Almost all that has been done for the good of the people has been done since the right lost the monopoly of power, since the rights of property were … - John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

According to the common opinion indirect elections are a safeguard of conservatism. But all the Assemblies of the French Revolution issued from indirect elections.

The worst criminals were not the men who did the deed. The crime of mobs and courtiers, infuriated by the lust of vengeance and of power, is not so strange a portent as the exultation of peaceful men, influenced by no present injury or momentary rage, but by the permanent and incurable perversion of moral sense wrought by a distorted piety.

[I]t will not do to act as if the moral question was not the supreme question in public life, and, in a sense, the vera causa of party conflict.