[Footnote 19: Peers and Bureaucrats, by Ramsay Muir, Professor of
Modern History at Liverpool University.]
[Footnote 20: 21 May 1910.]
[Footnote 21: "Pacificus," The Times, 31 October 1910.]
[Footnote 22: Address to the Eighty Club, 25 July 1910.]
APPENDIX I
THE JAPANESE ELECTORAL SYSTEM—THE SINGLE NON-TRANSFERABLE VOTE
The following memorandum has been written by Mr. Kametaro Hayasbida, the Chief Secretary of the Japanese House of Representatives, in reply to a series of questions, the particulars of which are set out in the memorandum.
Failure of single member system.
The Original Election Law of our country was promulgated in 1889, the same year in which took place the promulgation of the Constitution. Under this law the system of small electoral districts was single-adopted, and each Fu or Ken (administrative district) was divided into several electoral districts each of which constituted a single-member constituency (with the exception of some large districts which, impossible of further division, had two seats allotted with the system of scrutin de liste). The system was, however, found in practice to be very unsatisfactory, as it often happened that a minority of the voters, instead of the majority, in certain Fu or Ken obtained the majority of the members returned, and, on the other hand, a party with a majority at the polls could not sometimes, as the result of the grouping of the voters in the small electoral districts, secure any representation at all. Under such circumstances it was utterly impossible for each political party to obtain representation in reasonable proportion to the strength of its voters; or, in other words, the electors of the country at large had never succeeded in being properly represented in their legislative body. As the inadequacy of the system was thus apparently shown I formulated in 1891, by somewhat what modifying Marshal's cumulative voting system, a system of large electoral districts combined with that of the single vote, and urged for a revision of the Election Law.
Multi-member constituencies. Single vote adopted 1900.