been ignorantly represented as complex. It is really almost ideally
simple. You mark the list of candidates with numbers in the order of
your preference. For example, you believe A to be absolutely the best
man for parliament; you mark him 1. But B you think is the next best
man; you mark him 2. That means that if A gets an enormous amount of
support, ever so many more votes than he requires for his return, your
vote will not be wasted. Only so much of your vote as is needed will go
to A; the rest will go to B. Or, on the other hand, if A has so little
support that his chances are hopeless, you will not have thrown your
vote away upon him; it will go to B. Similarly you may indicate a third,
a fourth, and a fifth choice; if you like you may mark every name on
your paper with a number to indicate the order of your preferences. And
that is all the voter has to do. The reckoning and counting of the votes
presents not the slightest difficulty to any one used to the business
of computation. Silly and dishonest men, appealing to still sillier
audiences, have got themselves and their audiences into humorous muddles
over this business, but the principles are perfectly plain and simple.
Let me state them here; they can be fully and exactly stated, with
various ornaments, comments, arguments, sarcastic remarks, and
digressions, in seventy lines of this type.
It will be evident that, in any election under this system, any one who
has got a certain proportion of No. 1 votes will be elected. If, for
instance, five people have to be elected and 20,000 voters vote, then
any one who has got 4001 first votes or more _must_ be elected. 4001
votes is in that case enough to elect a candidate. This sufficient
number of votes is called the _quota_, and any one who has more than
that number of votes has obviously got more votes than is needful for
election. So, to begin with, the voting papers are classified according
to their first votes, and any candidates who have got more than a quota
of first votes are forthwith declared elected. But most of these elected
men would under the old system waste votes because they would have too
many; for manifestly a candidate who gets more than the quota of votes
_needs only a fraction of each of these votes to return him_. If, for
instance, he gets double the quota he needs only half each vote. He
takes that fraction, therefore, under this new and better system, and
the rest of each vote is entered on to No. 2 upon that voting paper. And
so on. Now this is an extremely easy job for an accountant or skilled
computer, and it is quite easily checked by any other accountant and
skilled computer. A reader with a bad arithmetical education, ignorant
of the very existence of such a thing as a slide rule, knowing nothing
of account keeping, who thinks of himself working out the resultant
fractions with a stumpy pencil on a bit of greasy paper in a bad light,
may easily think of this transfer of fractions as a dangerous and
terrifying process. It is, for a properly trained man, the easiest,
exactest job conceivable. The Cash Register people will invent machines
to do it for you while you wait. What happens, then, is that every
candidate with more than a quota, beginning with the top candidate,
sheds a traction of each vote he has received, down the list, and the
next one sheds his surplus fraction in the same way, and so on until
candidates lower in the list, who are at first below the quota, fill up
to it. When all the surplus votes of the candidates at the head of the
list have been disposed of, then the hopeless candidates at the bottom
of the list are dealt with. The second votes on their voting papers are
treated as whole votes and distributed up the list, and so on. It will
be plain to the quick-minded that, towards the end, there will be a
certain chasing about of little fractions of votes, and a slight
modification of the quota due to voting papers having no second or third
preferences marked upon them, a chasing about that it will be difficult
for an untrained intelligence to follow. _But untrained intelligences
are not required to follow it_. For the skilled computer these things
offer no difficulty at all. And they are not difficulties of principle
but of manipulation. One might as well refuse to travel in a taxicab
until the driver had explained the magneto as refuse to accept the
principle of Proportional Representation by the single transferable vote
until one had remedied all the deficiencies of one's arithmetical
education. The fundamental principle of the thing, that a candidate who
gets more votes than he wants is made to hand on a fraction of each vote
to the voter's second choice, and that a candidate whose chances are
hopeless is made to hand on the whole vote to the voter's second choice,
so that practically only a small number of votes are ineffective, is
within the compass of the mind of a boy of ten.
But simple as this method is, it completely kills the organization and
manipulation of voting. It completely solves the Goldbug-Wurstberg-
Sanity problem. It is knave-proof--short of forging, stealing, or
destroying voting papers. A man of repute, a leaderly man, may defy all
the party organizations in existence and stand beside and be returned
over the head of a worthless man, though the latter be smothered with
party labels. That is the gist of this business. The difference in
effect between Proportional Representation and the old method of voting
must ultimately be to change the moral and intellectual quality of
elected persons profoundly. People are only beginning to realize the
huge possibilities of advance inherent in this change of political
method. It means no less than a revolution from "delegate democracy"
to "selective democracy."
