As usual history provides part of the answer. In countries where the practice of electing representatives already existed, democratic reformers saw a dazzling opportunity. They saw no need to discard the representative system, despite its dubious origins and the narrow, exclusionary suffrage on which it rested. They believed that by broadening the electoral base the legislature or parliament could be converted into a more truly representative body that would serve democratic purposes. Some of them saw in representation a profound and dazzling alteration in the prospects for democracy. An eighteenth-century French thinker, Destutt de Tracy, whose criticisms of his predecessor, Montesquieu, greatly influenced Thomas Jefferson, observed triumphantly: “Representation, or representative government, may be considered as a new invention, unknown in Montesquieu’s time…Representative democracy…is democracy rendered practicable for a long time and over great extent of territory”