A year of prophesying

by H. G. Wells

We British cannot be such fools as to have neglected these things. But I cannot find the exhibits. Nor is there any display of the scientific and intellectual irrigation of the Press, nor of the machinery of book-publication and distribution that sustains the mental unity of the Dominions....

But I find my mind slipping away from the Wembley that is, to the dream of the Wembley that might have been. I drift off into a vision of the exhibits of work and achievement from the eighteen or twenty great Universities we have surely set up in India; the studies and reports of the two thousand students we send annually to that great land; the display of intellectual interchanges between the four or five splendid Australian Universities and Japan and China, Burmah and Siam; the achievements of the great schools of Polynesian ethnology at Sidney and Adelaide and Brisbane; the splendid educational work of Canada in China, rivalling the American effort: the joint exhibit of the United States and Canada of the scientific exploration of the Arctic and the Pacific; the vast pavilion giving a comparative treatment of the efforts of South Africa, Jamaica, and the United States to deal with the civilisation and assimilation of “colour”; the Capetown to Cairo school of African history, ethnology and economic geography. Surely these things have been seen to! We are so rich.

“In thy house and my house is half the world’s hoard.”

But what are we doing with it? Are we just hoarding it? I thought the White Man’s Burthen was a magnificent task, not a bundle of loot that he stood upon to brag about. I must have taken the wrong turning when I went to Wembley. I must go there again. I must go right on and find the turning beyond the ones that lead to these magnificent displays of machinery and metal and wool and grease.

XXXIX
THE EXTINCTION OF PARTY GOVERNMENT

31.5.24

The politicians of Great Britain, under the pressure of various accidental and some fundamental necessities, are being forced towards an honest democracy and efficient government. But they resist with great activity and ingenuity.

A Bill for what is called Proportional Representation, but which is really sane voting, has recently been rejected by the House of Commons by a majority of 238 to 144. It had the official support of the Liberal Party. Previously the Liberal hacks were all against it, but they have been chastened by the last two elections. The Bill went very far towards honest representative government, but in one respect it went no distance at all towards a great revolution in political method. When the time comes for its re-introduction it will be necessary to extend it or supplement it by another reducing the numbers of the representative assembly.

The urgencies of the British situation have put Great Britain far in advance of the United States in this matter. There is a very respectable movement for Proportional Representation in the United States of America, but it has still to be realised as practical politics and a serious need by the American public. In America every citizen is born either a little Republican or else a little Democrat; it does not matter what the Republican or Democratic platform is or what sort of man is put up for him in his division, he has to vote for his party. Or else go through a crisis almost like disowning his father and mother and vote for the other party. There is nothing else in the world for him to do in politics, just as there was nothing else but being “either a little Liberal or else a little Conservative” in the great days of Gilbert and Sullivan in London. The United States is young, prosperous, and at a great advantage to the rest of the world; it may be able to afford its present travesty of democracy for a long time yet. Britain cannot. The party system has always been more rigidly organised in America than in England. In Britain on the Left side, counting Liberal, Labour, and Communist together, there are eight or ten distinct schools of political thought and intention; on the Right side there are five or six. The British voter grows more and more erratic and uncertain under the present idiotic system, and the results of General Elections more and more silly and incalculable.

The idea of Proportional Representation is now nearly a century old. It is due to a clear-headed man named Hare. He proposed that a number of candidates should stand for the whole country as one constituency. The voter would vote for the man he liked and trusted best. If that man were so widely liked and trusted that he got more votes than were needed to return him, he would take as large a fraction of every vote as he needed, and if the voter had indicated a second choice on his paper, the rest of his vote would go to the candidate next on his list. Whatever happened, some or all of the voter’s support would go to the man he had chosen. That man would be his man par excellence. There could be no more direct relationship between voter and representative. But if that man were a very great and desirable man, the voter could also congratulate himself on the partial possession of a second or even a third, more personal representative. There are people who profess to find great difficulty in understanding Proportional Representation; mostly this is a purely wilful and subjective befuddlement. The filling up of the voting papers is perfectly simple and the counting and fractionation of the votes offers no difficulty to any properly instructed educated person.