Now, I will not pretend to be anything but a strong partizan in this
matter. When I speak of "democracy" I mean "selective democracy." I
believe that "delegate democracy" is already provably a failure in the
world, and that the reason why to-day, after three and a half years of
struggle, we are still fighting German autocracy and fighting with no
certainty of absolute victory, is because the affairs of the three great
Atlantic democracies have been largely in the hands not of selected men
but of delegated men, men of intrigue and the party machine, of dodges
rather than initiatives, second-rate men. When Lord Haldane, defending
his party for certain insufficiencies in their preparation for the
eventuality of the great war, pleaded that they had no "mandate" from
the country to do anything of the sort, he did more than commit
political suicide, he bore conclusive witness against the whole system
which had made him what he was. Neither Britain nor France in this
struggle has produced better statesmen nor better generals than the
German autocracy. The British and French Foreign Offices are old
monarchist organizations still. To this day the British and French
politicians haggle and argue with the German ministers upon petty points
and debating society advantages, smart and cunning, while the peoples
perish. The one man who has risen to the greatness of this great
occasion, the man who is, in default of any rival, rapidly becoming the
leader of the world towards peace, is neither a delegate politician nor
the choice of a monarch and his councillors. He is the one authoritative
figure in these transactions whose mind has not been subdued either by
long discipline in the party machine or by court intrigue, who has
continued his education beyond those early twenties when the mind of the
"budding politician" ceases to expand, who has thought, and thought
things out, who is an educated man among dexterous under-educated
specialists. By something very like a belated accident in the framing
of the American constitution, the President of the United States is more
in the nature of a selected man than any other conspicuous figure at the
present time. He is specially elected by a special electoral college
after an elaborate preliminary selection of candidates by the two great
party machines. And be it remembered that Mr. Wilson is not the first
great President the United States have had, he is one of a series of
figures who tower over their European contemporaries. The United States
have had many advantageous circumstances to thank for their present
ascendancy in the world's affairs: isolation from militarist pressure
for a century and a quarter, a vast virgin continent, plenty of land,
freedom from centralization, freedom from titles and social vulgarities,
common schools, a real democratic spirit in its people, and a great
enthusiasm for universities; but no single advantage has been so great
as this happy accident which has given it a specially selected man as
its voice and figurehead in the world's affairs. In the average
congressman, in the average senator, as Ostrogorski's great book so
industriously demonstrated, the United States have no great occasion for
pride. Neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives seem to rise
above the level of the British Houses of Parliament, with a Government
unable to control the rebel forces of Ulster, unable to promote or
dismiss generals without an outcry, weakly amenable to the press, and
terrifyingly incapable of great designs. It is to the United States of
America we must look now if the world is to be made "safe for
democracy." It is to the method of selection, as distinguished from
delegation, that we must look if democracy is to be saved from itself.
X
THE RECENT STRUGGLE FOR PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION IN GREAT BRITAIN
British political life resists cleansing with all the vigour of a dirty
little boy. It is nothing to your politician that the economic and
social organization of all the world, is strained almost to the pitch of
collapse, and that it is vitally important to mankind that everywhere
the whole will and intelligence of the race should be enlisted in the
great tasks of making a permanent peace and reconstructing the shattered
framework of society. These are remote, unreal considerations to the
politician. What is the world to him? He has scarcely heard of it. He
has been far too busy as a politician. He has been thinking of smart
little tricks in the lobby and brilliant exploits at question time. He
has been thinking of jobs and appointments, of whether Mr. Asquith is
likely to "come back" and how far it is safe to bank upon L. G. His one
supreme purpose is to keep affairs in the hands of his own specialized
set, to keep the old obscure party game going, to rig his little tricks
behind a vast, silly camouflage of sham issues, to keep out able men and
disinterested men, the public mind, and the general intelligence, from
any effective interference with his disastrous manipulations of the
common weal.
I do not see how any intelligent and informed man can have followed the
recent debates in the House of Commons upon Proportional Representation
without some gusts of angry contempt. They were the most pitiful and
alarming demonstration of the intellectual and moral quality of British
public life at the present time.
From the wire-pullers of the Fabian Society and from the party
organizers of both Liberal and Tory party alike, and from the knowing
cards, the pothouse shepherds, and jobbing lawyers who "work" the
constituencies, comes the chief opposition to this straightening out of
our electoral system so urgently necessary and so long overdue. They
have fought it with a zeal and efficiency that is rarely displayed in
the nation's interest. From nearly every outstanding man outside that
little inner world of political shams and dodges, who has given any
attention to the question, comes, on the other hand, support for this
reform. Even the great party leaders, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith, were
in its favour. One might safely judge this question by considering who
are the advocates on either side. But the best arguments for
Proportional Representation arise out of its opponents' speeches, and to
these I will confine my attention now. Consider Lord Harcourt--heir to
the most sacred traditions of the party game--hurling scorn at a project
that would introduce "faddists, mugwumps," and so on and so on--in fact
independent thinking men--into the legislature. Consider the value of
Lord Curzon's statement that London "rose in revolt" against the
project. Do you remember that day, dear reader, when the streets of
London boiled with passionate men shouting, "No Proportional
Representation! Down with Proportional Representation"? You don't. Nor
do I. But what happened was that the guinea-pigs and solicitors and
nobodies, the party hacks who form the bulk of London's
misrepresentation in the House of Commons, stampeded in terror against a
proposal that threatened to wipe them out and replace them by known and
responsible men. London, alas! does not seem to care how its members are
elected. What Londoner knows anything about his member? Hundreds of
thousands of Londoners do not even know which of the ridiculous
constituencies into which the politicians have dismembered our London
they are in. Only as I was writing this in my flat in St. James's Court,
Westminster, did it occur to me to inquire who was representing me in
the councils of the nation while I write....
