[Footnote 17: The Times, 16 June 1909.]
[Footnote 18: Preface to Parliamentary Procedure of the House of
Commons, by Josef Redlich, p. xvii.]
[Footnote 19: Minutes of Evidence of the Royal Commission on Electoral
Systems (Cd. 5152), Q. 1492.]
[Footnote 20: Glasgow, 22 October 1910.]
CHAPTER XI
OBJECTIONS TO PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION
"The party agents and political men opposed to the very last the introduction of a system of proportional representation."—COUNT GOBLET D'ALVIELLA
The question of practicality.
Although the fear lest proportional representation should weaken the party system is now the most serious obstacle in the way of its acceptance by the practical politician, yet there are others who warmly approve of the principle, who regard proportional representation as the ideal, but still entertain some doubts as to its practicability, and therefore shrink from a whole-hearted advocacy of the reform. Nor are these doubts entirely removed by the conclusion arrived at by the Royal Commission on Electoral Systems—that the three systems of proportional representation examined by the Commission are quite feasible. The sceptics need to be convinced that the intelligence of the ordinary English elector and the capacity of the English returning officer are equal to the requirements of the new system; its practicability has in fact to be demonstrated afresh. It is granted that the more complete adaptation of the machinery of elections to the true representation of the electors must involve some departure from the simplicity of present methods, and in order to gauge the value of the objection that the change proposed is so great as to render its introduction impracticable, it will be well to consider once more the character of the tasks which the new system will throw upon the elector and the returning officer.
The elector's task. In criticizing the mechanism of the single transferable vote a Member of Parliament, at a public meeting in his constituency, declared that the act of voting ought to be made so simple as to be intelligible to a child of the second standard in a public elementary school. The reply might very well be made that such children are capable of indicating a choice amongst those things in which they are interested. But this assertion raises the question whether the method of voting for the purpose of selecting the members of an assembly, to which the affairs of an empire, a nation or a city, are to be entrusted, can only be regarded as practicable if it is adapted to the capacity of the least intelligent of the electors. Must a nation continue to suffer all the evils which arise from an imperfect electoral system because some of its citizens may be so unintelligent as to be unable to make use of an improved method? A secretary of the Liberal Unionist Association has declared that in some constituencies hundreds of electors are so ignorant as not to know the name of the Prime Minister, and has even advanced this fact in order to show that it is unnecessary to trouble about the true representation of the electors. Even were this statement not exaggerated it would but furnish an additional argument in favour of proportional representation. The votes of such ignorant electors, not being given for political reasons, are far too easily bought by that indirect corruption which takes the form of subscriptions, charitable donations, gifts of coals and of blankets; and yet, with the present system, these votes may decide the result of an election and completely nullify the votes of intelligent citizens.