Tuesday, April 16, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

Ian Smith

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What we believed in was responsible majority rule as opposed to irresponsible majority rule, and I stand by that. I think it's important that before you give a person a [right to] vote you ensure that his roots go down [and] that he's part of the whole structure of the country. So I stand by what I've said, and I think we can substantiate the fact that the things we did were to the benefit of the black people of our country more so than anybody else. And I challenge anybody to disagree with that.

 
Ian Smith

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Liberalism is a doctrine about what the law ought to be, democracy a doctrine about the manner of determining the law. Liberalism regards it as desirable that only what the majority accepts should in fact be law, but it does not believe that this is therefore necessarily good law. Its aim, indeed, is to persuade the majority to observe certain principles. It accepts majority rule as a method of deciding, but not as an authority for what the decision ought to be. To the doctrinaire democrat the fact that the majority wants something is sufficient ground for regarding it as good; for him the will of the majority determines not only what is law but what is good law.

 
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