After some slight difficulty I ascertained that my representative is a
Mr. Burdett Coutts, who was, in the romantic eighties, Mr.
Ashmead-Bartlett. And by a convenient accident I find that the other day
he moved to reject the Proportional Representation Amendment made by the
House of Lords to the Representation of the People Bill, so that I am
able to look up the debate in Hansard and study my opinions as he
represented them and this question at one and the same time. And, taking
little things first, I am proud and happy to discover that the member
for me was the only participator in the debate who, in the vulgar and
reprehensible phrase, "threw a dead cat," or, in polite terms, displayed
classical learning. My member said, "_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_,"
with a rather graceful compliment to the Labour Conference at
Nottingham. "I could not help thinking to myself," said my member, "that
at that conference there must have been many men of sufficient classical
reading to say to themselves, '_Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_.'" In
which surmise he was quite right. Except perhaps for "_Tempus fugit,"_
"_verbum sap._," "_Arma virumque_," and "_Quis custodiet_," there is no
better known relic of antiquity. But my member went a little beyond my
ideas when he said: "We are asked to enter upon a method of legislation
which can bear no other description than that of law-making in the
dark," because I think it can bear quite a lot of other descriptions.
This was, however, the artistic prelude to a large, vague, gloomy
dissertation about nothing very definite, a muddling up of the main
question with the minor issue of a schedule of constituencies involved
in the proposal.
The other parts of my member's speech do not, I confess, fill me with
the easy confidence I would like to feel in my proxy. Let me extract a
few gems of eloquence from the speech of this voice which speaks for me,
and give also the only argument he advanced that needs consideration.
"History repeats itself," he said, "very often in curious ways as to
facts, but generally with very different results." That, honestly, I
like. It is a sentence one can read over several times. But he went on
to talk of the entirely different scheme for minority representation,
which was introduced into the Reform Bill of 1867, and there I am
obliged to part company with him. That was a silly scheme for giving two
votes to each voter in a three-member constituency. It has about as much
resemblance to the method of scientific voting under discussion as a
bath-chair has to an aeroplane. "But that measure of minority
representation led to a baneful invention," my representative went on
to say, "and left behind it a hateful memory in the Birmingham caucus. I
well remember that when I stood for Parliament thirty-two years ago _we
had no better platform weapon than repeating over and over again in a
sentence the name of Mr. Schnadhorst,_ and I am not sure that it would
not serve the same purpose now. Under that system the work of the caucus
was, of course, far simpler than it will be if this system ever comes
into operation. All the caucus had to do under that measure was to
divide the electors into three groups and with three candidates, A., B.,
and C., to order one group to vote for A. and B., another for B. and C.,
and the third for A. and C., and they carried the whole of their
candidates and kept them for many years. But the multiplicity of ordinal
preferences, second, third, fourth, fifth, up to tenth, which the single
transferable vote system would involve, will require a more scientific
handling in party interests, and neither party will be able to face an
election with any hope of success without the assistance of the most
drastic form of caucus and _without its orders being carried out by the
electors_."
Now, I swear by Heaven that, lowly creature as I am, a lost vote, a
nothing, voiceless and helpless in public affairs, I am not going to
stand the imputation that that sort of reasoning represents the average
mental quality of Westminster--outside Parliament, that is. Most of my
neighbours in St. James's Court, for example, have quite large pieces of
head above their eyebrows. Read these above sentences over and ponder
their significance--so far as they have any significance. Never mind my
keen personal humiliation at this display of the mental calibre of my
representative, but consider what the mental calibre of a House must be
that did not break out into loud guffaws at such a passage. The line of
argument is about as lucid as if one reasoned that because one can break
a window with a stone it is no use buying a telescope. And it remains
entirely a matter for speculation whether my member is arguing that a
caucus _can_ rig an election carried on under the Proportional
Representation system or that it cannot. At the first blush it seems to
read as if he intended the former. But be careful! Did he? Let me
suggest that in that last sentence he really expresses the opinion that
it cannot. It can be read either way. Electors under modern conditions
are not going to obey the "orders" of even the "most drastic
caucus"--whatever a "drastic caucus" may be. Why should they? In the
Birmingham instance it was only a section of the majority, voting by
wards, in an election on purely party lines, which "obeyed" in order to
keep out the minority party candidate. I think myself that my member's
mind waggled. Perhaps his real thoughts shone out through an argument
not intended to betray them. What he did say as much as he said anything
was that under Proportional Representation, elections are going to be
very troublesome and difficult for party candidates. If that was his
intention, then, after all, I forgive him much. I think that and more
than that. I think that they are going to make party candidates who are
merely party candidates impossible. That is exactly what we reformers
are after. Then I shall get a representative more to my taste than Mr.
