

# The Angels Weep: H.G. Wells on Electoral Reform.

### Edited with a post-script by Richard Lung.

Public domain electoral reform writings by Herbert George Wells (1866-1946).

Copyright © 2018: post-script by Richard Lung.

Three snaps of H.G. Wells, James Barrie and friends, taken at Stanway, Gloucestershire, in the early 1930s, reproduced by kind permission of the copyright holders.

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It will be particularly interesting to watch the ingenuities of the politicians in the new Parliament in producing schemes that will look like electoral reform and yet leave the profession still active for mischief. They will fight desperately against large constituencies with numerous members. The one-member or two-member constituency is absolutely necessary to their party system. In such constituencies even proportional representation can be reduced to a farce. And also they will offer cheap but attractive substitutes like the second ballot and the alternative vote. And they will fake extraordinary arrangements by which the voter will vote not for an individual but for a ticket or bunch, and they will call these fakes this or that improved variety of "proportional representation." All the political parties in Britain are at present trying to work out the probable effects of this or that fake or cheap substitute for electoral honesty, upon the party prospects. In this matter the Labour Party is as bad as any other party—or worse. The discussion of electoral legislation in the Imperial Parliament throughout the next session, though it may make the angels weep, is certain to afford much entertainment to every mundane observer of human disingenuousness.

_H.G. Wells, 1924._

### Table Of Contents.

#### Before the Great War.

The Labour Unrest.

Social Panaceas.

The Disease of Parliaments.

#### During the Great War.

Problems of political adaptation.

Democracy.

The recent struggle for Proportional Representation in Great Britain.

The study and propaganda of democracy.

#### After the Great War.

Politics as a public nuisance.

The re-emergence of Mr Lloyd-George.

The parliamentary triangle.

Modern government: Parliament and real electoral reform.

The Labour Party on trial: the folly of the five cruisers.

Dictators or politicians: The dilemma of civilisation.

Youth and the Vote. The rejuvenescence of the world.

Labour politicians: the evaporation of the intelligenzia.

Constructive ideas and their relation to current politics.

The extinction of party government.

The spirit of Fascism: Is there any good in it at all?

#### The inter-war years.

The Governments of Mankind...

A Short Study of the British Government at Work.

Assent.

Wells sources.

#### By Richard Lung:

#### Post-script

#### Works on electoral reform and research by the editor: The Democracy Science series.

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## The Labour Unrest.

(May 1912)

Table of Contents

From §2.

However tacit our understandings were in the past, with this new kind of labour, this young, restive labour of the twentieth century, which can read, discuss and combine, we need something in the nature of a social contract. And it is when one comes to consider by what possible means these suspicious third-class passengers in our leaking and imperilled social liner can be brought into generous co-operation with the second and the first that one discovers just how lamentably out of date and out of order our political institutions, which should supply the means for just this inter-class discussion, have become.

Between the busy and preoccupied owning and employing class on the one hand, and the distressed, uneasy masses on the other, intervenes the professional politician, not as a mediator, but as an obstacle, who must be propitiated before any dealings are possible. Our national politics no longer express the realities of the national life; they are a mere impediment in the speech of the community. With our whole social order in danger, our Legislating is busy over the trivial little affairs of the Welsh Established Church, whose whole endowment is not equal to the fortune of any one of half a dozen _Titanic_ passengers or a tithe of the probable loss of another strike among the miners.

We have a Legislature almost antiquarian, compiling a museum of Gladstonian legacies rather than governing our world to-day. Law is the basis of civilisation, but the lawyer is the law's consequence, and, with us at least, the legal profession is the political profession. It delights in false issues and merely technical politics. Steadily with the ascendancy of the House of Commons the barristers have ousted other types of men from political power. The decline of the House of Lords has been the last triumph of the House of Lawyers, and we are governed now to a large extent not so much by the people for the people as by the barristers for the barristers.

They set the tone of political life. And since they are the most specialised, the most specifically trained of all the professions, since their training is absolutely antagonistic to the creative impulses of the constructive artist and the controlled experiments of the scientific man, since the business is with evidence and advantages and the skilful use of evidence and advantages, and not with understanding, they are the least statesmanlike of all educated men, and they give our public life a tone as hopelessly discordant with our very great and urgent social needs as one could well imagine. They do not want to deal at all with great and urgent social needs. They play a game, a long and interesting game, with parties as sides, a game that rewards the industrious player with prominence, place, power and great rewards, and the less that game involves the passionate interests of other men, the less it draws them into participation and angry interference, the better for the steady development of the politician's career. A distinguished and active fruitlessness, leaving the world at last as he found it, is the political barrister's ideal career.

To achieve that, he must maintain legal and political monopolies, and prevent the invasion of political life by living interests. And so far as he has any views about labour beyond the margin of his brief, the barrister politician seems to regard getting men back to work on any terms and as soon as possible as the highest good. And it is with such men that our insurgent modem labour, with its vaguely apprehended wants, its large occasions and its rapid emotional reactions, comes into contact directly it attempts to adjust itself in the social body. It is one of the main factors in the progressive embitterment of the labour situation that whatever business is afoot -- arbitration, conciliation, inquiry -- our contemporary system presents itself to labour almost invariably in a legal guise.

The natural infirmities of humanity rebel against an unimaginative legality of attitude, and the common workaday man has no more love for this great and necessary profession to-day than he had in the time of Jack Cade. Little reasonable things from the lawyers' point of view -- the rejection, for example, of certain evidence in the _Titanic_ inquiry because it might amount to a charge of manslaughter, the constant interruption and checking of a labour representative at the same tribunal upon trivial points -- irritate quite disproportionately.

Lawyer and working man are antipathetic types, and it is a very grave national misfortune that at this time, when our situation calls aloud for statecraft and a certain greatness of treatment, our public life should be dominated as it has never been dominated before by this most able and illiberal profession.

Now for that great multitude of prosperous people who find themselves at once deeply concerned in our present social and economic crisis, and either helplessly entangled in party organisation or helplessly outside politics, the elimination and cure of this disease of statecraft, the professional politician, has become a very urgent matter. To destroy him, to get him back to his law courts and keep him there, it is necessary to destroy the machinery of the party system that sustains him, and to adopt some electoral method that will no longer put the independent representative man at a hopeless disadvantage against the party nominee. Such a method is to be found in proportional representation with large constituencies, and to that we must look for our ultimate liberation from our present masters, these politician barristers.

But the Labour situation cannot wait for this millennial release, and for the current issue it seems to me patent that every reasonable prosperous man will, even at the cost to himself of some trouble and hard thinking, do his best to keep as much of this great and acute controversy as he possibly can out of the lawyer's and mere politician's hands and in his own. Leave Labour to the lawyers, and we shall go very deeply into trouble indeed before this business is over. They will score their points, they will achieve remarkable agreements full of the possibility of subsequent surprises, they will make reputations, and do everything Heaven and their professional training have made them to do, and they will exasperate and exasperate!

Lawyers made the first French Revolution, and now, on a different side, they may yet bring about an English one. These men below there are still, as a class, wonderfully patient and reasonable, quite prepared to take orders and recognise superior knowledge, wisdom and nobility. They make the most reasonable claims for a tolerable life, for certain assurances and certain latitudes. Implicit rather than expressed is their demand for wisdom and right direction from those to whom the great surplus and freedom of civilisation are given. It is an entirely reasonable demand if man is indeed a social animal. But we have got to treat them fairly and openly. This patience and reasonableness and willingness for leadership is not limitless.

It is no good scoring our mean little points, for example, and accusing them of breach of contract and all sorts of theoretical wrongs because they won't abide by agreements to accept a certain scale of wages when the purchasing power of money has declined. When they made that agreement they did not think of that possibility. When they said a pound they thought of what was then a poundsworth of living. The Mint has since been increasing its annual output of gold coins to two or three times the former amount, and we have, as it were, debased the coinage with extraordinary quantities of gold. But we who know and own did nothing to adjust that; we did not tell the working man of that; we have let him find it out slowly and indirectly at the grocer's shop. That may be permissible from the lawyer's point of view, but it certainly isn't from the gentleman's, and it is only by the plea that its inequalities give society a gentleman that our present social system can claim to endure.

I would like to accentuate that, because if we are to emerge again from these acute social dissensions a reunited and powerful people, there has to be a change of tone, a new generosity on the part of those who deal with Labour speeches. Labour Literature, Labour representatives, and Labour claims. Labour is necessarily at an enormous disadvantage in discussion; in spite of a tremendous inferiority in training and education it is trying to tell the community its conception of its needs and purposes. It is not only young as a participator in the discussion of affairs; it is actually young. The average working man is not half the age of the ripe politicians and judges and lawyers and wealthy organisers who trip him up legally, accuse him of bad faith, mark his every inconsistency. It isn't becoming so to use our forensic advantages. It isn't -- if that has no appeal to you -- wise.

The thing our society has most to fear from Labour is not organised resistance, not victorious strikes and raised conditions, but the black resentment that follows defeat. Meet Labour half-way, and you will find a new co-operation in government; stick to your legal rights, draw the net of repressive legislation tighter, then you will presently have to deal with Labour enraged. If the anger burns free, that means revolution; if you crush out the hope of that, then sabotage and a sullen general sympathy for anarchistic crime.

From §5.

It is almost a national boast that we ''muddle through" our troubles, and I suppose it is true and to our credit that by virtue of a certain kindliness of temper, a humourous willingness to make the best of things, and an entirely amiable forgetfulness, we do come out of pressures and extremities that would smash a harder, more brittle people, only a little chipped and damaged. And it is quite conceivable that our country will, in a measure, survive the enormous stresses of labour adjustment that are now upon us, even if it never rises to any heroic struggle against these difficulties. But it may survive as a lesser country, as an impoverished and second-rate country. It will certainly do no more than that, if in any part of the world there is to be found a people capable of taking up this gigantic question in a greater spirit. Perhaps there is no such people, and the conflicts and muddles before us will be world-wide. Or suppose that it falls to our country in some strange way to develop a new courage and enterprise, and to be the first to go forward into this new phase of civilisation I foresee, from which a distinctive labouring class, a class that is of expropriated wage-earners, will have almost completely disappeared. ....

In the default of our public services, there opens an immense opportunity for voluntary effort. Deference to our official leaders is absurd; it is a time when men must, as the phrase goes, "come forward."

We want a National Plan for our social and economic development which everyone may understand and which will serve as a unifying basis for all our social and political activities. Such a plan is not to be flung out hastily by an irresponsible writer. It can only come into existence as the outcome of a wide movement of inquiry and discussion. My business in these pages has been not prescription but diagnosis. I hold it to be the clear duty of every intelligent person in the country to do his utmost to learn about these questions of economic and social organisation and to work them out to conclusions and a purpose. We have come to a phase in our affairs when the only alternative to a great, deliberate renascence of will and understanding is national disorder and decay.

From §6

I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national situation. I have pointed out that nearly all the social forces of our time seem to be in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance of a labour class as such and the rearrangement of our work and industry upon a new basis. That rearrangement demands an unprecedented national effort and the production of an adequate National Plan. Failing that, we seem doomed to a period of chronic social conflict and possibly even of frankly revolutionary outbreaks that may destroy us altogether or leave us only a dwarfed and enfeebled nation. . . .

And before we can develop that National Plan and the effective realisation of such a plan that is needed to save us from that fate two things stand immediately before us to be done, unavoidable preliminaries to that more comprehensive work. The first of these is the restoration of representative government, and the second a renascence of our public thought about political and social things.

As I have already suggested, a main factor in our present national inability to deal with this profound and increasing social disturbance is the entirely unrepresentative and unbusinesslike nature of our parliamentary government.

It is to a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart from our national life. It becomes more and more so. To go into the House of Commons is to go aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialised Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our affairs. There was a period when the debates in the House of Commons were an integral, almost a dominant, part of our national thought, when its speeches were read over in tens of thousands of homes, and a large and sympathetic public followed the details of every contested issue. Now a newspaper that dared to fill its columns mainly with parliamentary debates, with a full report of the trivialities, the academic points, the little familiar jokes, and entirely insincere pleadings which occupy that gathering would court bankruptcy.

This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of that comment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is associated with any will to change a state of affairs that so largely stultifies our national purpose. And yet the causes of our present political ineptitude are fairly manifest, and a radical and effective reconstruction is well within the wit of man.

All causes and all effects in our complex modem State are complex, but in this particular matter there can be little doubt that the key to the difficulty lies in the crudity and simplicity of our method of election, a method which reduces our apparent free choice of rulers to a ridiculous selection between undesirable alternatives, and hands our whole public life over to the specialised manipulator. Our House of Commons could scarcely misrepresent us more if it was appointed haphazard by the Lord Chamberlain or selected by lot from among the inhabitants of Notting Hill. Election of representatives in one-member local constituencies by a single vote gives a citizen practically no choice beyond the candidates appointed by the two great party organisations in the State. It is an electoral system that forbids absolutely any vote splitting or any indication of shades of opinion. The presence of more than two candidates introduces an altogether unmanageable complication, and the voter is at once reduced to voting not to secure the return of the perhaps less hopeful candidate he likes, but to ensure the rejection of the candidate he most dislikes. So the nimble wire-puller slips in. In Great Britain we do not have Elections any more; we have Rejections. What really happens at a general election is that the party organisations -- obscure and secretive conclaves with entirely mysterious funds -- appoint about 1,200 men to be our rulers, and all that we, we so-called self-governing people, are permitted to do is, in a muddled, angry way, to strike off the names of about half of these selected gentlemen.

Take almost any member of the present Government and consider his case. You may credit him with a life-long industrious intention to get there, but ask yourelf what is this man's distinction, and for what great thing in our national life does he stand? By the complaisance of our party machinery he was able to present himself to a perplexed constituency as the only possible alternative to Conservatism and Tariff Reform, and so we have him. And so we have most of his colleagues.

Now such a system of representation is surely a system to be destroyed at any cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts our national will. And we can leave no possible method of alteration untried. It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by the mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudely conceived. There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we must resort. Since John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importance of the matter there has been a systematic study of the possible working of electoral methods, and it is now fairly proved that in proportional representation, with large constituencies returning each many members, there is to be found a way of escape from this disastrous embarrassment of our public business by the party wire-puller and the party nominee.

I will not dwell upon the particulars of the proportional representation system here. There exists an active society which has organised the education of the public in the details of the proposal. Suffice it that it does give a method by which a voter may vote with confidence for the particular man he prefers, with no fear whatever that his vote will be wasted in the event of that man's chance being hopeless. There is a method by which the order of the voter's subsequent preference is effectively indicated. That is all, but see how completely it modifies the nature of an election. Instead of a hampered choice between two, you have a free choice between many. Such a change means a complete alteration in the quality of public life.

The present immense advantage of the party nominee -- which is the root cause, which is almost the sole cause of all our present political ineptitude \-- would disappear. He would be quite unable to oust any well-known and representative independent candidate who chose to stand against him. There would be an immediate alteration in type in the House of Commons. In the place of these specialists in political getting-on there would be few men who had not already gained some intellectual and moral hold upon the community; they would already be outstanding and distinguished men before they came to the work of government. Great sections of our national life, science, art, literature, education, engineering, manufacture, would cease to be under-represented, or misrepresented, by the energetic barrister and political specialist, and our Legislature would begin to serve, as we have now such urgent need of its serving, as the means and instrument of that national conference upon the social outlook of which we stand in need.

And it is to the need and nature of that Conference that I would devote myself, I do not mean by the word Conference any gathering of dull and formal and inattentive people in this dusty hall or that with a jaded audience and intermittently active reporters, such as this word may conjure up to some imaginations. I mean an earnest direction of attention in all parts of the country to this necessity for a studied and elaborated project of conciliation and social co-operation. We cannot afford to leave such things to specialised politicians and self-appointed, self-seeking ''experts" any longer. A modem community has to think out its problems as a whole and co-operate as a whole in their solution. We have to bring all our national life into this discussion of the National Plan before us, and not simply newspapers and periodicals and books, but pulpit and college and school have to bear their part in it. And in that particular I would appeal to the schools, because there more than anywhere else is the permanent quickening of our national imagination to be achieved.

We want to have ow young people filled with a new realisation that History is not over, that nothing is settled, and that the supreme dramatic phase in the story of England has still to come. It was not in the Norman Conquest, not in the flight of King James II, nor the overthrow of Napoleon; it is here and now. It falls to them to be actors not in a reminiscent pageant but a living conflict, and the sooner they are prepared to take their part in that the better our Empire will acquit itself. How absurd is the preoccupation of our schools and colleges with the little provincialisms of our past history before A.D. 1800! "No current politics," whispers the schoolmaster, "no religion -- except the coldest formalities. _Some parent might object._ " And he pours into our country every year a fresh supply of gentlemanly cricketing youths, gapingly unprepared -- unless they have picked up a broad generalisation or so from some surreptitious Socialist pamphlet -- for the immense issues they must control, and that are altogether uncontrollable if they fail to control them. The universities do scarcely more for our young men. All this has to be altered, and altered vigorously and soon, if our country is to accomplish its destinies. Our schools and colleges exist for no other purpose than to give our youths a vision of the world and of their duties and possibilities in the world. We can no longer afford to have them the last preserves of an elderly orthodoxy and the last repository of a decaying gift of superseded tongues. They are needed too urgently to make our leaders leader-like and to sustain the active understandings of the race.

And from the labour class itself we are also justified in demanding a far more effectual contribution to the National Conference than it is making at the present time. Mere eloquent apologies for distrust, mere denunciations of Capitalism and appeals for a Socialism as featureless as smoke, are unsatisfactory when one regards them as the entire contribution of the ascendant worker to the discussion of the national future. The labour thinker has to become definite in his demands and clearer upon the give and take that will be necessary before they can be satisfied. He has to realise rather more generously than he has done so far the enormous moral difficulty there is in bringing people who have been prosperous and at an advantage all their lives to the pitch of even contemplating a social reorganisation that may minimise or destroy their precedence. We have all to think, to think hard and think generously, and there is not a man in England to-day, even though his hands are busy at work, whose brain may not be helping in this great task of social rearrangement which lies before us all.

SOCIAL PANACEAS   
(June, 1912)

Table Of Contents

To have followed the frequent discussions of the Labour Unrest in the Press is to have learnt quite a lot about the methods of popular thought. And among other things I see now much better than I did why patent medicines are so popular. It is clear that as a community we are far too impatient of detail and complexity, we want overmuch to simplify, we clamour for panaceas, we are a collective invitation to quacks.

Our situation is an intricate one, it does not admit of a solution neatly done up in a word or a phrase. Yet so powerful is this wish to simplify that it is difficult to make it clear that one is not oneself a panacea-monger. One writes and people read a little inattentively and more than a little impatiently, until one makes a positive proposal. Then they jump. "So that's your Remedy!'' they say. "How absurdly inadequate!''

For example, I was privileged to take part in one such discussion in 1912, and among other things in my diagnosis of the situation I pointed out the extreme mischief done to our public life by the futility of our electoral methods. They make our whole public life forensic and ineffectual, and I pointed out that this evil effect, which vitiates our whole national life, could be largely remedied by an infinitely better voting system known as Proportional Representation.

Thereupon the Westminster Gazette declared in tones of pity and contempt that it was no Remedy -- and dismissed me. It would be as intelligent to discharge a doctor who pushed back the crowd about a broken-legged man in the street with wanting to heal the limb by giving the sufferer air. The task before our community, the task of reorganising labour on a basis broader than that of employment for daily or weekly wages, is one of huge complexity, and it is as entirely reasonable as it is entirely preliminary to clean and modernise to the utmost our representative and legislative machinery.

It is remarkable how dominant is this disposition to get a phrase, a word, a simple recipe, for an undertaking so vast in reality that for all the rest of our lives a large part of the activities of us, forty million people, will be devoted to its partial accomplishment. In the presence of very great issues people become impatient and irritated, as they would not allow themselves to be irritated by far more limited problems. Nobody in his senses expects a panacea for the comparatively simple and trivial business of playing chess. Nobody wants to be told to "rely wholly upon your pawns," or "never, never move your rook"; nobody clamours "give me a third knight and all will be well "; but that is exactly what everybody seems to be doing in our present discussion.

And as another aspect of the same impatience I note the disposition to clamour against all sorts of necessary processes in the development of a civilisation. For example, I read over and over again of the failure of representative government, and in nine cases out of ten I find that this amounts to a cry against any sort of representative government. It is perfectly true that our representative institutions do not work well and need a vigorous overhauling, but while I find scarcely any support for such a revision, the air is full of vague dangerous demands for aristocracy, for oligarchy, for autocracy.

It is like a man who jumps out of his automobile because he has burst a tyre, refuses a proffered [spare], and bawls passionately for anything -- for a four-wheeler, or a donkey, so long as he can be free from that exploded mechanism. There are evidently quite a considerable number of people in this country who would welcome a tyrant at the present time, a strong, silent, cruel, imprisoning, executing, melodramatic sort of person, who would somehow manage everything while they went on -- being silly.

I find that form of impatience cropping up everywhere. I hear echoes of Mr. Blatchford's Wanted, a Man, and we may yet see a General Boulanger prancing in our streets. There never was a more foolish cry. It is not a man we want, but just exactly as many million men as there are in Great Britain at the present time, and it is you, the reader, and I, and the rest of us who must together go on with the perennial task of saving the country by firstly, doing our own jobs just as well as ever we can, and secondly -- and this is really just as important as firstly -- doing our utmost to grasp our national purpose, doing our utmost, that is, to develop and carry out our national plan.

It is Everyman who must be the saviour of the State in a modem community; we cannot shift our share in the burthen; and here again, I think, is something that may well be underlined and emphasised. At present our "secondly" is unduly subordinated to our ''firstly"; our game is better individually than collectively; we are like a football team that passes badly, and our need is not nearly so much to change the players as to broaden their style.

And this brings me, in a spirit entirely antagonistic, up against Mr. Galsworthy's suggestion of an autocratic revolution in the methods of our public schools. But before I go on to that, let me first notice a still more comprehensive cry that has been heard again and again in this discussion, and that is the alleged failure of education generally. There is never any remedial suggestion made with this particular outcry ; it is merely a gust of abuse and insult for schools, and more particularly board schools, carrying with it a half-hearted implication that they should be closed, and then the contribution concludes.

Now there is no outcry at the present time more unjust or -- except for the Wanted, a Man clamour -- more foolish. No doubt our educational resources, like most other things, fall far short of perfection, but of all this imperfection the elementary schools are least imperfect; and I would almost go so far as to say that, considering the badness of their material, the huge, clumsy classes they have to deal with, the poorness of their directive administration, their bad pay and uncertain outlook, the elementary teachers of this country are amazingly efficient.

And it is not simply that they are good under their existing conditions, but that this service has been made out of nothing whatever in the course of scarcely forty years. An educational system to cover an Empire is not a thing that can be got for the asking, it is not even to be got for the paying, it has to be grown; and in the beginning it is bound to be thin, ragged, forced, crammy, text-bookish, superficial, and all the rest of it. As reasonable to complain that the children born last year were immature. A little army of teachers does not flash into being at the passing of an Education Act.

Not even an organisation for training those teachers comes to anything like satisfactory working order for many years, without considering the delays and obstructions that have been caused by the bickerings and bitterness of the various Christian Churches. So that it is not the failure of elementary education we have really to consider, but the continuance and extension of its already almost miraculous results.

And when it comes to the education of the ruling and directing classes, there is kindred, if lesser reason, for tempering zeal with patience. This upper portion of our educational organisation needs urgently to be bettered, but it is not to be bettered by trying to find an archangel who will better it dictatorially. For the good of our souls there are no such beings to relieve us of our collective responsibility. It is clear that appointments in this field need not only far more care and far more insistence upon creative power than has been shown in the past, but for the rest we have to do with the men we have and the schools we have. We cannot have an educational purge, if only because we have not the new men waiting. Here again the need is not impatience, not revolution, but a sustained and penetrating criticism, a steadfast, continuous urgency towards effort and well-planned reconstruction and efficiency.

And as a last example of the present hysterical disposition to scrap things before they have been fairly tried is the outcry against examinations, which has done so much to take the keenness off the edge of school work in the last few years. Because a great number of examiners chosen haphazard turned out to be negligent and incompetent as examiners because their incapacity created a cynical trade in cramming, a great number of people have come to the conclusion, just as examinations are being improved into efficiency, that all examinations are bad. In particular that excellent method of bringing new blood and new energy into the public services and breaking up official gangs and cliques, the competitive examination system, has been discredited, and the wire-puller and the influential person are back again tampering with a steadily increasing proportion of appointments. . . .

But I have written enough of this impatience, which is, as it were, merely the passion for reconstruction losing its head and defeating its own ends. There is no hope for us outside ourselves. No violent changes, no Napoleonic saviours can carry on the task of building the Great State, the civilised State that rises out of our disorders. That is for us to do, all of us and each one of us. We have to think clearly, and study and consider and reconsider our ideas about public things to the very utmost of our possibilities. We have to clarify our views and express them and do all we can to stir up thinking and effort in those about us.

I know it would be more agreeable for all of us if we could have some small pill-like remedy for all the troubles of the State, and take it and go on just as we are going now. But, indeed, to say a word for that idea would be a treason. We are the State, and there is no other way to make it better than to give it the service of our lives. Just in the measure of the aggregate of our devotions and the elaborated and criticised sanity of our public proceedings will the world mend.

I gather from a valuable publication called Secret Remedies, which analyses many popular cures, that this hasty passion for simplicity, for just one thing that will settle the whole trouble, can carry people to a level beyond an undivided trust in something warranted in a bottle. They are ready to put their faith in what amounts to practically nothing in a bottle. And just at present, while a number of excellent people of the middle class think that only a "man" is wanted and all will be well with us, there is a considerable wave of hopefulness among the working class in favour of a weak solution of nothing, which is offered under the attractive label of Syndicalism.

So far I have been able to discuss the present labour situation without any use of this empty word, but when one finds it cropping up in every other article on the subject, it becomes advisable to point out what Syndicalism is not. And incidentally it may enable me to make clear what Socialism in the broader sense, constructive Socialism, that is to say, is.

* * *
THE DISEASE OF PARLIAMENTS

Table of Contents

§1

There is a growing discord between governments and governed in the world.

There has always been discord between governments and governed since States began; government has always been to some extent imposed, and obedience to some extent reluctant. We have come to regard it as a matter of course that under all absolutisms and narrow oligarchies the community, so soon as it became educated and as its social elaboration developed a free class with private initiatives, so soon, indeed, as it attained to any power of thought and expression at all, would express discontent. But we English and Americans and Western Europeans generally had supposed that, so far as our own communities were concerned, this discontent was already anticipated and met by representative institutions. We had supposed that, with various safeguards and elaborations, our communities did, as a matter of fact, govern themselves. Our panacea for all discontents was the franchise. Social and national dissatisfaction could be given at the same time a voice and a remedy in the ballot-box. Our liberal intelligences could and do still understand Russians wanting votes, Indians wanting votes, women wanting votes. The history of nineteenth-century Liberalism in the world might almost be summed up in the phrase "progressive enfranchisement." But these are the desires of a closing phase in political history. The new discords go deeper than that. The new situation which confronts our Liberal intelligence is the discontent of the enfranchised, the contempt and hostility of the voters for their elected delegates and governments.

This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility to duly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democratic country or that; it is an almost worldwide movement. It is an almost universal disappointment with so-called popular government, and in many communities - in Great Britain particularly -- it is manifesting itself by an unprecedented lawlessness in political matters, and in a strange and ominous contempt for the law. One sees it, for example, in the refusal of large sections of the medical profession to carry out insurance legislation, in the repudiation of Irish Home Rule by Ulster, and in the steady drift of great masses of industrial workers towards the conception of a universal strike. The case of the discontented workers in Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people form effective voting majorities in many constituencies; they send alleged Socialist and Labour representatives into the legislative assembly; and, in addition, they have their trade unions with staffs of elected officials, elected ostensibly to state their case and promote their interests. Yet nothing is now more evident than that these officials, working-men representatives and the like, do not speak for their supporters, and are less and less able to control them. The Syndicalist movement, sabotage in France, and Larkinism in Great Britain, are, from the point of view of social stability, the most sinister demonstrations of the gathering anger of the labouring classes with representative institutions. These movements are not revolutionary movements, not movements for reconstruction such as were the democratic Socialist movements that closed the nineteenth century. They are angry and vindictive movements. They have behind them the most dangerous and terrible of purely human forces, the wrath, the blind destructive wrath, of a cheated crowd.

Now, so far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditions differ from European, and the process of disillusionment will probably follow a different course. American labour is very largely immigrant labour still separated by barriers of language and tradition from the established thought of the nation. It will be long before labour in America speaks with the massed effectiveness of labour in France and England, where master and man are racially identical, and where there is no variety of "Dagoes" to break up the revolt. But in other directions the American disbelief in and impatience with "elected persons" is and has been far profounder than it is in Europe. The abstinence of men of property and position from overt politics, and the contempt that banishes political discussion from polite society, are among the first surprises of the visiting European to America, and now that, under an organised pressure of conscience, college-trained men and men of wealth are abandoning this strike of the educated and returning to political life, it is, one notes, with a prevailing disposition to correct democracy by personality, and to place affairs in the hands of autocratic mayors and presidents rather than to carry out democratic methods to the logical end. At times America seems hot for a Caesar. If no Caesar is established, then it will be the good fortune of the Republic rather than its democratic virtue which will have saved it.

And directly one comes to look into the quality and composition of the elected governing body of any modem democratic State, one begins to see the reason and nature of its widening estrangement from the community it represents. In no sense are these bodies really representative of the thought and purpose of the nation; the conception of its science, the fresh initiatives of its philosophy and literature, the forces that make the future through invention and experiment, exploration and trial and industrial development have no voice, or only an accidental and feeble voice, there. The typical elected person is a smart rather than substantial lawyer, full of cheap catchwords and elaborate tricks of procedure and electioneering, professing to serve the interests of the locality which is his constituency, but actually bound hand and foot to the specialised political association, his party, which imposed him upon that constituency. Arrived at the legislature, his next ambition is office, and to secure and retain office he engages in elaborate manoeuvres against the opposite party, upon issues which his limited and specialised intelligence indicates as electorally effective. But being limited and specialised, he is apt to drift completely out of touch with the interests and feelings of large masses of people in the community. In Great Britain, the United States and France alike there is a constant tendency on the part of the legislative body to drift into unreality, and to bore the country with the disputes that are designed to thrill it. In Great Britain, for example, at the present time the two political parties are both profoundly unpopular with the general intelligence, which is sincerely anxious, if only it could find a way, to get rid of both of them. Irish Home Rule -- an issue as dead as mutton, is opposed to Tariff Reform, which has never been alive. Much as the majority of people detest the preposterously clumsy attempts to amputate Ireland from the rule of the British Parliament which have been going on since the breakdown of Mr. Gladstone's political intelligence, their dread of foolish and scoundrelly fiscal adventurers is sufficiently strong to retain the Liberals in office. The recent exposures of the profound financial rottenness of the Liberal party have deepened the public resolve to permit no such enlarged possibilities of corruption as Tariff Reform would afford their at least equally dubitable opponents. And meanwhile, beneath those ridiculous alternatives, those sham issues, the real and very urgent affairs of the nation, the vast gathering discontent of the workers throughout the Empire, the racial conflicts in India and South Africa which will, if they are not arrested, end in our severance from India, the insane waste of national resources, the control of disease, the frightful need of some cessation of armament, drift neglected. . . .

Now do these things indicate the ultimate failure and downfall of representative government? Was this idea which inspired so much of the finest and most generous thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a wrong idea, and must we go back to Caesarism or oligarchy or plutocracy or a theocracy, to Rome or Venice or Carthage, to the strong man or the ruler by divine right, for the political organisation of the future?

My answer to that question would be an emphatic No. My answer would be that the idea of representative government is the only possible idea for the government of a civilised community. But I would add that so far representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a devastating caricature.

It is quite plain now that those who first organised the parliamentary institutions which now are the ruling institutions of the greater part of mankind fell a prey to certain now very obvious errors. They did not realise that there are hundreds of different ways in which voting may be done, and that every way will give a different result. They thought, and it is still thought by a great number of mentally indolent people, that if a country is divided up into approximately equivalent areas, each returning one or two representatives, if every citizen is given one vote, and if there is no legal limit to the presentation of candidates, that presently a cluster of the wisest, most trusted and best citizens will come together in the legislative assembly.

In reality the business is far more complicated than this. In reality a country will elect all sorts of different people according to the electoral method employed. It is a fact that anyone who chooses to experiment with a willing school or club may verify. Suppose, for example, that you take your country, give every voter one single vote, put up six and twenty candidates for a dozen vacancies, and give them no adequate time for organisation. The voters, you will find, will return certain favourites, A and B and C and D let us call them, by enormous majorities, and behind these at a considerable distance will come E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L. Now give your candidates time to develop organisation. A lot of people who swelled A's huge vote will dislike J and K and L so much, and prefer M and N so much, that if they are assured that by proper organisation A's return can be made certain without their voting for him, they will vote for M and N. But they will do so only on that understanding. Similarly certain B-ites will want O and P if they can be got without sacrificing B. So that adequate party organisation in the community may return not the dozen a naive vote would give, but A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, M, N, O, P. Now suppose that, instead of this arrangement, your community is divided into twelve constituencies and no candidate may contest more than one of them. And suppose each constituency has strong local preferences. A, B and C are widely popular; in every constituency they have supporters, but in no constituency does any one of the three command a majority. They are great men, not local men. Q, who is an unknown man in most of the country, has, on the contrary, a strong sect of followers in the constituency for which A stands, and beats him by one vote; another local celebrity, R, disposes of B in the same way; C is attacked not only by S but T, whose peculiar views upon vaccination, let us say, appeal to just enough of C's supporters to let in S. Similar accidents happen in the other constituencies, and the country that would have unreservedly returned A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K and L on the first system, return instead O, P, Q. R. S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z. Numerous voters who would have voted for A if they had a chance vote instead for R, S, T, etc., numbers who would have voted for B, vote for Q, V, W, X, etc. But now suppose that A and B are opposed to one another, and that there is a strong A party and a strong B party highly organised in the country. B is really the second favourite over the country as a whole, but A is the first favourite. D, F, H, J, L, N, P, R, U, W, Y constitute the A candidates, and in his name they conquer. B, C, E, G, I, K, M, O, Q, S, V are all thrown out in spite of the wide popularity of B and C. B and C, we have supposed, are the second and third favourites, and yet they go out in favour of Y, of whom nobody has heard before, some mere hangers-on of A's. Such a situation actually occurs in both Ulster and Home-Rule Ireland.

But now let us suppose another arrangement, and that is that the whole country is one constituency, and every voter has, if he chooses to exercise them, twelve votes, which, however, he must give, if he gives them all, to twelve separate people. Then quite certainly A, B, C, D will come in, but the tail will be different. M, N, O, P may come up next to them, and even Z, that eminent non-party man, may get in. But now organisation may produce new effects. The ordinary man, when he has twelve votes to give, likes to give them all, so that there will be a good deal of wild voting at the tails of the voting papers. Now if a small resolute band decide to plump for T or to vote only for A and T or B and T, T will probably jump up out of the rejected. This is the system which gives the specialist, the anti-vaccinator or what not, the maximum advantage, V, W, X and Y, being rather hopeless anyhow, will probably detach themselves from party and make some special appeal, say to the teetotal vote or the Mormon vote or the single-tax vote, and so squeeze past O, P, Q, R, who have taken a more generalised line.

I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical fluctuations. Many people, I know from colloquial experiences, do at about this stage fly into a passion. But if you will exercise self-control, then I think you will see my point that, according to the method of voting, almost any sort of result may be got out of an election except the production of a genuinely representative assembly.

And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience of contemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representative assemblies of the world are not really representative at all. I will go farther and say that were it not for the entire inefficiency of our method of voting, not one-tenth of the present American and French Senators, the French Deputies, the American Congressmen, and the English Members of Parliament would hold their positions to-day. They would never have been heard of. They are not really the elected representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box, who have ousted the legitimate heirs from their sovereignty. They are no more the expression of the general will than the Czar or some President by pronunciamento. They are an accidental oligarchy of adventurers. Representative government has never yet existed in the world; there was an attempt to bring it into existence in the eighteenth century, and it succumbed to an infantile disorder at the very moment of its birth. What we have in the place of the leaders and representatives are politicians and "elected persons."

The world is passing rapidly from localised to generalised interests, but the method of election into which our fathers fell is the method of electing one or two representatives from strictly localised constituencies. Its immediate corruption was inevitable. If discussing and calculating the future had been, as it ought to be, a common, systematic occupation, the muddles of to-day might have been foretold a hundred years ago. From such a rough method of election the party system followed as a matter of course. In theory, of course, there may be any number of candidates for a constituency, and a voter votes for the one he likes best; in practice there are only two or three candidates, and the voter votes for the one most likely to beat the candidate he likes least. It cannot be too strongly insisted that in contemporary elections we vote against; we do not vote for. If A, B and C are candidates, and you hate C and all his works and prefer A, but doubt if he will get as many votes as B, who is indifferent to you, the chances are you will vote for B. If C and B have the support of organised parties, you are still less likely to risk "wasting" your vote upon A. If your real confidence is in G, who is not a candidate for your constituency, and if B pledges himself to support G, while A retains the right of separate action, you may vote for B even if you distrust him personally. Additional candidates would turn any election of this type into a wild scramble. The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb.

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. For twenty-five years I have been a voter, and in all that time I have only twice had an opporttmity of voting for a man of distinction in whom I had the slightest confidence. Commonly my choice of a "representative" has been between a couple of barristers entirely unknown to me or the world at large. Rather more than half the men presented for my selection have not been English at all, but of alien descent. This, then, is the sum of the political liberty of the ordinary American or Englishman, that is the political emancipation which Englishwomen have shown themselves so pathetically eager to share. He may reject one of two undesirables, and the other becomes his ''representative." Now this is not popular government at all; it is government by the profession of politicians, whose control becomes more and more irresponsible in just the measure that they are able to avoid real factions within their own body. Whatever the two party organisations have a mind to do together, whatever issue they chance to reserve from "party politics," is as much beyond the control of the free and independent voter as if he were a slave subject in ancient Peru.

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form and substance. The old spirit of freedom and the collective purpose which overthrew and subdued priestcrafts and king-crafts, has done, so it seems, only to make way for these obscure political conspiracies. Instead of liberal institutions, mankind has invented a new sort of usurpation. And it is not unnatural that many of us should be in a phase of political despair.

These oligarchies of the party organisations have now been evolving for two centuries, and their inherent evils and dangers become more and more manifest. The first of these is the exclusion from government of the more active and intelligent sections of the community. It is not treated as remarkable, it is treated as a matter of course, that neither in Congress nor in the House of Commons is there any adequate representation of the real thought of the time, of its science, invention and enterprise, of its art and feeling, of its religion and purpose. When one speaks of Congressmen or Members of Parliament, one thinks, to be plain about it, of intellectual riff-raff. When one hears of a pre-eminent man in the English-speaking community, even though that pre-eminence may be in political or social science, one is struck by a sense of incongruity if he happens to be also in the Legislature. When Lord Haldane disengages the Gifford lectures or Lord Morley writes a Life of Gladstone or ex-President Roosevelt is delivered of a magazine article, there is the same sort of excessive admiration as when a Royal Princess does a water-colour sketch or a dog walks on its hind legs.

Now this intellectual inferiority of the legislator is not only directly bad for the community by producing dull and stupid legislation, but it has a discouraging and dwarfing effect upon our intellectual life. Nothing so stimulates art, thought and science as realisation; nothing so cripples it as unreality. But to set oneself to know thoroughly and to think clearly about any human question is to unfit oneself for the forensic claptrap which is contemporary politics, is to put oneself out of the effective current of the nation's life. The intelligence of any community which does not make a collective use of that intelligence, starves and becomes hectic, tends inevitably to preciousness and futility on the one hand, and to insurgency, mischief and anarchism on the other.

From the point of view of social stability this estrangement of the national government and the national intelligence is far less serious than the estrangement between the governing body and the real feeling of the mass of the people. To many observers this latter estrangement seems to be drifting very rapidly towards a social explosion in the British Isles. The organised masses of labour find themselves baffled both by their parliamentary representatives and by their trade-union officials. They are losing faith in their votes and falling back in anger upon insurrectionary ideals, upon the idea of a general strike, and upon the expedients of sabotage. They are doing this without any constructive proposals at all, for it is ridiculous to consider Syndicalism as a constructive proposal. They mean mischief because they are hopeless and bitterly disappointed. It is the same thing in France, and before many years are over it will be the same thing in America. That way lies chaos. In the next few years there may be social revolt and bloodshed in most of the great cities of Western Europe. That is the trend of current probability. Yet the politicians go on in an almost complete disregard of this gathering storm. Their jerrymandered electoral methods are like wool in their ears, and the rejection of Tweedledum for Tweedledee is taken as a ''mandate" for Tweedledee's distinctive brand of political unrealities. .. .

Is this an incurable state of things? Is this method of managing our affairs the only possible electoral method, and is there no remedy for its monstrous clumsiness and inefficiency but to ''show a sense of humour," or, in other words, to grin and bear it? Or is it conceivable that there may be a better way to government than any we have yet tried, a method of government that would draw every class into conscious and willing co-operation with the State, and enable every activity of the community to play its proper part in the national life? That was the dream of those who gave the world representative government in the past. Was it an impossible dream?

§2

Is this disease of Parliaments an incurable disease, and have we, therefore, to get along as well as we can with it, just as a tainted and incurable invalid diets and is careful and gets along through life? Or is it possible that some entirely more representative and effective collective control of our common affairs can be devised?

The answer to that must determine our attitude to a great number of fundamental questions. If no better governing body is possible than the stupid, dilatory and forensic assemblies that rule in France, Britain and America to-day, then the civilised human community has reached its climax. That more comprehensive collective handling of the common interests to which science and intelligent Socialism point, that collective handling which is already urgently needed if the present uncontrolled waste of natural resources and the ultimate bankruptcy of mankind is to be avoided, is quite beyond the capacity of such assemblies; already there is too much in their clumsy and untrustworthy hands, and the only course open to us is an attempt at enlightened Individualism, an attempt to limit and restrict State activities in every possible way, and to make little private temporary islands of light and refinement amidst the general disorder and decay. All collectivist schemes, all rational Socialism, if only Socialists would realise it, all hope for humanity, indeed, are dependent ultimately upon the hypothetical possibility of a better system of government than any at present in existence.

Let us see first, then, if we can lay down any conditions which such a better governing body would satisfy. Afterwards it will be open to us to believe or disbelieve in its attainment. Imagination is the essence of creation. If we can imagine a better government we are half-way to making it.

Now, whatever other conditions such a body will satisfy, we may be sure that it will not be made up of members elected by single-member constituencies. A single-member constituency must necessarily contain a minority, and may even contain a majority of dissatisfied persons whose representation is, as it were, blotted out by the successful candidate. Three single-member constituencies which might all return members of the same colour, if they were lumped together to return three members would probably return two of one colour and one of another. There would still, however, be a suppressed minority averse to both these colours, or desiring different shades of those colours from those afforded them in the constituency. Other things being equal, it may be laid down that the larger the constituency and the more numerous its representatives, the greater the chance of all varieties of thought and opinion being represented.

But that is only a preliminary statement; it still leaves untouched all the considerations advanced in the former part of this discussion to show how easily the complications and difficulties of voting lead to a falsification of the popular will and understanding. But here we enter a region where a really scientific investigation has been made, and where established results are available. A method of election was worked out by Hare in the middle of the last century that really does seem to avoid or mitigate nearly every falsifying or debilitating possibility in elections; it was enthusiastically supported by J. S. Mill; it is now advocated by a special society -- the Proportional Representation Society -- to which belong men of the most diverse type of distinction, united only by the common desire to see representative government a reality and not a disastrous sham. It is a method which does render impossible nearly every way of forcing candidates upon constituencies, and nearly every trick for rigging results that now distorts and cripples the political life of the modem world. It exacts only one condition, a difficult but not an impossible condition, and that is the honest scrutiny and counting of the votes.

The peculiar invention of the system is what is called the single transferable vote -- that is to say, a vote which may be given in the first instance to one candidate, but which, in the event of his already having a sufficient quota of votes to return him, may be transferred to another. The voter marks clearly in the list of the candidates the order of his preference by placing 1, 2, 3, and so forth against the names. In the subsequent counting the voting papers are first classified according to the first votes. Let us suppose that popular person A is found to have received first votes enormously in excess of what is needed to return him. The second votes are then counted on his papers, and after the number of votes necessary to return him has been deducted, the surplus votes are divided in due proportion among the second-choice names, and count for them. That is the essential idea of the whole thing. At a stroke all that anxiety about wasting votes and splitting votes, which is the secret of all party political manipulation, vanishes. You may vote for A well knowing that if he is safe your vote will be good for C. You can make sure of A, and at the same time vote for C. You are in no need of a ''ticket" to guide you, and you need have no fear that in supporting an independent candidate you will destroy the prospects of some tolerably sympathetic party man without any compensating advantage. The independent candidate does, in fact, become possible for the first time. The Hobson's choice of the party machine is abolished.

Let me be a little more precise about the particulars of this method, the only sound method, of voting in order to ensure an adequate representation of the community. Let us resort again to the constituency I imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidates represented by all the letters of the alphabet struggle for twelve places. And let us suppose that A, B, C and D are the leading favourites. Suppose that there are twelve thousand voters in the constituency, and that three thousand votes are cast for A -- I am keeping the figures as simple as possible -- then A has two thousand more than is needed to return him. All the second votes on his papers are counted, and it is found that 600, or a fifth of them, go to C; 50O, or a sixth, go to E; 300, or a tenth, to G; 300 to J; 200, or a fifteenth, each to K and L, and a hundred each, or a thirtieth, to M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, W and Z. Then the surplus of 2,000 is divided in these proportions -- that is, a fifth of 2,000 goes to C, a sixth to E, and the rest to G, J, etc., in proportion. C, who already has 900 votes, gets another 400, and is now returned, and has moreover 300 to spare; and the same division of the next votes upon C's paper occurs as has already been made with A's. But previously to this there has been a distribution of B's surplus votes, B having got 1,200 of first votes. And so on. After the distribution of the surplus votes of the elect at the top of the list, there is a distribution of the second votes upon the papers of those who have voted for the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list. At last a point is reached when twelve candidates have a quota.

In this way the "wasting" of a vote, or the rejection of a candidate for any reason except that hardly anybody wants him, becomes practically impossible. This method of the single transferable vote with very large constituencies and many members does, in fact, give an entirely valid electoral result; each vote tells for all it is worth, and the freedom of the voter is only limited by the number of candidates who put up or are put up for election. This method, and this method alone, gives representative government; all others of the hundred and one possible methods admit of trickery, confusion and falsification. Proportional representation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way. It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually selected sidings and branch lines. It is not the substitution of something for something else of the same nature; it is the substitution of right for wrong. It is the plain common sense of the greatest difficulty in contemporary affairs.

I know that a number of people do not, will not, admit this of Proportional Representation. Perhaps it is because of that hideous mouthful of words for a thing that would be far more properly named Sane Voting. This, which is the only correct way, these antagonists regard as a peculiar way. It has unfamiliar features, and that condemns it in their eyes. It takes at least ten minutes to understand, and that is too much for their plain, straightforward souls. "Complicated" -- that word of fear! They are like the man who approved of an electric tram, but said that he thought it would go better without all that jiggery-pokery of wires up above. They are like the Western judge in the murder trial who said that if only they got a man hung for the abominable crime, he wouldn't make a pedantic fuss about the question of which man. They are like the plain, straightforward promoter who became impatient with maps and planned a railway across Switzerland by drawing a straight line with a ruler across Jungfrau and Matterhom, and glacier and gorge. Or else they are like Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., who knows too well what would happen to him.

Now let us consider what would be the necessary consequences of the establishment of Proportional Representation in such a community as Great Britain -- that is to say, the redistribution of the country into great constituencies, such as London or Ulster or Wessex or South Wales, each returning a score or more of members, and the establishment of voting by the single transferable vote. The first, immediate, most desirable result would be the disappearance of the undistinguished party candidate; he would vanish altogether. He would be no more seen. Proportional Representation would not give him the ghost of a chance. The very young man of good family, the subsidised barrister, the respectable nobody, the rich supporter of the party would be ousted by known men. No candidate who had not already distinguished himself, and who did not stand for something in the public eye, would have a chance of election. There alone we have a sufficient reason for anticipating a very thorough change in the quality and character of the average legislator.

And next, no party organisation, no intimation from headquarters, no dirty tricks behind the scenes, no conspiracy of spite and scandal would have much chance of keeping out any man of real force and distinction who had impressed the public imagination. To be famous in science, to have led thought, to have explored or administered or dissented courageously from the schemes of official wire-pullers would no longer be a bar to a man's attainment of Parliament. It would be a help. Not only the level of parliamentary intelligence, but the level of personal independence would be raised far above its present position. And Parliament would become a gathering of prominent men instead of a means to prominence.

The two-party system which holds all the English-speaking countries to-day in its grip would certainly be broken up by Proportional Representation. Sane Voting in the end would kill the Liberal and Tory and Democratic and Republican party machines. That secret rottenness of our public life, that hidden conclave which sells honours, fouls finance, muddles public affairs, fools the passionate desires of the people, and ruins honest men by obscure campaigns would become impossible. The advantage of party support would be a doubtful advantage, and in Parliament itself the party men would find themselves outclassed and possibly even outnumbered by the independent. It would be only a matter of a few years between the adoption of Sane Voting and the disappearance of the Cabinet from British public life. It wotdd become possible for Parliament to get rid of a minister without getting rid of a ministry, and to express its disapproval of -- let us say -- some foolish project for rearranging the local government of Ireland without opening the door upon a vista of fantastical fiscal adventures. The party-supported Cabinet, which is now the real government of the so-called democratic countries, would cease to be so, and government would revert more and more to the legislative assembly. And not only would the latter body resume government, but it would also necessarily take into itself all those large and growing exponents of extra-parliamentary discontent that now darken the social future. The case of the armed "Unionist" rebel in Ulster, the case of the workman who engages in sabotage, the case for sympathetic strikes and the general strike, all these cases are identical in this, that they declare Parliament a fraud, that justice lies outside it and hopelessly outside it, and that to seek redress through Parliament is a waste of time and energy. Sane Voting would deprive all these destructive movements of the excuse and necessity for violence.

There is, I know, a disposition in some quarters to minimise the importance of Proportional Representation, as though it were a mere readjustment of voting methods. It is nothing of the sort; it is a prospective revolution. It will revolutionise government far more than a mere change from kingdom to republic or vice versa could possibly do; it will give a new and unprecedented sort of government to the world. The real leaders of the country will govern the country. For Great Britain, for example, instead of the secret, dubious and dubitable Cabinet, which is the real British government of to-day, poised on an unwieldy and crowded House of Commons, we should have open government by the representatives of, let us say, twenty great provinces, Ulster, Wales, London, for example, each returning from twelve to thirty members. It would be a steadier, stabler, more confident, and more trusted government than the world has ever seen before. Ministers, indeed, and even ministries, might come and go, but that would not matter, as it does now, because there would be endless alternatives through which the assembly could express itself instead of the choice between two parties.

The arguments against Proportional Representation that have been advanced hitherto are trivial in comparison with its enormous advantages. Implicit in them all is the supposition that public opinion is at bottom a foolish thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify rather than express a people. It is possibly true that notorious windbags, conspicuously advertised adventurers, and the heroes of temporary sensations may run a considerable chance upon the lists. My own estimate of the popular wisdom is against the idea that any vividly prominent figure must needs get in; I think the public is capable of appreciating, let us say, the charm and interest of Mr. Sandow or Mr. Jack Johnson or Mr. Harry Lauder or Mr. Evan Roberts without wanting to send these gentlemen into Parliament. And I think that the increased power that the press would have through its facilities in making reputations may also be exaggerated. Reputations are mysterious things and not so easily forced, and even if it were possible for a section of the Press to lime-light a dozen or so figures up to the legislature, they would still have, I think, to be interesting, sympathetic and individualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozen among four hundred men of a repute more naturally achieved. A third objection is that this reform would give us group politics and unstable government. It might very possibly give us unstable ministries, but unstable ministries may mean stable government, and such stable ministries as that which governs England at the present time may, by clinging obstinately to office, mean the wildest fluctuations of policy. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald has drawn a picture of the too-representative Parliament of proportional representation, split up into groups each pledged to specific measures and making the most extraordinary treaties and sacrifices of the public interest in order to secure the passing of these definite bills. But Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is exclusively a parliamentary man; he knows contemporary parliamentary "shop" as a clerk knows his "guv'nor," and he thinks in the terms of his habitual life; he sees representatives only as politicians financed from party headquarters; it is natural that he should fail to see that the quality and condition of the sanely elected Member of Parliament will be quite different from these scheming climbers into positions of trust with whom he deals to-day. It is the party system based on insane voting that makes governments indivisible wholes and gives the group and the cave their terrors and their effectiveness. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is as typical a product of existing electoral methods as one could well have, and his peculiarly keen sense of the power of intrigue in legislation is as good evidence as one could wish for of the need of drastic change.

Of course, Sane Voting is not a short cut to the millennium, it is no way of changing human nature, and in the new type of assembly, as in the old, spite, vanity, indolence, self-interest, and downright dishonesty will play their part. But to object to a reform on that account is not a particularly effective objection. These things will play their part, but it will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is like objecting to some projected and long-needed railway because it does not propose to carry its passengers by immediate express to heaven.

From: _Social Forces in England and America._ (1914)

* * *

## PROBLEMS OF POLITICAL ADAPTATION

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### WANT OF CLEAR THINKING

It is the purpose of these chapters to be plain and elementary, to put what we believe to be the stark essentials of a hopeful scheme of reconstruction, of what the writers believe to be the only possible scheme of reconstruction, with the utmost bareness and simplicity. We believe that there is at present a dangerous want of clear general thinking upon the national outlook and a dangerous disposition to undertake piecemeal changes without any comprehensive vision. We believe that this is one problem, and not to be dealt with miscellaneously. The misconception is still too prevalent that it is 'practical' to work with one's nose right up close to this question or that, and 'theoretical' and useless to get a little way off and look at what we are doing.

In no relation is this small-business method of feeling about things rather than of thinking about things, of making our estimates with the point of the nose, so to speak, instead of the cerebral hemispheres, more evident and more evidently mischievous than in relation to projected legislative developments. These have to be envisaged largely, we passionately believe, or patched disastrously. It is evident that our Legislature and Administration work slowly, lack initiative, are not really in touch with the mind of the community, and so keep the community in a fever of unrest. The Press and public discussion are full of complaints, instances of failure, accusation of lost opportunity and shirked responsibility. But they are confused and incoherent complaints, they do not seem to produce any real working project for political reconstruction, they are almost as unhelpful to the forming of a plan as the moaning of a patient is to the formation of a diagnosis. Let us, therefore, make an attempt here to sort out the constituents of what is probably in its very essence a confused and complex trouble. Let us try to distinguish the factors in the political tangle. It is probable, we suggest, that it is not one thing wrong but several distinct things wrong, things not very closely correlated, that makes our existing government so slow, so evasive, and so generally unsatisfactory - and, when we consider the task of reconstruction before us, so hopeless. There may be quite separable things wrong, and each thing wrong may demand quite separate treatment.

That at least is the suggestion we are making here. That is our present thesis. We are going to suggest here that there is not only a complexity of origin but a masking of symptoms in this case.

### THE MACHINE OF GOVERNMENT

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The complaint on the surface, as we hear it, is that the undoubted slowness and clumsiness of British government are due to the predominance of lawyers in politics. Gentlemen unversed in affairs give us to understand that government should be in the hands of men of science or 'business-men,' regardless of the fairly obvious fact that men of science are most properly engaged in the advancement of science, and that the proper business of a business man is to mind his own business. As a matter of fact politics and government have always been, and will always be so long as human communities endure, largely in the hands of lawyers or lawyer-like persons, and this for no other reason than that they are matters of systematic human relationship, which is only another way of saying that they are matters of law. In an autocracy the lawyer may have to propitiate the autocrat, in a democracy the lawyer may have to propitiate the people, but under any form of government he remains the intermediary, the active agent, the minister between men and men. This is so obvious that this outcry against lawyers already changes its direction, and in the place of a simple Jack Cade-like proposal to be quit of them altogether we are getting analyses of the 'legal' type of mind, and complaints, with which we ourselves are in far more sympathy, that the organization, procedure and education of our legal profession fall short of modern needs, are still essentially Gothic and mediaeval. We are, in fact, no longer asked to slaughter our lawyers, but to bring them up to date. The modernisation of the political lawyer is quite a different proposition from the abolition of the political lawyer, and apart from such special questions as the relation of the two branches of the profession to each other and the relations of the advocate to the judge, questions with which these papers will not deal, its discussion passes indistinguishably into a discussion of a general liberal education. As a part of that discussion we will return to it in a later paper.

But our suggestion here is that whatever the present defects of the legal tradition and the legal training may be, they are not really the major reasons for our present clumsiness and unconstructiveness of government. They are at the utmost a minor contributory reason. We want to suggest that our existing governing machine is, quite apart from the percentage of lawyers in it, an unsuitable instrument, a misfit, a very incomplete and unsatisfactory adaptation to current needs of forms of government originally set up under conditions of communication and transit and economic production that carry us halfway back to the Bronze Age. We suggest that this governing machine of ours has hitherto always been patched up for fresh needs at the latest possible moment under a maximum of urgency and with a minimum of efficiency, and that it is possible not only to scheme out but to carry out much more drastic and fundamental re-arrangements. Reform Bills, Parliament Acts, Home Rule Bills, quieter but more effectual changes of method and relationship than have been, of course; the political history of the British Empire for a century has been very largely a history of a struggle to adjust, but it is still open to question whether any step has ever been taken except as a reluctant minimum concession to a need already flagrant. And about the suitability of this patched-up fabric to control the vast changes demanded in our immediate future it seems to us there can be hardly any doubt at all.

### THE THREE ESTATES

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The form of the British governing machine was of course determined long ago by the needs and conditions of a comparatively small feudal monarchy, a monarchy with practically no manufactures and only a very trifling interest on the sea, in which there was no such thing as a town as big as Winchester is now; and its three tiers of King, Lords, and Commons still represent very fairly the three organs, as it were, of such a simple community, first the law and the State, secondly the landowner, the land administration, and thirdly the tenantry. All the references of the governing machine are references to practically autonomous localities - the Lords have chiefly territorial titles still, the members in the Commons still represent local interests; everything was localized, because in those days, apart from the Crown, there were no such things as non-local interests, such interests as a participating share in a railway system, a bicycle business, colonial trade, foreign investments, chemical industries, or book-printing, for example, give a man to-day. The modern State contains not three organs, but a great number, some of which have no representative at all in the government as distinctive organs, and some of which get a representation in disguise, as when some great railway man or some great Colonial man pretends to be the landlord of Thistown or Thatshire, or some energetic industrial organizer assures us that he represents the southern division of Cow-shire. None of these modern organs has a representation that has any thought-out proportion or relationship to that of the many other organs in our intricate modern State. It is only by assuming that there is a special national providence that we can assume that our governing apparatus can be anything like the best possible for the Empire; and the whole mass of our present discontents argues that it is not so. Upon three distinct lines, we submit, we can challenge these existing arrangements and point to conceivably better ones.

### LOCAL REFERENCE

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The first of these defects of the British Parliament is this question of local reference. We assert that, for a large and increasing number of citizens in a modern State, locality has only a residential interest, and often even that residential interest is transitory, and that the major aspect of the existences of such citizens is towards some trade or industry or occupation of national dimensions. The real 'estates' of a modern community are cut up politically into kaleidoscopic fragments and distributed among topographical constituencies. We have on the one hand 'representatives' of such places as Croydon or Hampstead or Battersea, whose inhabitants have scarcely anything in common except a postal address, and, on the other hand, if we want to deal in any satisfactory way with the transport workers or railway servants or medical men or electrical engineers, we have to go outside the formal Constitution altogether and discuss matters with trade and professional organizations that have neither legislative nor administrative power, that may not represent the entire profession or industry concerned, that are often mere organizations for restricting work and raising wages without any tradition or sense of public function. Yet straight ahead of us is a time in which it is manifest we must either reconstruct our economic life on a larger scale or succumb to a better-organized State, and the only means at present in existence for the vast discussions and agreements between employer and employed that are necessary to this reconstruction are these not very efficient and essentially defensive labour organizations on the one hand, and the voluntary organizations of employers on the other; and between these two, to direct their cooperation and adjudicate, is this old-fashioned Legislature, with its obsolete reference to localities and to the social grades of the Feudal Age and its admitted practical ineptitude. Perhaps the shortest way to economic reorganization may lie in lifting most of the task out of the scope of the Legislature altogether, in largely increasing the powers and scope and responsibilities of the great labour organizations on the one hand, in bringing both them and the national councils of the employers and proprietors of the great industries into the structure of the Constitution, in insisting upon joint conferences and joint action, and in leaving Parliament little more than the power to endorse or veto the outcome of these joint deliberations. But this will be to set up an industrial state beside the feudal state. On the face of it this may seem to offer a less serious break with older forms and habits than an attempt to supersede or supplement the existing methods of Parliamentary representation by national occupational constituencies; but that is not our opinion. In reality we believe it is a far more dangerous method than to attempt a courageous reform of representational method. The increasing disharmony between Parliament and our urgent national needs, due to this persistence of local reference when the whole drift of things is towards broadening the interests of every citizen who matters beyond the limits of any localized constituency, does not by any means exhaust the tale of our legislative inefficiency. There is next the unwieldiness of both Houses, and thirdly there is that persistent tendency to a bilateral system of conflict about false issues which is denounced as the 'party system.'

With regard to the former point we are dealing once again with another instance of that blindness to the question of scale on the part of the British which has been the burden of all these papers. It would seem to be the most obvious of propositions that there must be in legislative assemblies, as in other bodies, a size for maximum efficiency. But it is a proposition extraordinarily disregarded. Above a certain optimum of size the numbers must become too great for attention and discussion, and the assembly begin to tail out towards a mob, to lose will-power and intention, and obey the laws of mob psychology; below it, the assembly must be insufficiently various and representative. Yet our House of Commons seems to have been put together with an entire disregard of any such possibilities, and new peer after new peer has been added to the House of Lords without any thought whatever of the mechanical effect of these additions upon the vigour of the whole.

### THE PARTY SYSTEM.

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Much graver than its unwieldiness is the persistent bilaterality of our Legislature. Party has turned legislation into a duel, and party interests and party loyalty have blinded men to the future dangers and opportunities of the Empire. But why has party been able to do this, and whence does party derive its strength? This is a question to which an answer exists, but it is a question very rarely answered. We read a great deal of rather clamorous matter in the popular Press about the abolition of the party system, but a careful examination of such utterances reveals no project of how the party system is to be abolished. A small but active section of journalists inspired by Mr. Sidney Low's very able criticisms (in his Governance of England) of our methods of government has made his views its own, has claimed them as its own, and used them as a basis for much aimless rhetoric. But no attempt whatever has been made to analyse the processes that have given and must give a Legislature this bilateral character. To do so would have been to abandon irresistible opportunities for indulgence in conspiracy mania. It was more romantic and attractive to present party as a conspiracy of the rich. A soberer inquiry into this defect, as into most defects of our British system, will go far to restore our faith in British human nature and in the remediable quality of our difficulties. The true source of Parliamentary bilaterality had been analysed in anticipation half a century ago.

From the days of Hare and John Stuart Mill onward there has been a progressive analysis of the character and effects of voting methods, and it may now be taken as demonstrated that, wherever the common and obvious method of giving each voter in any election a single non-transferable vote is adopted, it follows necessarily that there can be no real decision between more than two candidates, and further it follows that the affairs decided by such voting will gravitate continually into the control of two antagonized party organizations. This is, of course, tame stuff compared with heady shoutings and accusations against plutocrats, rich Jews, privileged families, and party funds, but it is the simple essential of this question. Voting, like any other process, is subject to scientific treatment; there is one right method of voting which automatically destroys bilaterality, and there is a considerable variety of wrong methods amenable to manipulation and fruitful of corruption and enfeebling complications. The sane method of voting is known as Proportional Representation with large constituencies and the single transferable vote, and it is as reasonable and necessary that the country should adopt it as soon as possible as that it should adopt the right types of aeroplane and the best sorts of gun. The advantage of this method is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of demonstration; it needs but an hour or so of inquiry to convince any intelligent person of its merit and desirability and of the fatal and incurable mischiefs of any other method. It is the custom of the melodramatic school of political writers to speak of Proportional Representation as a 'fad': but it is no more a fad to want the methods of proportional representation in Parliamentary election than it is to want copper wire instead of ginger-beer bottle wire in an electrical installation, or wheaten flour instead of chaff in a loaf. With it Parliamentary institutions will work freely; without it they will certainly choke and block in any great emergency.

Party manipulation and the political irrelevance due to our method of voting, unwieldiness due to our national disregard of the importance of scale, and a complete failure to shape out or present in any way the real conflicting interests and classes of a modern community, a failure due to the antiquity of the machine, these are the three categories of our Parliamentary failure. They are, so to speak, the mechanical defects of our government. They are continually preventing and perverting our national effort; they waste time and energy enormously, while before us now lies a period wherein we cannot afford to waste either time or energy, when indeed nervelessness, evasiveness, and dilatoriness mean the certain downfall of our Empire.

The cure of these mechanical defects, we would assert, constitutes a group of urgencies that can be considered apart from another set of problems that looms far more insistently upon the public imagination. These latter are the problems of Imperial reorganization, of Colonial representation, for example, upon an Imperial Council. Pursuing our scheme of a complete review in outline of a possible national and Imperial policy, we shall take these up in our next paper. Here we would claim only to have set out and established a statement of defects as a preliminary to this inquiry, and to have indicated cause for a change in the size of Parliament and in the method of electing representatives.

From: _The Elements Of Reconstruction._ (1916) 

## DEMOCRACY

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All the talk, all the aspiration and work that is making now towards this conception of a world securely at peace, under the direction of a League of Free Nations, has interwoven with it an idea that is often rather felt than understood, the idea of Democracy. Not only is justice to prevail between race and race and nation and nation, but also between man and man; there is to be a universal respect for human life throughout the earth; the world, in the words of President Wilson, is to be made "safe for democracy." I would like to subject that word to a certain scrutiny to see whether the things we are apt to think and assume about it correspond exactly with the feeling of the word. I would like to ask what, under modern conditions, does democracy mean, and whether we have got it now anywhere in the world in its fulness and completion.

And to begin with I must have a quarrel with the word itself. The eccentricities of modern education make us dependent for a number of our primary political terms upon those used by the thinkers of the small Greek republics of ancient times before those petty states collapsed, through sheer political ineptitude, before the Macedonians. They thought in terms of states so small that it was possible to gather all the citizens together for the purposes of legislation. These states were scarcely more than what we English might call sovereign urban districts. Fast communications were made by runners; even the policeman with a bicycle of the modern urban district was beyond the scope of the Greek imagination. There were no railways, telegraphs, telephones, books or newspapers, there was no need for the state to maintain a system of education, and the affairs of the state were so simple that they could be discussed and decided by the human voice and open voting in an assembly of all the citizens. That is what democracy meant. In Andorra, or perhaps in Canton Uri, such democracy may still be possible; in any other modern state it cannot exist. The opposite term to it was oligarchy, in which a small council of men controlled the affairs of the state. Oligarchy, narrowed down to one man, became monarchy. If you wished to be polite to an oligarchy you called it an aristocracy; if you wished to point out that a monarch was rather by way of being self-appointed, you called him a Tyrant. An oligarchy with a property qualification was a plutocracy.

Now the modern intelligence, being under a sort of magic slavery to the ancient Greeks, has to adapt all these terms to the problems of states so vast and complex that they have the same relation to the Greek states that the anatomy of a man has to the anatomy of a jellyfish. They are not only greater in extent and denser in population, but they are increasingly innervated by more and more rapid means of communication and excitement. In the classical past--except for such special cases as the feeding of Rome with Egyptian corn--trade was a traffic in luxuries or slaves, war a small specialized affair of infantry and horsemen in search of slaves and loot, and empire the exaction of tribute. The modern state must conduct its enormous businesses through a system of ministries; its vital interests go all round the earth; nothing that any ancient Greek would have recognized as democracy is conceivable in a great modern state. It is absolutely necessary, if we are to get things clear in our minds about what democracy really means in relation to modern politics, first to make a quite fresh classification in order to find what items there really are to consider, and then to inquire which seem to correspond more or less closely in spirit with our ideas about ancient democracy.

Now there are two primary classes of idea about government in the modern world depending upon our conception of the political capacity of the common man. We may suppose he is a microcosm, with complete ideas and wishes about the state and the world, or we may suppose that he isn't. We may believe that the common man can govern, or we may believe that he can't. We may think further along the first line that he is so wise and good and right that we only have to get out of his way for him to act rightly and for the good of all mankind, or we may doubt it. And if we doubt that we may still believe that, though perhaps "you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time," the common man, expressing himself by a majority vote, still remains the secure source of human wisdom. But next, while we may deny this universal distribution of political wisdom, we may, if we are sufficiently under the sway of modern ideas about collective psychology, believe that it is necessary to poke up the political indifference and inability of the common man as much as possible, to thrust political ideas and facts upon him, to incite him to a watchful and critical attitude towards them, and above all to secure his assent to the proceedings of the able people who are managing public affairs. Or finally, we may treat him as a thing to be ruled and not consulted. Let me at this stage make out a classificatory diagram of these elementary ideas of government in a modern country.

CLASS I.   
It is supposed that the common man _can_ govern:   
(1) without further organization (Anarchy);   
(2) through a majority vote by delegates.

CLASS II.   
It is supposed that the common man cannot govern, and that government therefore must be through the agency of Able Persons who may be classified under one of the following sub-heads, either as   
(1) persons elected by the common man because he believes them to be persons able to govern--just as he chooses his doctors as persons able to secure health, and his electrical engineers as persons able to attend to his tramways, lighting, etc., etc.;   
(2) persons of a special class, as, for example, persons born and educated to rule (e.g. Aristocracy), or rich business adventurers (Plutocracy) who rule without consulting the common man at all.   
To which two sub-classes we may perhaps add a sort of intermediate stage between them, namely:   
(3) persons elected by a special class of voter.   
Monarchy may be either a special case of Class II.(1), (2) or (3), in which the persons who rule have narrowed down in number to one person, and the duration of monarchy may be either for life or a term of years.

These two classes and the five sub-classes cover, I believe, all the elementary political types in our world. Now in the constitution of a modern state, because of the conflict and confusion of ideas, all or most of these five sub-classes may usually be found intertwined. The British constitution, for instance, is a complicated tangle of arrangements, due to a struggle between the ideas of Class I.(2), Class II.(3), tending to become Class II.(1) and Class II.(2) in both its aristocratic and monarchist forms. The American constitution is largely dominated by Class I.(2), from which it breaks away in the case of the President to a short-term monarchist aspect of Class II.(1). I will not elaborate this classification further. I have made it here in order to render clear first, that what we moderns mean by democracy is not what the Greeks meant at all, that is to say, direct government by the assembly of all the citizens, and secondly and more important, that the word "democracy" is being used very largely in current discussion, so that it is impossible to say in any particular case whether the intention is Class I.(2) or Class II.(1), and that we have to make up our minds whether we mean, if I may coin two phrases, "delegate democracy" or "selective democracy," or some definite combination of these two, when we talk about "democracy," before we can get on much beyond a generous gesture of equality and enfranchisement towards our brother man. The word is being used, in fact, confusingly for these two quite widely different things.

Now, it seems to me that though there has been no very clear discussion of the issue between those two very opposite conceptions of democracy, largely because of the want of proper distinctive terms, there has nevertheless been a wide movement of public opinion away from "delegate democracy" and towards "selective democracy." People have gone on saying "democracy," while gradually changing its meaning from the former to the latter. It is notable in Great Britain, for example, that while there has been no perceptible diminution in our faith in democracy, there has been a growing criticism of "party" and "politicians," and a great weakening in the power and influence of representatives and representative institutions. There has been a growing demand for personality and initiative in elected persons. The press, which was once entirely subordinate politically to parliamentary politics, adopts an attitude towards parliament and party leaders nowadays which would have seemed inconceivable insolence in the days of Lord Palmerston. And there has been a vigorous agitation in support of electoral methods which are manifestly calculated to subordinate "delegated" to "selected" men.

The movement for electoral reform in Great Britain at the present time is one of quite fundamental importance in the development of modern democracy. The case of the reformers is that heretofore modern democracy has not had a fair opportunity of showing its best possibilities to the world, because the methods of election have persistently set aside the better types of public men, or rather of would-be public men, in favour of mere party hacks. That is a story common to Britain and the American democracies, but in America it was expressed in rather different terms and dealt with in a less analytical fashion than it has been in Great Britain. It was not at first clearly understood that the failure of democracy to produce good government came through the preference of "delegated" over "selected" men, the idea of delegation did in fact dominate the minds of both electoral reformers and electoral conservatives alike, and the earlier stages of the reform movement in Great Britain were inspired not so much by the idea of getting a better type of representative as by the idea of getting a fairer representation of minorities. It was only slowly that the idea that sensible men do not usually belong to any political "party" took hold. It is only now being realized that what sensible men desire in a member of parliament is honour and capacity rather than a mechanical loyalty to a "platform." They do not want to dictate to their representative; they want a man they can trust as their representative. In the fifties and sixties of the last century, in which this electoral reform movement began and the method of Proportional Representation was thought out, it was possible for the reformers to work untroubled upon the assumption that if a man was not necessarily born a   
"... little Liber-al,   
or else a little Conservative,"   
he must at least be a Liberal-Unionist or a Conservative Free-Trader. But seeking a fair representation for party minorities, these reformers produced a system of voting at once simple and incapable of manipulation, that leads straight, not to the representation of small parties, but to a type of democratic government by selected best men.

Before giving the essential features of that system, it may be well to state in its simplest form the evils at which the reform aims. An election, the reformers point out, is not the simple matter it appears to be at the first blush. Methods of voting can be manipulated in various ways, and nearly every method has its own liability to falsification. We may take for illustration the commonest, simplest case--the case that is the perplexity of every clear-thinking voter under British or American conditions--the case of a constituency in which every elector has one vote, and which returns one representative to Parliament. The naive theory on which people go is that all the possible candidates are put up, that each voter votes for the one he likes best, and that the best man wins. The bitter experience is that hardly ever are there more than two candidates, and still more rarely is either of these the best man possible. Suppose, for example, the constituency is mainly Conservative. A little group of pothouse politicians, wire-pullers, busybodies, local journalists, and small lawyers, working for various monetary interests, have "captured" the local Conservative organization. They have time and energy to capture it, because they have no other interest in life except that. It is their "business," and honest men are busy with other duties. For reasons that do not appear these local "workers" put up an unknown Mr. Goldbug as the official Conservative candidate. He professes a generally Conservative view of things, but few people are sure of him and few people trust him. Against him the weaker (and therefore still more venal) Liberal organization now puts up a Mr. Kentshire (formerly Wurstberg) to represent the broader thought and finer generosities of the English mind. A number of Conservative gentlemen, generally too busy about their honest businesses to attend the party "smokers" and the party cave, realize suddenly that they want Goldbug hardly more than they want Wurstberg. They put up their long-admired, trusted, and able friend Mr. Sanity as an Independent Conservative.

Every one knows the trouble that follows. Mr. Sanity is "going to split the party vote." The hesitating voter is told, with considerable truth, that a vote given for Mr. Sanity is a vote given for Wurstberg. At any price the constituency does not want Wurstberg. So at the eleventh hour Mr. Sanity is induced to withdraw, and Mr. Goldbug goes into Parliament to misrepresent this constituency. And so with most constituencies, and the result is a legislative body consisting largely of men of unknown character and obscure aims, whose only credential is the wearing of a party label. They come into parliament not to forward the great interests they ostensibly support, but with an eye to the railway jobbery, corporation business, concessions and financial operations that necessarily go on in and about the national legislature. That in its simplest form is the dilemma of democracy. The problem that has confronted modern democracy since its beginning has not really been the representation of organized minorities--they are very well able to look after themselves-- _but the protection of the unorganized mass of busily occupied, fairly intelligent men from the tricks of the specialists who work the party machines._ We know Mr. Sanity, we want Mr. Sanity, but we are too busy to watch the incessant intrigues to oust him in favour of the obscurely influential people, politically docile, who are favoured by the organization. We want an organizer-proof method of voting. It is in answer to this demand, as the outcome of a most careful examination of the ways in which voting may be protected from the exploitation of those who _work_ elections, that the method of Proportional Representation with a single transferable vote has been evolved. It is organizer-proof. It defies the caucus. If you do not like Mr. Goldbug you can put up and vote for Mr. Sanity, giving Mr. Goldbug your second choice, in the most perfect confidence that in any case your vote cannot help to return Mr. Wurstberg. With Proportional Representation with a single transferable vote (this specification is necessary, because there are also the inferior imitations of various election-riggers figuring as proportional representation), it is _impossible to prevent the effective candidature of independent men of repute beside the official candidates._

The method of voting under the Proportional Representation system has been ignorantly represented as complex. It is really almost ideally simple. You mark the list of candidates with numbers in the order of your preference. For example, you believe A to be absolutely the best man for parliament; you mark him 1. But B you think is the next best man; you mark him 2. That means that if A gets an enormous amount of support, ever so many more votes than he requires for his return, your vote will not be wasted. Only so much of your vote as is needed will go to A; the rest will go to B. Or, on the other hand, if A has so little support that his chances are hopeless, you will not have thrown your vote away upon him; it will go to B. Similarly you may indicate a third, a fourth, and a fifth choice; if you like you may mark every name on your paper with a number to indicate the order of your preferences. And that is all the voter has to do. The reckoning and counting of the votes presents not the slightest difficulty to any one used to the business of computation. Silly and dishonest men, appealing to still sillier audiences, have got themselves and their audiences into humorous muddles over this business, but the principles are perfectly plain and simple. Let me state them here; they can be fully and exactly stated, with various ornaments, comments, arguments, sarcastic remarks, and digressions, in seventy lines of this type. It will be evident that, in any election under this system, any one who has got a certain proportion of No. 1 votes will be elected. If, for instance, five people have to be elected and 20,000 voters vote, then any one who has got 4001 first votes or more _must_ be elected. 4001 votes is in that case enough to elect a candidate. This sufficient number of votes is called the _quota_ , and any one who has more than that number of votes has obviously got more votes than is needful for election. So, to begin with, the voting papers are classified according to their first votes, and any candidates who have got more than a quota of first votes are forthwith declared elected. But most of these elected men would under the old system waste votes because they would have too many; for manifestly a candidate who gets more than the quota of votes _needs only a fraction of each of these votes to return him_. If, for instance, he gets double the quota he needs only half each vote. He takes that fraction, therefore, under this new and better system, and the rest of each vote is entered on to No. 2 upon that voting paper. And so on. Now this is an extremely easy job for an accountant or skilled computer, and it is quite easily checked by any other accountant and skilled computer. A reader with a bad arithmetical education, ignorant of the very existence of such a thing as a slide rule, knowing nothing of account keeping, who thinks of himself working out the resultant fractions with a stumpy pencil on a bit of greasy paper in a bad light, may easily think of this transfer of fractions as a dangerous and terrifying process. It is, for a properly trained man, the easiest, exactest job conceivable. The Cash Register people will invent machines to do it for you while you wait. What happens, then, is that every candidate with more than a quota, beginning with the top candidate, sheds a fraction of each vote he has received, down the list, and the next one sheds his surplus fraction in the same way, and so on until candidates lower in the list, who are at first below the quota, fill up to it. When all the surplus votes of the candidates at the head of the list have been disposed of, then the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list are dealt with. The second votes on their voting papers are treated as whole votes and distributed up the list, and so on. It will be plain to the quick-minded that, towards the end, there will be a certain chasing about of little fractions of votes, and a slight modification of the quota due to voting papers having no second or third preferences marked upon them, a chasing about that it will be difficult for an untrained intelligence to follow. _But untrained intelligences are not required to follow it._ For the skilled computer these things offer no difficulty at all. And they are not difficulties of principle but of manipulation. One might as well refuse to travel in a taxicab until the driver had explained the magneto as refuse to accept the principle of Proportional Representation by the single transferable vote until one had remedied all the deficiencies of one's arithmetical education. The fundamental principle of the thing, that a candidate who gets more votes than he wants is made to hand on a fraction of each vote to the voter's second choice, and that a candidate whose chances are hopeless is made to hand on the whole vote to the voter's second choice, so that practically only a small number of votes are ineffective, is within the compass of the mind of a boy of ten.

But simple as this method is, it completely kills the organization and manipulation of voting. It completely solves the Goldbug-Wurstberg- Sanity problem. It is knave-proof--short of forging, stealing, or destroying voting papers. A man of repute, a leaderly man, may defy all the party organizations in existence and stand beside and be returned over the head of a worthless man, though the latter be smothered with party labels. That is the gist of this business. The difference in effect between Proportional Representation and the old method of voting must ultimately be to change the moral and intellectual quality of elected persons profoundly. People are only beginning to realize the huge possibilities of advance inherent in this change of political method. It means no less than a revolution from "delegate democracy" to "selective democracy."

Now, I will not pretend to be anything but a strong partizan in this matter. When I speak of "democracy" I mean "selective democracy." I believe that "delegate democracy" is already provably a failure in the world, and that the reason why to-day, after three and a half years of struggle, we are still fighting German autocracy and fighting with no certainty of absolute victory, is because the affairs of the three great Atlantic democracies have been largely in the hands not of selected men but of delegated men, men of intrigue and the party machine, of dodges rather than initiatives, second-rate men. When Lord Haldane, defending his party for certain insufficiencies in their preparation for the eventuality of the great war, pleaded that they had no "mandate" from the country to do anything of the sort, he did more than commit political suicide, he bore conclusive witness against the whole system which had made him what he was. Neither Britain nor France in this struggle has produced better statesmen nor better generals than the German autocracy. The British and French Foreign Offices are old monarchist organizations still. To this day the British and French politicians haggle and argue with the German ministers upon petty points and debating society advantages, smart and cunning, while the peoples perish. The one man who has risen to the greatness of this great occasion, the man who is, in default of any rival, rapidly becoming the leader of the world towards peace, is neither a delegate politician nor the choice of a monarch and his councillors. He is the one authoritative figure in these transactions whose mind has not been subdued either by long discipline in the party machine or by court intrigue, who has continued his education beyond those early twenties when the mind of the "budding politician" ceases to expand, who has thought, and thought things out, who is an educated man among dexterous under-educated specialists. By something very like a belated accident in the framing of the American constitution, the President of the United States is more in the nature of a selected man than any other conspicuous figure at the present time. He is specially elected by a special electoral college after an elaborate preliminary selection of candidates by the two great party machines. And be it remembered that Mr. Wilson is not the first great President the United States have had, he is one of a series of figures who tower over their European contemporaries. The United States have had many advantageous circumstances to thank for their present ascendancy in the world's affairs: isolation from militarist pressure for a century and a quarter, a vast virgin continent, plenty of land, freedom from centralization, freedom from titles and social vulgarities, common schools, a real democratic spirit in its people, and a great enthusiasm for universities; but no single advantage has been so great as this happy accident which has given it a specially selected man as its voice and figurehead in the world's affairs. In the average congressman, in the average senator, as Ostrogorski's great book so industriously demonstrated, the United States have no great occasion for pride. Neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives seem to rise above the level of the British Houses of Parliament, with a Government unable to control the rebel forces of Ulster, unable to promote or dismiss generals without an outcry, weakly amenable to the press, and terrifyingly incapable of great designs. It is to the United States of America we must look now if the world is to be made "safe for democracy." It is to the method of selection, as distinguished from delegation, that we must look if democracy is to be saved from itself.

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## THE RECENT STRUGGLE FOR PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION IN GREAT BRITAIN

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British political life resists cleansing with all the vigour of a dirty little boy. It is nothing to your politician that the economic and social organization of all the world, is strained almost to the pitch of collapse, and that it is vitally important to mankind that everywhere the whole will and intelligence of the race should be enlisted in the great tasks of making a permanent peace and reconstructing the shattered framework of society. These are remote, unreal considerations to the politician. What is the world to him? He has scarcely heard of it. He has been far too busy as a politician. He has been thinking of smart little tricks in the lobby and brilliant exploits at question time. He has been thinking of jobs and appointments, of whether Mr. Asquith is likely to "come back" and how far it is safe to bank upon L. G. His one supreme purpose is to keep affairs in the hands of his own specialized set, to keep the old obscure party game going, to rig his little tricks behind a vast, silly camouflage of sham issues, to keep out able men and disinterested men, the public mind, and the general intelligence, from any effective interference with his disastrous manipulations of the common weal. I do not see how any intelligent and informed man can have followed the recent debates in the House of Commons upon Proportional Representation without some gusts of angry contempt. They were the most pitiful and alarming demonstration of the intellectual and moral quality of British public life at the present time.

From the wire-pullers of the Fabian Society and from the party organizers of both Liberal and Tory party alike, and from the knowing cards, the pothouse shepherds, and jobbing lawyers who "work" the constituencies, comes the chief opposition to this straightening out of our electoral system so urgently necessary and so long overdue. They have fought it with a zeal and efficiency that is rarely displayed in the nation's interest. From nearly every outstanding man outside that little inner world of political shams and dodges, who has given any attention to the question, comes, on the other hand, support for this reform. Even the great party leaders, Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith, were in its favour. One might safely judge this question by considering who are the advocates on either side. But the best arguments for Proportional Representation arise out of its opponents' speeches, and to these I will confine my attention now. Consider Lord Harcourt--heir to the most sacred traditions of the party game--hurling scorn at a project that would introduce "faddists, mugwumps," and so on and so on--in fact independent thinking men--into the legislature. Consider the value of Lord Curzon's statement that London "rose in revolt" against the project. Do you remember that day, dear reader, when the streets of London boiled with passionate men shouting, "No Proportional Representation! Down with Proportional Representation"? You don't. Nor do I. But what happened was that the guinea-pigs and solicitors and nobodies, the party hacks who form the bulk of London's misrepresentation in the House of Commons, stampeded in terror against a proposal that threatened to wipe them out and replace them by known and responsible men. London, alas! does not seem to care how its members are elected. What Londoner knows anything about his member? Hundreds of thousands of Londoners do not even know which of the ridiculous constituencies into which the politicians have dismembered our London they are in. Only as I was writing this in my flat in St. James's Court, Westminster, did it occur to me to inquire who was representing me in the councils of the nation while I write....

After some slight difficulty I ascertained that my representative is a Mr. Burdett Coutts, who was, in the romantic eighties, Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett. And by a convenient accident I find that the other day he moved to reject the Proportional Representation Amendment made by the House of Lords to the Representation of the People Bill, so that I am able to look up the debate in Hansard and study my opinions as he represented them and this question at one and the same time. And, taking little things first, I am proud and happy to discover that the member for me was the only participator in the debate who, in the vulgar and reprehensible phrase, "threw a dead cat," or, in polite terms, displayed classical learning. My member said, " _Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_ ," with a rather graceful compliment to the Labour Conference at Nottingham. "I could not help thinking to myself," said my member, "that at that conference there must have been many men of sufficient classical reading to say to themselves, ' _Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes_.'" In which surmise he was quite right. Except perhaps for " _Tempus fugit_ ," " _verbum sap_.," " _Arma virumque_ ," and " _Quis custodiet_ ," there is no better known relic of antiquity. But my member went a little beyond my ideas when he said: "We are asked to enter upon a method of legislation which can bear no other description than that of law-making in the dark," because I think it can bear quite a lot of other descriptions. This was, however, the artistic prelude to a large, vague, gloomy dissertation about nothing very definite, a muddling up of the main question with the minor issue of a schedule of constituencies involved in the proposal.

The other parts of my member's speech do not, I confess, fill me with the easy confidence I would like to feel in my proxy. Let me extract a few gems of eloquence from the speech of this voice which speaks for me, and give also the only argument he advanced that needs consideration. "History repeats itself," he said, "very often in curious ways as to facts, but generally with very different results." That, honestly, I like. It is a sentence one can read over several times. But he went on to talk of the entirely different scheme for minority representation, which was introduced into the Reform Bill of 1867, and there I am obliged to part company with him. That was a silly scheme for giving two votes to each voter in a three-member constituency. It has about as much resemblance to the method of scientific voting under discussion as a bath-chair has to an aeroplane. "But that measure of minority representation led to a baneful invention," my representative went on to say, "and left behind it a hateful memory in the Birmingham caucus. I well remember that when I stood for Parliament thirty-two years ago _we had no better platform weapon than repeating over and over again in a sentence the name of Mr. Schnadhorst_ , and I am not sure that it would not serve the same purpose now. Under that system the work of the caucus was, of course, far simpler than it will be if this system ever comes into operation. All the caucus had to do under that measure was to divide the electors into three groups and with three candidates, A., B., and C., to order one group to vote for A. and B., another for B. and C., and the third for A. and C., and they carried the whole of their candidates and kept them for many years. But the multiplicity of ordinal preferences, second, third, fourth, fifth, up to tenth, which the single transferable vote system would involve, will require a more scientific handling in party interests, and neither party will be able to face an election with any hope of success without the assistance of the most drastic form of caucus and _without its orders being carried out by the electors_."

Now, I swear by Heaven that, lowly creature as I am, a lost vote, a nothing, voiceless and helpless in public affairs, I am not going to stand the imputation that that sort of reasoning represents the average mental quality of Westminster--outside Parliament, that is. Most of my neighbours in St. James's Court, for example, have quite large pieces of head above their eyebrows. Read these above sentences over and ponder their significance--so far as they have any significance. Never mind my keen personal humiliation at this display of the mental calibre of my representative, but consider what the mental calibre of a House must be that did not break out into loud guffaws at such a passage. The line of argument is about as lucid as if one reasoned that because one can break a window with a stone it is no use buying a telescope. And it remains entirely a matter for speculation whether my member is arguing that a caucus _can_ rig an election carried on under the Proportional Representation system or that it cannot. At the first blush it seems to read as if he intended the former. But be careful! Did he? Let me suggest that in that last sentence he really expresses the opinion that it cannot. It can be read either way. Electors under modern conditions are not going to obey the "orders" of even the "most drastic caucus"--whatever a "drastic caucus" may be. Why should they? In the Birmingham instance it was only a section of the majority, voting by wards, in an election on purely party lines, which "obeyed" in order to keep out the minority party candidate. I think myself that my member's mind waggled. Perhaps his real thoughts shone out through an argument not intended to betray them. What he did say as much as he said anything was that under Proportional Representation, elections are going to be very troublesome and difficult for party candidates. If that was his intention, then, after all, I forgive him much. I think that and more than that. I think that they are going to make party candidates who are merely party candidates impossible. That is exactly what we reformers are after. Then I shall get a representative more to my taste than Mr. Burdett Coutts.

But let me turn now to the views of other people's representatives.

Perhaps the most damning thing ever said against the present system, damning because of its empty absurdity, was uttered by Sir Thomas Whittaker. He was making the usual exaggerations of the supposed difficulties of the method. He said English people didn't like such "complications." They like a "straight fight between two men." Think of it! A straight fight! For more than a quarter-century I have been a voter, usually with votes in two or three constituencies, and never in all that long political life have I seen a single straight fight in an election, but only the dismallest sham fights it is possible to conceive. Thrice only in all that time have I cast a vote for a man whom I respected. On all other occasions the election that mocked my citizenship was either an arranged walk-over for one party or the other, or I had a choice between two unknown persons, mysteriously selected as candidates by obscure busy people with local interests in the constituency. Every intelligent person knows that this is the usual experience of a free and independent voter in England. The "fight" of an ordinary Parliamentary election in England is about as "straight" as the business of a thimble rigger.

And consider just what these "complications" are of which the opponents of Proportional Representation chant so loudly. In the sham election of to-day, which the politicians claim gives them a mandate to muddle up our affairs, the voter puts a x against the name of the least detestable of the two candidates that are thrust upon him. Under the Proportional Representation method there will be a larger constituency, a larger list of candidates, and a larger number of people to be elected, and he will put 1 against the name of the man he most wants to be elected, 2 against his second choice, and if he likes he may indulge in marking a third, or even a further choice. He may, if he thinks fit, number off the whole list of candidates. That is all he will have to do. That is the stupendous intricacy of the method that flattens out the minds of Lord Harcourt and Sir Thomas Whittaker. And as for the working of it, if you must go into that, all that happens is that if your first choice gets more votes than he needs for his return, he takes only the fraction of your vote that he requires, and the rest of the vote goes on to your Number 2. If 2 isn't in need of all of it, the rest goes on to 3. And so on. That is the profound mathematical mystery, that is the riddle beyond the wit of Westminster, which overpowers these fine intelligences and sets them babbling of "senior wranglers." Each time there is a debate on this question in the House, member after member hostile to the proposal will play the ignorant fool and pretend to be confused himself, and will try to confuse others, by deliberately clumsy statements of these most elementary ideas. Surely if there were no other argument for a change of type in the House, these poor knitted brows, these public perspirations of the gentry who "cannot understand P.R.," should suffice. But let us be just; it is not all pretence; the inability of Mr. Austen Chamberlain to grasp the simple facts before him was undoubtedly genuine. He followed Mr. Burdett Coutts, in support of Mr. Burdett Coutts, with the most Christian disregard of the nasty things Mr. Burdett Coutts had seemed to be saying about the Birmingham caucus from which he sprang. He had a childish story to tell of how voters would not give their first votes to their real preferences, because they would assume he "would get in in any case"--God knows why. Of course on the assumption that the voter behaves like an idiot, anything is possible. And never apparently having heard of fractions, this great Birmingham leader was unable to understand that a voter who puts 1 against a candidate's name votes for that candidate anyhow. He could not imagine any feeling on the part of the voter that No. 1 was his man. A vote is a vote to this simple rather than lucid mind, a thing one and indivisible. Read this--

"Birmingham," he said, referring to a Schedule under consideration, "is to be cut into three constituencies of four members each. I am to have a constituency of 100,000 electors, I suppose. How many thousand inhabitants I do not know. _Every effort will be made to prevent any of those electors knowing--in fact, it would be impossible for any of them to know--whether they voted for me or not, or at any rate whether they effectively voted for me or not, or whether the vote which they wished to give to me was really diverted to somebody else_."

Only in a house of habitually inattentive men could any one talk such nonsense without reproof, but I look in vain through Hansard's record of this debate for a single contemptuous reference to Mr. Chamberlain's obtuseness. And the rest of his speech was a lamentable account of the time and trouble he would have to spend upon his constituents if the new method came in. He was the perfect figure of the parochially important person in a state of defensive excitement. No doubt his speech appealed to many in the House.

Of course Lord Harcourt was quite right in saying that the character of the average House of Commons member will be changed by Proportional Representation. It will. It will make the election of obscure and unknown men, of carpet-bag candidates who work a constituency as a hawker works a village, of local pomposities and village-pump "leaders" almost impossible. It will replace such candidates by better known and more widely known men. It will make the House of Commons so much the more a real gathering of the nation, so much the more a house of representative men. (Lord Harcourt's "faddists and mugwumps.") And it is perfectly true as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (also an opponent) declares, that Proportional Representation means constituencies so big that it will be impossible for a poor man to cultivate and work them. That is unquestionable. But, mark another point, it will also make it useless, as Mr. Chamberlain has testified, for rich men to cultivate and work them. All this cultivating and working, all this going about and making things right with this little jobber here, that contractor there, all the squaring of small political clubs and organizations, all the subscription blackmail and charity bribery, that now makes a Parliamentary candidature so utterly rotten an influence upon public life, will be killed dead by Proportional Representation. You cannot job men into Parliament by Proportional Representation. Proportional Representation lets in the outsider. It lets in the common, unassigned voter who isn't in the local clique. That is the clue to nearly all this opposition of the politicians. It makes democracy possible for the first time in modern history. And that poor man of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's imagination, instead of cadging about a constituency in order to start politician, will have to make good in some more useful way--as a leader of the workers in their practical affairs, for example--before people will hear of him and begin to believe in him.

The opposition to Proportional Representation of Mr. Sidney Webb and his little circle is a trifle more "scientific" in tone than these naive objections of the common run of antagonist, but underlying it is the same passionate desire to keep politics a close game for the politician and to bar out the politically unspecialized man. There is more conceit and less jobbery behind the criticisms of this type of mind. It is an opposition based on the idea that the common man is a fool who does not know what is good for him. So he has to be stampeded. Politics, according to this school, is a sort of cattle-driving.

The Webbites do not deny the broad facts of the case. Our present electoral system, with our big modern constituencies of thousands of voters, leads to huge turnovers of political power with a relatively small shifting of public opinion. It makes a mock of public opinion by caricature, and Parliament becomes the distorting mirror of the nation. Under some loud false issue a few score of thousands of votes turn over, and in goes this party or that with a big sham majority. This the Webbites admit. But they applaud it. It gives us, they say, "a strong Government." Public opinion, the intelligent man outside the House, is ruled out of the game. He has no power of intervention at all. The artful little Fabian politicians rub their hands and say, " _Now_ we can get to work with the wires! No one can stop us." And when the public complains of the results, there is always the repartee, " _You_ elected them." But the Fabian psychology is the psychology of a very small group of pedants who believe that fair ends may be reached by foul means. It is much easier and more natural to serve foul ends by foul means. In practice it is not tricky benevolence but tricky bargaining among the interests that will secure control of the political wires. That is a bad enough state of affairs in ordinary times, but in times of tragic necessity like the present men will not be mocked in this way. Life is going to be very intense in the years ahead of us. If we go right on to another caricature Parliament, with perhaps half a hundred leading men in it and the rest hacks and nobodies, the baffled and discontented outsiders in the streets may presently be driven to rioting and the throwing of bombs. Unless, indeed, the insurrection of the outsiders takes a still graver form, and the Press, which has ceased entirely to be a Party Press in Great Britain, helps some adventurous Prime Minister to flout and set aside the lower House altogether. There is neither much moral nor much physical force behind the House of Commons at the present time.

The argument of the Fabian opponents to Proportional Representation is frankly that the strongest Government is got in a House of half a hundred or fewer leading men, with the rest of the Parliament driven sheep. But the whole mischief of the present system is that the obscure members of Parliament are not sheep; they are a crowd of little-minded, second-rate men just as greedy and eager and self-seeking as any of us. They vote straight indeed on all the main party questions, they obey their Whips like sheep then; but there is a great bulk of business in Parliament outside the main party questions, and obedience is not without its price. These are matters vitally affecting our railways and ships and communications generally, the food and health of the people, armaments, every sort of employment, the appointment of public servants, the everyday texture of all our lives. Then the nobody becomes somebody, the party hack gets busy, the rat is in the granary....

In these recent debates in the House of Commons one can see every stock trick of the wire-puller in operation. Particularly we have the old dodge of the man who is "in theory quite in sympathy with Proportional Representation, but ..." It is, he declares regretfully, too late. It will cause delay. Difficult to make arrangements. Later on perhaps. And so on. It is never too late for a vital issue. Upon the speedy adoption of Proportional Representation depends, as Mr. Balfour made plain in an admirable speech, whether the great occasions of the peace and after the peace are to be handled by a grand council of all that is best and most leaderlike in the nation, or whether they are to be left to a few leaders, apparently leading, but really profoundly swayed by the obscure crowd of politicians and jobbers behind them. Are the politicians to hamper and stifle us in this supreme crisis of our national destinies or are we British peoples to have a real control of our own affairs in this momentous time? Are men of light and purpose to have a voice in public affairs or not? Proportional Representation is supremely a test question. It is a question that no adverse decision in the House of Commons can stifle. There are too many people now who grasp its importance and significance. Every one who sets a proper value upon purity in public life and the vitality of democratic institutions will, I am convinced, vote and continue to vote across every other question against the antiquated, foul, and fraudulent electoral methods that have hitherto robbed democracy of three-quarters of its efficiency.

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## THE STUDY AND PROPAGANDA OF DEMOCRACY

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In the preceding chapter I have dealt with the discussion of Proportional Representation in the British House of Commons in order to illustrate the intellectual squalor amidst which public affairs have to be handled at the present time, even in a country professedly "democratic." I have taken this one discussion as a sample to illustrate the present imperfection of our democratic instrument. All over the world, in every country, great multitudes of intelligent and serious people are now inspired by the idea of a new order of things in the world, of a world-wide establishment of peace and mutual aid between nation and nation and man and man. But, chiefly because of the elementary crudity of existing electoral methods, hardly anywhere at present, except at Washington, do these great ideas and this world-wide will find expression. Amidst the other politicians and statesmen of the world President Wilson towers up with an effect almost divine. But it is no ingratitude to him to say that he is not nearly so exceptional a being among educated men as he is among the official leaders of mankind. Everywhere now one may find something of the Wilson purpose and intelligence, but nearly everywhere it is silenced or muffled or made ineffective by the political advantage of privileged or of violent and adventurous inferior men. He is "one of us," but it is his good fortune to have got his head out of the sack that is about the heads of most of us. In the official world, in the world of rulers and representatives and "statesmen," he almost alone, speaks for the modern intelligence.

This general stifling of the better intelligence of the world and its possible release to expression and power, seems to me to be the fundamental issue underlying all the present troubles of mankind. We cannot get on while everywhere fools and vulgarians hold the levers that can kill, imprison, silence and starve men. We cannot get on with false government and we cannot get on with mob government; we must have right government. The intellectual people of the world have a duty of co-operation they have too long neglected. The modernization of political institutions, the study of these institutions until we have worked out and achieved the very best and most efficient methods whereby the whole community of mankind may work together under the direction of its chosen intelligences, is the common duty of every one who has a brain for the service. And before everything else we have to realize this crudity and imperfection in what we call "democracy" at the present time. Democracy is still chiefly an aspiration, it is a spirit, it is an idea; for the most part its methods are still to seek. And still more is this "League of Free Nations" as yet but an aspiration. Let us not underrate the task before us. Only the disinterested devotion of hundreds of thousands of active brains in school, in pulpit, in book and press and assembly can ever bring these redeeming conceptions down to the solid earth to rule.

All round the world there is this same obscuration of the real intelligence of men. In Germany, human good will and every fine mind are subordinated to political forms that have for a mouthpiece a Chancellor with his brains manifestly addled by the theories of _Welt-Politik_ and the Bismarckian tradition, and for a figurehead a mad Kaiser. Nevertheless there comes even from Germany muffled cries for a new age. A grinning figure like a bloodstained Punch is all that speaks for the best brains in Bulgaria. Yes. We Western allies know all that by heart; but, after all, the immediate question for each one of us is, " _What speaks for me?_ " So far as official political forms go I myself am as ineffective as any right-thinking German or Bulgarian could possibly be. I am more ineffective than a Galician Pole or a Bohemian who votes for his nationalist representative. Politically I am a negligible item in the constituency of this Mr. Burdett Coutts into whose brain we have been peeping. Politically I am less than a waistcoat button on that quaint figure. And that is all I am--except that I revolt. I have written of it so far as if it were just a joke. But indeed bad and foolish political institutions cannot be a joke. Sooner or later they prove themselves to be tragedy. This war is that. It is yesterday's lazy, tolerant, "sense of humour" wading out now into the lakes of blood it refused to foresee.

It is absurd to suppose that anywhere to-day the nationalisms, the suspicions and hatreds, the cants and policies, and dead phrases that sway men represent the current intelligence of mankind. They are merely the evidences of its disorganization. Even now we _know_ we could do far better. Give mankind but a generation or so of peace and right education and this world could mock at the poor imaginations that conceived a millennium. But we have to get intelligences together, we have to canalize thought before it can work and produce its due effects. To that end, I suppose, there has been a vast amount of mental activity among us political "negligibles." For my own part I have thought of the idea of God as the banner of human unity and justice, and I have made some tentatives in that direction, but men, I perceive, have argued themselves mean and petty about religion. At the word "God" passions bristle. The word "God" does not unite men, it angers them. But I doubt if God cares greatly whether we call Him God or no. His service is the service of man. This double idea of the League of Free Nations, linked with the idea of democracy as universal justice, is free from the jealousy of the theologians and great enough for men to unite upon everywhere. I know how warily one must reckon with the spite of the priest, but surely these ideas may call upon the teachers of all the great world religions for their support. The world is full now of confused propaganda, propaganda of national ideas, of traditions of hate, of sentimental and degrading loyalties, of every sort of error that divides and tortures and slays mankind. All human institutions are made of propaganda, are sustained by propaganda and perish when it ceases; they must be continually explained and re-explained to the young and the negligent. And for this new world of democracy and the League of Free Nations to which all reasonable men are looking, there must needs be the greatest of all propagandas. For that cause every one must become a teacher and a missionary. "Persuade to it and make the idea of it and the necessity for it plain," that is the duty of every school teacher, every tutor, every religious teacher, every writer, every lecturer, every parent, every trusted friend throughout the world. For it, too, every one must become a student, must go on with the task of making vague intentions into definite intentions, of analyzing and destroying obstacles, of mastering the ten thousand difficulties of detail....

I am a man who looks now towards the end of life; fifty-one years have I scratched off from my calendar, another slips by, and I cannot tell how many more of the sparse remainder of possible years are really mine. I live in days of hardship and privation, when it seems more natural to feel ill than well; without holidays or rest or peace; friends and the sons of my friends have been killed; death seems to be feeling always now for those I most love; the newspapers that come in to my house tell mostly of blood and disaster, of drownings and slaughterings, of cruelties and base intrigues. Yet never have I been so sure that there is a divinity in man and that a great order of human life, a reign of justice and world-wide happiness, of plenty, power, hope, and gigantic creative effort, lies close at hand. Even now we have the science and the ability available for a universal welfare, though it is scattered about the world like a handful of money dropped by a child; even now there exists all the knowledge that is needed to make mankind universally free and human life sweet and noble. We need but the faith for it, and it is at hand; we need but the courage to lay our hands upon it and in a little space of years it can be ours.

## POLITICS AS A PUBLIC NUISANCE

1.12.1923

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IN the United States of America they know when their elections are coming, and prepare for them; in Great Britain they come unheralded, like earthquakes and tidal waves. They may come and come again; there is no period of immunity.

It is only yesterday that in Great Britain we were all speculating about this Mr. Baldwin, who had become Prime Minister. What was he? Where had he come from? Nobody knew. From the first he seemed to share our doubts about himself. He hid as much as possible behind a big, big, manly pipe, and made wise little speeches about nothing in particular at colleges and boys' schools. He claimed to be a cousin of Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Now he seems to have given way to panic at the conspicuousness of his position. The European situation is frightful, and the state of affairs at home is miserable; and I think he has plunged this country into all the expense and confusion of a General Election, in the hope of getting back to the old smoking-room at home, wherever it is, and tranquillity.

Except in Tasmania and Ireland, where they have Proportional Representation and an approach to political sanity, all the elections of the English-speaking democracies are profoundly silly affairs. The common voter hasn't a dog's chance of expressing his real opinion of things. Some organisations or other put up a couple of candidates for his constituency, and he votes for the one associated with the political leaders he dislikes and distrusts least. When the issues are manifold, as they are in Britain now, the results may be preposterous. They may fail altogether to indicate the feeling of the country about any public question at all. The voter is generally in the case of a man who wants to go shooting, and is confronted with the choice of taking the family Bible and some cartridges, or a boiled fowl and a gun.

The cardinal fact of the contest is that France is destroying the economic life of Central Europe, with which the prosperity of Great Britain is bound up. Great Britain is congested with unemployed, before whom there does not seem to be any prospect of employment. In the face of this Mr. Baldwin proposes tariffs to make food and everything dearer without increasing the purchasing power of any but the very rich; and Mr. Ramsay MacDonald proposes a levy on large fortunes. Mr. Asquith, to whom Mr. Churchill the anti-Bolshevik and Mr. Lloyd George have rallied, raises, as I have already noted in these articles, the banner of Free Trade—although Free Trade is already in operation in Great Britain without conspicuous success. And nobody says anything in particular about France.

Under these circumstances anything may happen. Exaggerated estimates of the effect of the tariff upon food prices will be used to scare the struggling voter, and particularly the women, against Protection, and ¦—as the Labour Party has no Press worth talking about—tremendous lies will be told about the Capital Levy. It will be represented as a raid upon the savings bank deposits of the servant girl and the children's money-boxes, although as a matter of fact it is not to touch any fortune under five thousand pounds, and only begins to press heavily upon twenty thousand and upward. The Labour leaders, being for the most part respectable but inaudible men, will never get that over to the public in time. And in the ensuing panic and scrimmage it is quite possible that that extraordinary old omnibus, the Liberal Party, with Mr. Asquith the elder statesman, Mr. Churchill the junker, Mr. Lloyd George the rather world- stained democrat, Sir John Simon, Mr. Asquith's once prospective successor, and a miscellany of other people, pledged really to no more than the negative policy of no Protection and no Capital Levy, will make quite a respectable run and get quite a large proportion of its four hundred odd passengers into Westminster. And what they will do there Heaven knows. Possibly fight among themselves, and have another dissolution.

Meanwhile, as the struggle for the wheel goes on, the British ship of state will drift through the winter as it has drifted through the autumn, and M. Poincaré will continue to do what he likes with Europe.

Now this is really too preposterous a way of running the affairs of a great people. It is bound to end in some great disaster. These spasmodic appeals to the country whenever a Prime Minister gets frightened by the aspect of the skies or whenever a quarrelsome group has to be reunited somehow, produce a terrible vacillation and ineffectiveness in the national conduct. It is time Great Britain came up to date with a triennial or quadrennial election of the Legislature, after the American and French fashion, and then stayed put. And it is time, too, that Great Britain went beyond, and gave a lead to America and most of the world by abandoning the present method of voting with a single vote in a limited constituency, which absolutely destroys any real choice of representation by the common man. The only civilised method of democracy is Proportional Representation; in large constituencies returning many members there is no other method which gives the individual voter a reasonable opportunity of expressing his real preference. It is the right way, and all other ways are wrong and bad. This present election in Great Britain is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the current system. In the seething mass of British opinion there are:

Out-and-out Protectionists hostile to Russia and France.  
Ditto friendly to Russia but hostile to France.  
Ditto hostile to Russia but abject to France.  
Protectionists for industry but not for food, hostile to France.  
Ditto, but "Hats off to France."  
Anti-Bolshevik Free Traders like Mr. Churchill.  
Free Traders friendly to Russia.

Any of the above may or may not be in frantic opposition to an imaginary Capital Levy upon everybody's savings.

Labourite Free Traders weak on the Capital Levy.  
Labourite Free Traders strong on the Capital Levy.  
Labourites strong on the Capital Levy, but weak on Free Trade.

All of the above may be weak or strong or hostile about the present League of Nations.  
All of the above may be strong for the new education, or they may be anti- educational.

And the poor mutt of a voter in any particular constituency has to indicate his opinion of things by voting for one of three gentlemen or ladies selected by the three local political clubs. As candidates they will do as little as possible in the way of positive statements and pledges. They will engage chiefly in hostile noises against the other parties. We shall never get any clear indication from this election upon any issue of any importance at all. We shall get no clear mandate either to deal with France or submit to France. We shall get no clear indication of the feelings of the people about Protection or Free Trade. We shall have only a slight measure of the panic about the Capital Levy caused by its misrepresentation. The thing is silly. It is a monstrous foolery in the face of the needs and dangers of the present time. The new Parliament will be just as feeble and insecure as the old Parliament, just as uncertain of popular support, and just as incapable of taking a strong line in the tragic pass to which British affairs are coming.

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## THE RE-EMERGENCE OF MR. LLOYD GEORGE

8.12.1923

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That muddle-headed process, the General Election, is over in Great Britain; the votes have been counted and the results are out—and everybody now is free to speculate what it was that the British Demos was trying to say to the world.

The idiotic simplicity of the voting method employed leaves the intelligent observer entirely free to put whatever interpretation he likes upon these results, and the British and foreign Press are taking the fullest advantage of this freedom. Confronted by a complex of issues and two or three usually very unpalatable candidates, the poor voter has voted anyhow or abstained from voting. Poor Demos might just as well have stayed away from the polls altogether for any chance he has had of expressing himself about France or about Russia or about the Singapore dockyards or anything of positive importance in the outer world. The single nontransferable vote system which prevails in the British communities and in America is almost as good a political gag as the old Russian autocracy, and may in the end provoke as violent a reaction. One may conclude that a great number of women voters were scared by the thought of high prices under a Tariff, and that the Capital Levy is not the bogy it promised to be. We shall have no Tariff. Beyond that there are no clear indications of the Will of the People.

So instructed, Parliament reassembles.

The chief result of the convulsion is that Mr. Lloyd George is back in the middle of the limelight in his original role of a great Liberal leader. Gestures of reconciliation of an almost scandalous warmth have characterised all the chief Liberal gatherings, and it is a wonder to the rest of mankind that British Liberalism ever permitted even an appearance of dissension. And Mr. Lloyd George has completely and triumphantly come back. It is his victory as much as it is anybody's victory.

Like nearly all Welshmen and many Englishmen, I have a strong but qualified affection for Mr. Lloyd George. How far that affection is due to Mr. Lloyd George's own merits, and how far it is due to the endearing caricatures of Low, I will not attempt to determine. But we like his go and we like his bounce and we like his smile. Unless he is caught vociferating a speech, all his photographs, even the most casual snapshots, show him smiling the most disarming of smiles. All Englishmen, except perhaps the Duke of Northumberland, are radicals, subverters, equalitarians, and revolutionaries, though very many of us restrain and conceal these qualities, and in some they are altogether subconscious. (I say "Englishmen" here, and I do not add "Englishwomen.") In Mr. Lloyd George—particularly when he smiles or makes a peer—we recognise our dearest suppressions. His creations roused the elder peerage at last to open revolt, and that amused us. Were it not for him and the new newspaper adventurers of the last quarter-century, Britain would still be ruled by the Cecils and Society.

America, I suspect, feels much the same about him. In the United States they pick him out from among all other figures in British politics as theirs. He is much more in the American than the British tradition. Ever so many American statesmen began as provincial lawyers. The journey from that Welsh solicitor's office to Whitehall is the nearest parallel British political life has yet given to the Log Cabin to White House adventure.

And Mr. Lloyd George has never had a classical education. He can quote Welsh but not Greek. A contempt for learning—that is to say, for classical learning—is another of the hidden things in the soul of every ordinary Englishman and every plain American. We know secretly that stuff is an imposture. But we never argue about it—even when Mr. President Coolidge betrays a belief that an ordinary classical education involves an understanding of human history. We know in our bones that it does not. It is not that we despise knowledge, but that we do not believe that a little Greek and Latin and a few worn quotations are knowledge. And on the whole Mr. Lloyd George is a very knowledgeable man.

In no sense of the word, of course, is he an educated man. Lincoln was. Starting from an almost illiterate adolescence, Lincoln, by an industrious self-education, achieved wisdom, achieved a profound and comprehensive perception of world realities; his mind could handle at last anything the mind of a President of men ever had to handle with supreme mastery. But Mr. Lloyd George has never built up a strong and comprehensive body of ideas in that fashion. He has never realised the need. His mind has not the solid substance of Lincoln's mind. It is a quick feminine mind, with extremely rapid intuitions. His judgments are apt to be as just as they are quick, but he has never got them together into any system. They are immediate and superficial. He is mentally disconnected. He retains the prejudices and general ideas of his upbringing. He has no vision or sense of the world as a whole, no worked -out conception of the part he might play in the human story. So it was that opportunity caught him at Versailles and laid him bare.

Within two years of the signing of that treaty, for which he was mainly responsible, he had learnt better and was trying in his quite feminine indirect way to mitigate and undo it. He will go on trying.

He means well—always. And he was almost the first statesman of the Coalition Government to realise the folly of an inveterate quarrel with New Russia. In dealing with Russia he will be unhampered by that violent anti-Bolshevik, Mr. Winston Churchill, who is again among the "outs." His inconsistencies trouble the common British voter hardly at all. The logical Frenchman points to his broken pledges. This from the French point of view constitutes dishonesty. The Anglo-Saxon mind realises that to be honest one must be inconsistent. We have all made our mistakes, and muddled back out of them. Life is a puzzling thing full of surprises. The one thing the British will never understand is the tremendous persistence of M. Poincaré. It impresses them as invincible stupidity.

Both Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill denounced Socialism, but while Mr. Churchill really meant Socialism by Socialism, Mr. Lloyd George only meant a tendency to vote for Labour instead of for Lloyd George. By nature and tradition Mr. Lloyd George is on the Left side in politics, and his experience of Tories and rich men during the last few years has probably restored his leftward tendencies to their primitive vigour. As his record in the Ministry of Munitions shows, he has no respect for money: he throws it about, he can be careless and rough with it, it is a means to an end, and he has probably accumulated very little. Returned to power and faced by a spectacle of economic debacle, he is capable of taxing, levying upon, and confiscating the property of the rich to an extent that would make Mr. Henderson white with terror and throw Mr. Ramsay MacDonald into convulsions of Scotch caution. (But mark you, it won't be Socialism. He is against Socialism.)

So Mr. Lloyd George emerges again from his temporary eclipse seated on the back of a united Liberal Party and already leaning a little to the Left. As the world situation develops he will probably lean more and more to the Left. Until he leans right over the Socialist programme. He has with him the affectionate distrust of a great multitude of his countrymen. They like his smile, have a profound sympathy for his tendencies, and wish they knew more of his intentions. He is by far the most vigorous and popular personality in the new House. He may do anything. This election that has reunited the Liberal Party in his interest has cost the country over two million pounds. We trust him to give us a show for our money.

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## THE PARLIAMENTARY TRIANGLE

5.1.1924

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That profoundly absurd body the British Parliament will meet on January 8, and the recondite and fascinating game of party politics will be resumed under novel conditions with three parties, none of which have a majority, and with a Labour Party in sight, not of power, but of office.

I call the British Parliament an absurd body with set and measured intention. It is twice as big as it ought to be for efficient government; it carries a load, a fatty encumbrance, of more than three hundred undistinguished and useless members; much of its procedure, its method of taking divisions for example, is idiotically wasteful of the nation's time; and it is elected by methods so childishly crude that it represents neither the will nor the energy nor the intelligence of the country. It dissipates and caricatures the national consciousness. Assembled, it will have nothing definite to say to France, Germany, Russia, America, or to the festering mass of British unemployed. From the Parliamentary point of view that sort of thing is subsidiary. Its party leaders will engage at once in the primary business of party leaders, which is, of course, to secure the sweets of office as speedily and securely as possible.

The broad lines of the game to be played this year are now fairly evident. They raise a number of profoundly interesting questions. The Conservative Party is the strongest of the three, but the Government it supports can be and will be turned out of office by a vote of "no confidence," in which the Liberals, the smallest party of all, will support the Labour motion. The King will then send for Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Opposition, and ask him to form a Government. This Mr. MacDonald says he intends to do. He will have the qualified support of the Liberal Party. Almost immediately the Labour Party will have to produce its Budget.

The prophets foretell two alternatives. The Labour Government will produce a weak, individualistic Budget, an apologetic, compromising, imitative affair; it will drop or reserve almost all its Socialistic ideas, and it will be permitted to continue in office under the distinguished patronage—gracefully and frequently reiterated—of Mr. Asquith, so long as its good behaviour continues. Everyone will praise Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's statesmanlike moderation, and when at last the Party has to face the constituencies. But it will have no face left for the constituencies. A mass of votes will drift back to Liberalism, which by that time will be seen to be just as good as Labour or better, and the crowd of unemployed, the poor, the disinherited, and all who are really weary and angry with the exploits and adventures of the untrammelled rich, will turn their faces away from the Labour Party and Parliamentary methods towards revolution. But the Liberal politicians will take little heed of the latter drift because it is outside the scope of Parliamentary procedure.

Or secondly, the prophets think that Labour may produce very bold and far- reaching Socialist proposals. They may stick to the Capital Levy, and so forth. They may put up their entire election programme. Then the Liberal Party will withdraw its support. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald will be obliged to resign, and the clever little, brave little Liberal group will form a Government, and with the assistance of a large part of the Conservatives carry on and—with large benevolent gestures—"save the country" by doing nothing. So that on the second alternative also the Liberal Party stands to win.

But then Mr. Ramsay MacDonald may advise the King to dissolve Parliament; he may ask the country to decide upon his Budget and legislative programme. And here comes the most delicate issue of all. The Liberal prophets tell us the King will refuse a dissolution. Will he in fact refuse to follow the advice of his Ministers, and become active instead of passive in party affairs? When Mr. Baldwin asked for a dissolution the King protested and granted it. Will he behave differently towards Mr. MacDonald? The Liberal prophets have most attractive arguments to show that such a course is constitutional. No doubt it is. Mr. Baldwin had a majority; Mr. MacDonald has not. Nevertheless, would such a refusal, from the point of view of the Court, be a wise thing? The common man in the country is not going to see the thing from the lawyer's standpoint. He is going to conclude that the King favours the Conservatives and Liberals against Labour. From the point of view of the monarchy that is a very undesirable conclusion, even if it is an unjust conclusion, to spread about the country in a period of unemployment and social stress.

It is a polite convention in Great Britain that there is no Republican feeling in the land. That convention is not in accordance with the facts. There is much dormant Republicanism, but so long as the monarchy remains "the golden link of empire," so long as the conditions of a "crowned republic" are observed, Republicanism sleeps. But it sleeps much more lightly than many people suppose, and the crown cannot afford to make mistakes.

When the other day the Duke of York allowed himself to be associated with what appears to be a British imitation of the Ku Klux Klan, the sleeping spirit stirred. It raised an eyebrow, even if it did not open an eye. It may prove a great misfortune for the British crown if presently it is led by the assurances of eager Liberals into even the appearance of hostility to the party of the workers. The now latent Republicanism of the British people, once roused to activity, may be very difficult to lull again. The Labour Party may become a Republican party. And since the British crown is manifestly wary and discreet, I am not so certain as the Liberal lawyers that that dissolution will be refused. I may be wrong, and so among other possibilities we may see a "safety" Liberal Government sitting on the safety-valve in Britain for some years.

But do these alternatives exhaust the possibilities of the case? Suppose the coming Labour Government neither abandons nor carries out its Capital Levy, but refers it to a delaying committee of inquiry, and suppose it goes on in grim earnest to realise all of the fine promises of the Liberal programme. Where will the Liberals be then? Suppose, pending the decision of the committee upon the Capital Levy, it piles up the super-tax on large incomes, puts an almost confiscatory tax upon underdeveloped land and mineral resources, abolishes the game laws and rids England of the fox, cuts expenditure upon armaments and military and naval display ruthlessly—puts, for example, the Guards into reasonable and comfortable inexpensive uniforms—replaces doles by public employment, organises agricultural marketing, produces a comprehensive housing scheme, and quadruples the estimate for education and scientific research; what are the Liberals going to say to it?

I know what the dinner parties will say about it, but the Liberal Party, if it is to go on existing, must save its face with the country. Perhaps a third of the Liberal Party might be genuinely disposed to back such a Labour programme; another third might feel constrained to do so. Mr. Lloyd George would move leftward, quite helpfully. And the Labour Government might struggle along insecurely and valiantly for much longer than most of the prophets suppose.

And the party managers, of all three parties, will be scheming some new electoral law before the next election. None of them will hear of honest proportional representation with large constituencies and a smaller, more efficient House of Commons; but they will all be planning something that will look fair and honest, leave the party system intact, and advantage the Parliamentary party to which each belongs. In this matter the Labour Party is no more honest than any other. Its party organs discuss the question entirely from the party point of view, and are quite disposed to consider "the alternative vote" or any other shabby evasion of proper electoral methods. So that at the end of our vista we must reckon with an election faked perhaps in some novel way but just as absurd as the last one.

And so Great Britain muddles through the years of destiny.

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## MODERN GOVERNMENT: PARLIAMENT AND REAL ELECTORAL REFORM

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22.1.1924

We are assured that a reform of the electoral system is now imminent in Great Britain. The oldest and most respectable of the world's democratic governments is declared to be in need of repair and reconstruction. It has produced three parties without a majority, and it threatens to jam. Immediate legislation is promised. This must needs be a matter of lively interest to every intelligent person from China to Peru.

For the British Parliament is the Mother of Parliaments. This is the proud boast of the conventional teacher of British history (as distinguished from history), and—subject to a footnote by Mr. Belloc—it is reasonably true. The prevalent type of governing body in the world has been constructed more or less in imitation or as a variation of the respected British pattern; there is an Upper House whose members are supposed to be more select and genteel and important, and a Lower House which, generally speaking, wrangles more, is more representative of and more in the spirit of the common people, has taxing power, and is more conspicuously and fussily elected by the general population. The reasons commonly alleged for this double chamber system are pedantic and ridiculous, but the States that have been organised or modernised in the past three centuries have followed one another in the matter with all that unquestioning readiness which distinguishes man and the sheep and the processional caterpillar from most other of God's animated creatures.

The members of one or both of these chambers or houses are elected, and the system of election remains so primitive and stupid as to leave a large minority, or even a majority, of the electors not even represented in the House. The procedure is infantile—in the British Parliament the members vote by sprinting past a teller and through a lobby and along passages and so forth back to their seats—and generally these Parliaments, Congresses, and Legislative Chambers are about as well fitted to serve the needs of our complicated modern communities as a battleship of Queen Elizabeth's navy is fitted to encounter modern artillery.

But they are difficult to scrap and reconstruct because the only people legally capable of scrapping and reconstructing them are the politicians they have created, and who are completely adapted to their necessities. You cannot expect "Old Parliamentary Hands" and such-like gentry to modify or even to realise the disastrous inefficiency of the political devices by which they live and move and have their being. Most of the Latin communities, which are logical to the pitch of violence, have solved the problem of Parliamentary incompetence in their hasty way by accepting dictators who treat all elected representatives with a scarcely veiled contempt; and even the English, in the face of a supreme national crisis, acquiesced in Cromwell.... Of course, after I have written that last sentence nothing will prevent the world-wide society of the muddle-headed from running away with the idea that I advocate dictatorships, just as it was impossible to prevent them from declaring that I had "embraced Protection" after I had pointed out that tariffs, like war, follow naturally upon nationalism, and just as they would certainly have it that I want to promote typhoid fever if I were to write about the necessary consequences of insanitary conditions. But that is a digression. Dictatorships are evil consequences of democratic break-downs. They are the rough remedy for intolerable democracy. And except in the United States democracies are becoming very generally intolerable. The people of the United States, for the time the spoilt children of the human race, are so fortunate in their isolation and their vast unity that the efficiency of their Government is a matter of no immediate concern to them. They will perhaps get along with their unwieldy Congress and their dear two historical parties for a long time yet. The British behind their silver streak had something of the same immunity before the war. They were still in a phase of financial and economic good luck. It is over for them now. In Britain politics have become serious and vital, and under existing conditions the overstrained and impoverished community can no longer suffer the elaborate fooleries of party government.

Great Britain is in urgent need of competent representative government, and the extent to which the Mother of Parliaments proves herself to be a recuperative phoenix or an incurable old goose in this affair is a matter of vital importance not only to the British Empire, but to the whole world.

