But it was against Tory and Whigs who defended “virtual representation” and advocated slow and piecemeal reform of the representative system that Mill’s main arguments were directed. He holds that the very idea of virtual representation is a recipe for misgovernment, corruption, and the triumph of the aristocratic or “sinister interests” of the few at the expense of the many. The public interest can be represented only in so far as the public, or a considerably enlarged portion thereof, has the vote. Mill is a radical individualist in that he insists that each person is the best, perhaps indeed the only, judge of what his own interests are. And if—as he also insists—the public interest is the sum of all individual non-sinister interests, it follows that the wider the franchise, the more truly representative the government. Mill deemed any defense of a greatly restricted franchise and virtual representation to be arguments against representative government itself. Pace Ricardo, Mill had not really managed to avoid giving Government “the appearance of an essay on Reform of Parliament” (Ricardo 1820, 211).