Despite all the sarcasm and mingled emotion with which Findley in 1786 put forward this radical suggestion, he was anticipating in this one statement all of the modern democratic political developments of the succeeding generation: the increased electioneering and competitive politics, the open promotion of private interests in legislation, the emergence of parties, the extension of the actual and direct representation of particular groups in government, and the eventual weakening, if not the repudiation, of the classical republican ideal that legislators were supposed to be disinterested
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