Burdett Coutts.
But let me turn now to the views of other people's representatives.
Perhaps the most damning thing ever said against the present system,
damning because of its empty absurdity, was uttered by Sir Thomas
Whittaker. He was making the usual exaggerations of the supposed
difficulties of the method. He said English people didn't like such
"complications." They like a "straight fight between two men." Think of
it! A straight fight! For more than a quarter-century I have been a
voter, usually with votes in two or three constituencies, and never in
all that long political life have I seen a single straight fight in an
election, but only the dismallest sham fights it is possible to
conceive. Thrice only in all that time have I cast a vote for a man whom
I respected. On all other occasions the election that mocked my
citizenship was either an arranged walk-over for one party or the other,
or I had a choice between two unknown persons, mysteriously selected as
candidates by obscure busy people with local interests in the
constituency. Every intelligent person knows that this is the usual
experience of a free and independent voter in England. The "fight" of an
ordinary Parliamentary election in England is about as "straight" as the
business of a thimble rigger.
And consider just what these "complications" are of which the opponents
of Proportional Representation chant so loudly. In the sham election of
to-day, which the politicians claim gives them a mandate to muddle up
our affairs, the voter puts a x against the name of the least detestable
of the two candidates that are thrust upon him. Under the Proportional
Representation method there will be a larger constituency, a larger list
of candidates, and a larger number of people to be elected, and he will
put I against the name of the man he most wants to be elected, 2 against
his second choice, and if he likes he may indulge in marking a third, or
even a further choice. He may, if he thinks fit, number off the whole
list of candidates. That is all he will have to do. That is the
stupendous intricacy of the method that flattens out the minds of Lord
Harcourt and Sir Thomas Whittaker. And as for the working of it, if you
must go into that, all that happens is that if your first choice gets
more votes than he needs for his return, he takes only the fraction of
your vote that he requires, and the rest of the vote goes on to your
Number 2. If 2 isn't in need of all of it, the rest goes on to 3. And so
on. That is the profound mathematical mystery, that is the riddle beyond
the wit of Westminster, which overpowers these fine intelligences and
sets them babbling of "senior wranglers." Each time there is a debate on
this question in the House, member after member hostile to the proposal
will play the ignorant fool and pretend to be confused himself, and will
try to confuse others, by deliberately clumsy statements of these most
elementary ideas. Surely if there were no other argument for a change of
type in the House, these poor knitted brows, these public perspirations
of the gentry who "cannot understand P.R.," should suffice.
But let us be just; it is not all pretence; the inability of Mr. Austen
Chamberlain to grasp the simple facts before him was undoubtedly
genuine. He followed Mr. Burdett Coutts, in support of Mr. Burdett
Coutts, with the most Christian disregard of the nasty things Mr.
Burdett Coutts had seemed to be saying about the Birmingham caucus from
which he sprang. He had a childish story to tell of how voters would not
give their first votes to their real preferences, because they would
assume he "would get in in any case"--God knows why. Of course on the
assumption that the voter behaves like an idiot, anything is possible.
And never apparently having heard of fractions, this great Birmingham
leader was unable to understand that a voter who puts 1 against a
candidate's name votes for that candidate anyhow. He could not imagine
any feeling on the part of the voter that No. 1 was his man. A vote is a
vote to this simple rather than lucid mind, a thing one and indivisible.
Read this--
"Birmingham," he said, referring to a Schedule under consideration, "is
to be cut into three constituencies of four members each. I am to have a
constituency of 100,000 electors, I suppose. How many thousand
inhabitants I do not know. _Every effort will be made to prevent any of
those electors knowing--in fact, it would be impossible for any of them
to know--whether they voted for me or not, or at any rate whether they
effectively voted for me or not, or whether the vote which they wished
to give to me was really diverted to somebody else_."
Only in a house of habitually inattentive men could any one talk such
nonsense without reproof, but I look in vain through Hansard's record
of this debate for a single contemptuous reference to Mr. Chamberlain's
obtuseness. And the rest of his speech was a lamentable account of the
time and trouble he would have to spend upon his constituents if the new
method came in. He was the perfect figure of the parochially important
person in a state of defensive excitement. No doubt his speech appealed
to many in the House.