Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign in favour of 'proportional representation,' in which, as it seems to me, the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing system of the 'single ballot' a minority in any single-member constituency may, if there are more candidates than two, return its representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them—the Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals—have, as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large constituencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchester with its eight seats being given as an example.
This system, according to Lord Courtney, 'will lead to the dropping of the fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men and women on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent.'[[76]] But the arguments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion is ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If at the assizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury, and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the accidental composition of the separate juries; but the process of forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective.
The English experiment on which the Proportional Representation Society mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society and through eight newspapers. 'The constituency,' we are told, 'was supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were politicians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinary newspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of some of the main divisions of public opinion.'[[77]] The names were, in fact, Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner-man, Sir Thomas P. Whittaker, and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Richard Bell, Austen Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law, and Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected.
I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him to my next neighbour. We were all politicians, and nearly all the names were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their readers to recognise.
At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might have said, the same, 'to us,' as they were 'in themselves.' But an ordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is 'to him' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will either do nothing or do as he is told.
The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in his programme will be known to 'the ordinary newspaper reader,' who is assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between them a small number of established papers advocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote.' The choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local electioneering in each constituency, i.e. by meetings and canvassing and the distribution of 'election literature.' Lord Courtney's proposal, even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six, would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a day.
These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced the House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Board elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should be assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all his votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of them.
This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each district into a recognisable entity like the American 'ticket' and urge all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative 'eight' or 'five' or 'three.' If they did this they were saved the trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the French scrutin de liste. The second method was adopted in London, and perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates. Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers or school-keepers.
If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it is the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party association, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked official paper. The essential fact, that is to say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney's scheme is not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons.
Lord Courtney, in speaking on the second reading of his Municipal Representation Bill in the House of Lords,[[78]] contrasted his proposed system with that used in the London Borough Council elections, according to which a number of seats are assigned to each ward and the voter may give one vote each, without indication of preference, to that number of candidates. It is true that the electoral machinery for the London Boroughs is the worst to be found anywhere in the world outside of America. I have before me my party ballot-card instructing me how to vote at the last Council election in my present borough. There were six seats to be filled in my ward and fifteen candidates. I voted as I was told by my party organisation giving one vote each to six names, not one of which I remembered to have seen before. If there had been one seat to be filled, and, say, three candidates, I should have found out enough about one candidate at least to give a more or less independent vote; and the local party committees would have known that I and others would do so. Bach party would then have circulated a portrait and a printed account of their candidate and of his principles, and would have had a strong motive for choosing a thoroughly reputable person. But I could not give the time necessary for forming a real opinion on fifteen candidates, who volunteered no information about themselves. I therefore, and probably twenty-nine out of every thirty of those who voted in the borough, voted a 'straight ticket.' If for any reason the party committee put, to use an Americanism, a 'yellow dog' among the list of names, I voted for the yellow dog.