John Stuart
Mill. Indeed, Chapman apparently wrote to Mill to report the good news of
the secret ballot provision of Victoria’s Electoral Act, only to have Mill inform
him he no longer supported such a ballot (Neale 1967).
But in Chapman’s advocacy of the‘secret ballot’there was an irony that was
fully shared by Bentham. Both Chapman and Bentham unhesitatingly took
the already extant ballot of the USA to amount to a secret ballot.‘In the State
of New York’, wrote Bentham,‘the members of the House of Representatives
are, all of them, elected by secret suffrage. It was, declaredly, as a measure of
(^6) In the three years 1843 to 1845, the tryo Legislative Council of News South Wales produced
1,730 pages of committee reports and other matter.
William O. Coleman