Under Lord Courtney's system I should have had to vote on the same ticket, with the same amount of knowledge, but should have copied down different marks from my party card. On the assumption, that is to say, that every name on a long ballot paper represents an individual known to every voter there would be an enormous difference between Lord Courtney's proposed system and the existing system in the London Boroughs. But if the fact is that the names in each case are mere names, there is little effective difference between the working of the two systems until the votes are counted.
If the sole object of an election were to discover and record the exact proportion of the electorate who are prepared to vote for candidates nominated by the several party organisations Lord Courtney's scheme might be adopted as a whole. But English experience, and a longer experience in America, has shown that the personality of the candidate nominated is at least as important as his party allegiance, and that a parliament of well-selected members who represent somewhat roughly the opinion of the nation is better than a parliament of ill-selected members who, as far as their party labels are concerned, are, to quote Lord Courtney, 'a distillation, a quintessence, a microcosm, a reflection of the community.'[[79]]
To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, which permits of a wide choice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of that choice, are equally essential parts of his plan; and that plan will soon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise of the Labour Party and the late prevalence of 'three-cornered' contests, will soon have to deal with the question. It will then be interesting to see whether the growing substitution of the new quantitative and psychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking about elections will have advanced sufficiently far to enable the House of Commons to distinguish between the two points. If so, they will adopt the transferable vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-cornered elections, while retaining single-member constituencies, and therewith the possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to the whole of his constituents.
A further effect of the way in which we are beginning to think of the electoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing the system of English local government, has steadily diminished the number of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency. The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands of elections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc. In 1902 the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certain that the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Rural Parish Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have been a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if we omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soon vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On the average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year.
In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoral concentration as a means of increasing electoral responsibility. In Philadelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form which seemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake in psychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only of economising political force, and had ignored the limitations of political knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that the Philadelphia 'blanket-ballot' which I was shown, with its parallel columns of party 'tickets,' contained some four hundred names. The resulting effects on the personnel of Philadelphian politics were as obvious as they were lamentable. In other American cities, however, concentration often takes the form of the abolition of many of the elected boards and officials, and the substitution for them of a single elected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated commissions, and whose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election to all the voters, and therefore must he seriously considered by his nominators. One noticed again the growing tendency to substitute a quantitative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of the electoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up by the House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election (or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous to themselves. Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if allowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to the electoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by the House of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press. Lord Robert Cecil alone, whose mind is historical in the worst sense of that term, objected 'What a commentary was that on the "will of the people,"'[[80]] and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel should not defend democracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so that he could answer in the style of Canning. The present quarrel between the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the public control of the methods of producing political opinion by the substitution of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of national excitement.
But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not hope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the general intellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose. At my last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very poor district. I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of this book. The voters who came in were the results of the 'final rally' of the canvassers on both sides. They entered the room in rapid but irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and inefficient machine. About half of them were women, with broken straw hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair. All were dazed and bewildered, having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making of match-boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed. Most of them seemed to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote. A few were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own, clung to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous fact which just eluded his power of speech. I was very anxious to win, and inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing of the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enable us to improve it.
Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, to abolish the more sordid details of English electioneering. Public houses could be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunkenness and casual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness. It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they have in France. The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or twenty-four hours' rest, and their own thoughts would have some power of asserting themselves even in the presence of the canvasser, whose hustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who have just finished their day's work. The feeling of moral responsibility half consciously associated with the religious use of Sunday would also be so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determined anti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used. But such improvements in the external environment of election-day, however desirable they may be in themselves, can only be of small effect.
Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of the electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social equality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend on it; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream of unspoilt impulse.
If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeed come. Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge cities under conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among those who profit, and those who suffer by them. But no one who is near to political facts can believe that the immediate effect either of greater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clear away all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation.