It seems strange now that this scheme should have received serious consideration. Mr. Hare was so much under the spell of the apparent justice of the underlying principle that he was blind to its results. But it was soon perceived that the electors would not group themselves as Mr. Hare supposed; that the personal ideal of every class of electors would be simply men of their own class. It was further pointed out that cranks and faddists and every organization founded on questions of the remotest interest would combine to secure representation. Mr. Disraeli declared it to be "opposed to every sound principle, its direct effect being to create a stagnant representation ... an admirable scheme for bringing crotchety men into the House." Mr. Shaw-Lefevre condemned it as "a vicious principle based upon a theory of classes," and Mr. Gladstone said that it regarded electors "not as rational and thinking beings, but merely as the equivalents of one another." Walter Bagehot, in his standard work on the "English Constitution," opposes the principle of voluntary constituencies, because it would promote a constituency-making trade. "But upon the plan suggested," he writes, "the House would be made up of party politicians selected by a party committee, chained to that committee, and pledged to party violence, and of characteristic, and therefore unmoderate, representatives for every 'ism' in all England. Instead of a deliberate assembly of moderate and judicious men, we should have a various compound of all sorts of violence. I may seem to be drawing a caricature, but I have not reached the worst. Bad as these members would be if they were left to themselves—if in a free Parliament they were confronted with the perils of government, close responsibility might improve them, and make them tolerable. But they would not be left to themselves. A voluntary constituency will nearly always be a despotic constituency."
The practical difficulties in the application of Mr. Hare's scheme are almost insuperable, but it is not worth while pursuing the subject, since it is now admitted by recent advocates that the faddist argument is fatal. This is an admission that Mr. Hare completely neglected the factor of human nature. Professor Nanson writes:—"Hare proposed that there should be only one electorate, consisting of the whole State. It is unfortunate that this proposal was made. There can be no doubt that it has retarded the progress of true electoral reform for at least a generation ... it would inevitably lead to the election of a certain number of faddists."
John Stuart Mill.—The great vogue which the Hare system has obtained is to be traced more to the influence of John Stuart Mill than to that of anyone else. Mill was captivated by the apparent justice of the proposal, and devoted a chapter of his "Representative Government" to it, wherein he declared:—"Mr. Hare's scheme has the almost unparalleled merit of carrying out a great principle of government in a manner approaching to ideal perfection, while it attains incidentally several other things of scarcely inferior importance." Believing in the absolute justice of the principle, Mill and Hare were certainly consistent in setting no limit to its application except the size of the assembly. Mill is emphatic on this point. "Real equality of representation," he asserted, "is not obtained unless any set of electors, amounting to average number of a constituency, wherever they happen to reside, have the power of combining with one another to return a representative." Now, the recent disciples of Mr. Hare are never tired of claiming the support of Mill, although they have thrown this definition to the winds. But they are guilty of far more than that, for in another chapter of Mill's book we find that his conception of a representative assembly elected by the Hare system is a purely deliberative body. He expressly declares it to be radically unfit for legislation, which he proposes to hand over to a commission appointed by the Crown. The value of his testimony is very much discounted by this fact.
Sir John Lubbock.[1]—We have asserted that the proportional principle should be applied to two parties only—the majority and the minority, and that every section can then be represented. Mill and Hare thought that no limit should be set except the size of the assembly. All the recent advocates of the system take up an intermediate position. Appreciating the serious objections against allowing independent representation to a large number of small sections, Sir John Lubbock, president of the English Proportional Representation Society, proposes to constitute electorates returning only three to five members each, thus confining representation to only three to five sections in each electorate, and sacrificing to a great extent accurate proportional representation. In his book on "Representation," he writes:—"I have assumed that Parliament should be 'a mirror of the nation;' if the object were to secure unity of action rather than freedom of discussion, to form an executive body such as a Government, a Board of Directors, or a Vestry, the case would be quite different. It is, however, I presume, our wish that Parliament should be a deliberative assembly in which all parties should be fairly represented." But to make Parliament a deliberative body is to destroy its power to secure unity of action at all, and to render it useless as a working machine.
Miss Spence.—An active campaign has for some time been carried on for the adoption of the Hare system in Australia. Miss C.H. Spence, of South Australia, was the pioneer reformer, and has laboured in the cause by pen and voice for no less than forty years. Great credit is undoubtedly due to Miss Spence for the clear and simple manner in which she has expounded the system, and for the good work she has done in exposing the defects of the present methods. Not only has she lectured in all parts of Australia, but she has made visits to England, where she met Mr. Hare and Sir John Lubbock, and also to America. But we may admire Miss Spence's courage and devotion to principle without agreeing with her conclusions.
At a meeting held at River House, Chelsea, London, in 1894, Miss Spence submitted an analysis of 8,824 votes recorded at 50 public meetings in South Australia. The audiences were in each case asked to select six representatives out of twelve candidates. The result of a scrutiny of all the votes combined was that the following six "parties" secured one "representative" each—viz., Capital, Labour, Single Tax, Irish Catholic, Prohibition, and Women's Suffrage. Miss Spence frankly confesses that these "parties" are minorities, but holds that a majority can be formed by the union of minorities, and that party responsible government can still be carried on. Now, can any sensible man or woman imagine a working ministry formed by a union of any four of these "parties?" Capital would certainly be permanently opposed to Labour and to Single Tax, and as for the others, there is not a single principle in common. How, then, could a union be formed? The only possible way is by log-rolling; they must make a bargain to support one another's demands. Such a union could not possibly be stable, because the minority is free to offer a better bargain to any one of the "parties" to induce it to desert. Again, it may be called the rule of the majority, but what sort of a majority? Is it not plainly the rule of a majority in the interests of minorities? That is very different to the rule of the majority in the interests of all, which free government demands. The simple truth is that the "parties" are factions, and that the "representatives" are mere delegates of those factions.
But in practice the case would be far worse than we have assumed. There is not the slightest guarantee that the same six factions would be elected in each six-seat electorate. We might have an unlimited number of delegates of various religions, classes, races, localities, and political organizations on all kinds of single questions. An assembly formed on these lines could hardly be dignified with the name of a representative assembly.
Mr. G. Bradford, in his work on "The Lesson of Popular Government," displays a more intimate knowledge of human nature than any other recent writer. Of these schemes for the representation of minorities he says:—
As an illustration of the effect in popular government of looking to popular impulse for the initiation of measures, it may be observed that perhaps the worst of all expedients for remedying the defective working of a government by a legislature like ours, that which combines the evils of them all, is one which is urged by perfectly disinterested advocates of reform, and is known as proportional representation. If there is one principle at the base of popular government it is that the majority shall rule. If the largest of three or four fractions is to rule it ceases to be popular government, and becomes government by faction. If the tyranny of the majority is bad a tyranny of the minority is still worse. (Vol. i., p. 505.)
And the following picture could hardly be better drawn:—