Nowadays we have fairly clear ideas of the nature of the supreme governing body that is needed for a great and various modern State. A single body seems to be all that is required; that a nation should squint at its problems with two divergent bodies does not seem id be imperative at all—though possibly a secondary body representing function, and not locality, may be a desirable auxiliary to the supreme assembly. About that supreme assembly we are now able to stipulate certain necessary conditions. It must not be too large a body, because that means an excess of inert and undistinguished members too numerous and obscure to be properly watched, such as we find encumbering affairs at Washington and Westminster, and at the same time it must be large enough to staff all its necessary committees, and to represent the chief varieties of opinion in the country. Something between two hundred and three hundred members seems to be the proper assembly; less may be unrepresentative, and more will develop crowd mentality. And the members must be elected by the method of proportional representation, and be sent up from twenty or thirty large constituencies—largely to eliminate mere local leaders—each constituency returning a dozen members or more. Only by this method of election can we kill that gag upon honest democracy, the party system, and replace the professional politician by a various gathering of typical and well-known men and women. Such a body would change only slowly in its character from election to election, and it would sustain a Government more real, steadfast, representative, assured and consistent than any the world has ever seen before.

Throughout the world a great and gathering body of opinion is moving steadily towards such a conception of a modern Government. And because of its present needs it is Great Britain which is likely to be for a time the battleground between modern and eighteenth-century conceptions of a legislative assembly.

It will be particularly interesting to watch the ingenuities of the politicians in the new Parliament in producing schemes that will look like electoral reform and yet leave the profession still active for mischief. They will fight desperately against large constituencies with numerous members. The one-member or two-member constituency is absolutely necessary to their party system. In such constituencies even proportional representation can be reduced to a farce. And also they will offer cheap but attractive substitutes like the second ballot and the alternative vote. And they will fake extraordinary arrangements by which the voter will vote not for an individual but for a ticket or bunch, and they will call these fakes this or that improved variety of "proportional representation." All the political parties in Britain are at present trying to work out the probable effects of this or that fake or cheap substitute for electoral honesty, upon the party prospects. In this matter the Labour Party is as bad as any other party—or worse. The discussion of electoral legislation in the Imperial Parliament throughout the next session, though it may make the angels weep, is certain to afford much entertainment to every mundane observer of human disingenuousness.

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## THE LABOUR PARTY ON TRIAL:  
THE FOLLY OF THE FIVE CRUISERS

15.3.1924

Table of Contents

I HAVE recently been watching British politics from a rather interesting angle; I have been seeing Britain through Latin eyes from the Portuguese corner of Europe. Events come to me generally in this order. First the Lisbon _Diario des Noticias_ comes in with my coffee; next day the French _Quotidien_ arrives before lunch and the Italian _Secolo_ at dinner, and there is usually another twenty-four hours before a bundle of London papers comes to hand. The Paris _Daily Mail_ or the _Action Française_ may come in neck and neck with the _Quotidien_ , but I don't go out of my way to see them. I get no American papers at all. In this perspective the death of Dr. Theophilo Braga, a sort of Frederic Harrison, who was the first President of the Portuguese Republic, and a congress of Latin Pressmen in Lisbon take on the importance of considerable international events, and all that looms largest in the London _Times_ or the American Press undergoes a compression that amounts at times to complete effacement. That stupid outrage upon civilisation, the deportation of Miguel de Unamuno, the great rector of the University of Salamanca, to the Canary-Islands because of his disrespect for the Spanish monarchy and dictatorship gets a large Press in all these Latin countries. It matters to them. It ought to matter to every civilised man. The petroleum scandals in the United States get a rather muddled attention; every country has the oil scandals it deserves; and there were important articles upon the death of President Wilson. In its day the coming of the League of Nations was a great event. Otherwise there has been very little notice either of the United States or the overseas Empire of Britain. America means Brazil, and "overseas" Angola.

The Latin mind has always inclined to be sceptical and cynical about the League of Nations. Was it Anglo-Saxon practicality or Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy behind this new thing? Did the Americans and British mean what the League seemed to mean, or was it just another of their deep inexplicable manoeuvres? The doubts have long since carried the day. The Paris _Quotidien_ supports the League, indeed, but it concerns itself very little about the criticism or creative reconstruction of the League, as it would do if it regarded the concern as a working reality. It treats the whole business as a sort of ethical deep breathing—good chiefly for the soul. When it refers to it, a note of piety comes into its style.

The arrival of a Labour Government in Britain was a matter for lively attention in all these Latin lands. Liberal thinkers everywhere welcomed it with a hopefulness that was only very faintly tainted by suspicion. Here, perhaps, was a new thing, a break in the age-long British tradition of heavy national selfishness and overbearing self-righteousness. Bits of election addresses, Labour manifestos, and so forth, had filled up columns and carried headlines in every paper from Oporto to Fiume and from Mexico to Buenos Aires. This Labour stood for a reconstituted League of Nations, with wider powers; it stood for a generous treatment of Russia and Germany; it stood for disarmament; it stood for a universal retrenchment of military and naval expenditure and a surcease of grabbing and exploitation. Once again, just as with the League of Nations, the Latin Press betrayed the peculiar power which the great English-speaking community might and could exercise, of putting over broad political ideas to the world at large. There is a natural reciprocity between the mind of the Latin community and ours; it is far more delicately critical and far less rudely creative. We can do much to sustain or destroy its faith. It can do much to clarify our ideas.

The first utterances of the new Government were scanned with exceptional closeness; the gestures of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald were watched with ten times the attention that was ever given to Mr. Baldwin's. The prompt recognition of Russia was widely approved of; the rather empty politenesses towards M. Poincaré were taken as evidence of an essential goodness of heart and a desire to give him a fair chance—and then came this business of the cruisers. It would be hard to exaggerate its evil effect. The first I saw of it was in the Lisbon morning paper. The paragraph was headed "Signor MacDonald, Militarist," and the statement was made without any qualification that the Labour Government was to lay down the keels of five new cruisers forthwith. It seemed incredible. Followed the French and Italian papers. The Italians were derisive at this footnote to the disarmament conference at Rome, and the French clamoured for six cruisers in reply to the British "challenge." The _Quotidien_ was disappointed but not surprised. The caricaturists, who do so much in the Latin countries to personify the character of nations and peoples, got to work, and are still at work, rubbing in this last revelation of the British soul. One discerned the sensitive, the irritable Latin mind sick with disgust and bitterly ashamed of itself for its folly in supposing for a moment that the Labour programme was anything more than electioneering flummery. "Labour" was just a fine name for a group of British politicians as dishonest, as basely "patriotic," as dangerous to the welfare of Europe as any other group.

Never has there been so gross, so stupid and needless a sacrifice of moral capital in international relations. I do not see how Mr. Ramsay MacDonald can ever restore the provisional credit the liberal thought of the Latin States had accorded him. The guns of those five cruisers, though not one of them ever materialise and though they will certainly prove obsolete weapons before they can ever be finished, will have blown the prestige of the British Labour Government as a possible European peacemaker to smithereens.

I will confess I shared this immense disillusionment. As one who had written and spoken to the text of the Labour programme at the last general election, as one who had explained that the Labour Party at least would have the courage for disarmament and a better use for the taxpayers' money than battleship building, I did my best to suspend my judgment until the London newspapers came to hand with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's speech upon this issue. It seemed impossible that he could have gone the complete Amery he has done. I could not believe that he would not have realised that this thing his Government has done was not a mere parochial extravagance but an act of intense international significance. I expected to find some explanations, some palliations, some apology, that could be put before the foreign observer. I found a speech—the rottenest Old Parliamentary Hand could not have made a more parliamentary speech. It was in two parts: the first part was an ingenious quibble about these ships being merely the replacement of "wastage"—as though the naval equipment of a country was a constant thing that had to be kept up to a standard mark instead of being an incessantly variable thing—and the second was a scarcely veiled admission that the building of these unnecessary and provocative ships was a bribe to the labour in the dockyard constituencies. There was not a word to anticipate the inevitable interpretation of the act abroad; there was not an indication on the part of this astonishing Foreign Minister that the affair would even be observed abroad.

One does not buy a weapon without an enemy in view, and I am altogether at a loss to see what enemy Mr. MacDonald has in view—unless it is the Conservative candidates in the shipbuilding constituencies. Does he think he may have to fight France or Italy or Japan or the United States? Those five cruisers will be no good in a war with France; we should have to tuck them away somewhere and put patrols of submarine chasers to take care of them. In a war between France and Britain the mutual suicide, so to speak, would be achieved through the air. The cruisers would hardly be of more use against Italy. It is Italy, however, which is likely to be most estranged by the thought of them. Italy or Japan. Is there a ghost of a chance of a war with either the United States or Japan? It is our excellent custom to defer to the United States, and we always shall. This leaves Japan.

Can anything but the blackest folly bring us into a conflict with Japan except on some issue which would put the United States on our side?

These cruisers are to cost five million pounds—or more if, failing the Capital Levy, Britain is forced to inflation—and they are to give employment to some few thousands of men. Meanwhile I gather that the educational clauses of that magniflcent Labour programme which was to have kept the next generation at school (and off the crowded labour market) until it reached the age of sixteen are to be crippled—a la Fisher—for want of funds.

The more Parliament changes, I perceive, the more it is the same thing. It is organised for politicians by politicians; it is elected so stupidly that the statesman wilts into the politician so soon as he breathes its air. He ceases to see beyond the division lobby and the dockyard vote. If laying down cruisers is the chief business of government and the chief end of taxation, I would rather, on the whole, see Mr. Amery spending my money than Mr. Ammon.

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## DICTATORS OR POLITICIANS?   
THE DILEMMA OF CIVILISATION

22.3.1924

Table of Contents

The drift towards dictatorships in many of the European countries has been very marked in the last few years. The mental distress and physical discomforts arising out of the steady process of financial, social, and economic decay in the tangle of nationalist States in Europe, have liberated a lively and widespread discontent with the methods of representative government. The legal way and the parliamentary way has seemed too long, tedious, and disingenuous for the urgent needs of the times. In Italy and Spain, in Hungary and Germany, we have had the complete dictatorship; the shadow of a dictatorship has fallen upon the French outlook. There has been an outbreak of bosses, strong men, tyrants after the Greek pattern, statesmen with special powers, suspensions of the constitution and so forth, across the entire European stage.

To a certain small extent this may be due to a rebellion of ordinary common-sense people against the absurdity of committees doing one-man jobs. In America the disposition to give great powers to mayors and prominent public servants—a disposition which Mr. Belloc calls, absurdly enough, a disposition to "monarchy," and makes out to be a fundamental difference between Americans and Europeans—is probably due mainly to the perception of the need for a single head and a free hand in many complicated jobs. But the job is defined, and the term of power is defined. That concentration of ad hoc powers in a single competent responsible person is of course a legitimate and most hopeful development of democratic method. It is no more "monarchy" than the power of a judge is monarchy. But the drift in Europe, in Germany, and the Latin countries generally is to a general and not to a specific free hand. The man is there not to do this or that specified thing but to take the whole power of the State out of the hands of the politicians. Russia is a special case; the dictator there is the ghost of Karl Marx acting through the Communist Party. But Russia is as far from parliamentary democracy as any country in the world. Parliamentary democracy did for a brief interval appear in Russia, but it was as suitable wear for that country at its present phase of education as a silk hat for a whale.

Why have all these dictatorships sprung up? Why has there been this decline of faith throughout the world in the Anglo-Saxon device of parliamentary government? Every intelligent person must know that this is a world of men and not supermen, and every lapse to a dictatorship implies a belief in a superman. Every year of a dictatorship diminishes the autonomous vitality of a community, no dictatorship is proof against the degeneration of the dictator through impunity and presumption, and no dictator has ever provided an eJ05cient successor. Yet we find the peoples of important European countries acquiescing in Mussolinis, Riveras, and the like, and powerful minorities in almost every European State asking for similar dictatorships. It is not that they are blind to the defects of dictatorships, but that they dislike parliamentary government more. A dictator may carry on a Government roughly and dangerously, but in many cases Parliaments have failed to carry on government at all.

English-speaking peoples are beginning to realise that what they call "democracy" may not be a universal panacea, and that Parliamentary and Congressional government as it flourished in the nineteenth century with two parties and a choice for the elector limited to two party hacks, instead of being a method of universal validity and altogether perfect, was a temporarily convenient method of government for a fairly homogeneous dominant middle class living under apparently stable conditions. Social developments in Western Europe evolved this class throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a national mentality was evolved concurrently. Transferred to alien soils, parliamentary institutions wilt or become weedy. And it is extremely doubtful whether in Britain, that mother of Parliaments, it is possible for the parliamentary machine to work now except in a very hectic and unsatisfactory way, unless it undergoes extensive adaptations to meet the great financial, economic, and social stresses that have still to try the British community. In a previous paper I have discussed the electoral reforms whereby Parliament or Congress could be made really representative of the national mind, would cease to be an arena for a stupid and boring party conflict, and would become a smaller assembly, a working council, alive throughout, appointing and criticising the various Ministries. But a reform of representative methods is not in itself a sufficient solution to our problem. A graver and profounder weakness both of the American and British community at the present time is the incoherence and diffuseness of public opinion. Great changes in the range and material of economic life during the last quarter of a century and the financial earthquakes that have followed the war have shattered the old homogeneous and dominant middle-class stratum on both sides of the Atlantic. That was the reservoir of public opinion, and there is nothing equivalent on the new scale to replace it. There have been bold extensions of the franchise in Britain to great classes of inexperienced and inattentive voters; Mr. Adamson's Bill has brought us within sight of universal suffrage for every man and woman over twenty-one; but there has been no development of political education upon the same scale. Probably a third of the British voting mass after these additions—seven millions, say—will be too indifferent to political issues to vote at all. A half, another ten or eleven millions, will vote for trivial or silly reasons, and will certainly never take the slightest trouble to sustain the Parliament it has elected. Politically they will accept anything they get. They have still to learn to consider politics seriously. There remains about a sixth of the British electorate; less than five millions, a miscellany of every sort of opinion and drawn from every class, with this much in common, that it cares enough about politics to fight about them if necessary. But it is not this sixth but the half that the vote-hunting politician need consider. And it is not the half but some sections of the sixth which may presently resort to illegal methods to achieve its ends.

Are we so remote and secure from the violent phase in Britain as people are apt to suppose? Can Britain go on indefinitely with a crazy electoral method that leaves masses of people thwarted and masses indifferent, and that leaves the mandate of any Government ambiguous? The present Government picks its precarious way amidst issues of the most inflammatory sort. The financial difficulty is not tackled; the Capital Levy is shelved for the time, and we do not know whether the method of taxing and more or less expropriating large bulks of property only, or the method of taxing every creditor, great or small, down to the penny of credit in the beggar woman's hand, is to be followed. One or other it must be. The first course will evoke the prompt resistance of the Fascist element in the Tory Party. Since the great days of the gun-running by Carson and F.E. in Ulster and the Curragh Pronunciamento, the Tories have been infected with dreams of reactionary illegalities. Army people and so forth are drenched with such stuff. They lost Ireland by it, but they are quite capable of setting about to lose England by the same methods. But though the Tory elements in British life might easily attempt forcible resistance to parliamentary socialisation, they are far too unintelligent to face the alternative of inflation, which will certainly produce just such conditions as will promote a drift towards revolution from the Communist end.... Violence from either side means ultimately dictatorship and the opening phase of a process of disorder and collapse for the entire British system. Between the horns of this dilemma the existing British system has still a few years left in which to modernise, enlarge, and clean its parliamentary methods and to educate its masses to political efficiency.

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## YOUTH AND THE VOTE:  
THE REJUVENESCENCE OF THE WORLD

29.3.1924

Table of Contents

The recent discussion of the extension of the British parliamentary suffrage has been an amusing and instructive display. The finer parts of the debate upon Mr. Adamson's Bill were a little overshadowed in the Press by the Duchess of Atholl's possibly exaggerated objection to the proposed enfranchisement of several hundred travelling tinkers, and her nightmare of all the women in the country voting down all the men in the country upon some unexpected issue. I must confess that I am not very much interested by the question whether there are to be slight traces of tinker in the next election or not, and the end of the world by collision with some other planet seems a far less remote possibility to me than the lining up of the two separate sexes in flat opposition to each other. But what did interest me was to note that everyone seemed to have caught up his or her opinion just anyhow, and worn it much as people wear false noses at a carnival, and that in the whole ridiculous fray there was no apparent perception of any general reason why some people should vote and not others. I could not find any evidence that a single member had asked himself why people had to vote at all, whether it was a privilege or a duty to vote, and what were the proper qualifications or just claims of a voter.

Mostly, I don't think they had ever asked themselves any such questions. Members of Parliament don't think about questions of that kind. They seem to think very little about anything of importance in the world, so much of their time is spent in division lobbies and loafing and gossiping about the House of Commons; but what attention they do give to franchise and electoral method is usually given in close consultation with a parliamentary agent, who is far from the spirit of scientific truth.

Let us try and put the question on rather broader foundations than the House succeeded in doing. And, to begin with, let us consider whether the age of twenty-one is a sensible age at which to graduate a citizen as voter. Sir Sydney Russell-Wells and Sir Martin Conway, two University members, very properly declared it was not. With that we can well agree. Twenty-one marks no natural epoch in the mental and moral life of either man or woman. It is too old for adolescence and too young for any other phase. Twenty-one is a magic compound of seven and three, but nowadays we do not believe very much in the magic of numbers. The reasons why twenty-one was made the "coming-of-age" are lost in the mists of antiquity. But why these two gentlemen should propose therefore to make five-and-twenty the minimum age for a voter of either sex is not very clear. Sir Martin Conway, indeed, warmed up to a luscious eloquence about "woman's great flowering time." The young woman between twenty-one and twenty-five "should have her eye upon the glory of life," and so forth. Even if this were so, it is a little hard to understand the application of the limit to men. Apparently the young man is to undergo a sort of political "couvade" during these rich years, and think sympathetically about babies. As a matter of fact, lots of women far over twenty-five have not yet reached these preoccupations; it would, indeed, be highly improper for most of these below that limit to engage their minds in this fashion, since the majority do not marry until close upon twenty-five, and many much later. The twenty-fifth birthday is, indeed, no more a natural epoch for woman or man than the twenty-first, and Sir Martin Conway's argument was just a sample of the careless nonsense people talk on these important questions.

But if neither twenty-five nor twenty-one is a real natural division line between the human being capable of citizenship and the junior, the natural minor, where shall we draw that line? I would suggest that we draw it at the age when the individual's education comes to an end. Education, we are assured, is to prepare the individual for citizenship. When a State turns its young people out of its schools into the streets to seek employment and toil for the community, it tacitly declares that their preparation for citizenship is at an end. If they are not prepared for citizenship they should not be turned out. If they are, then they ought to go on at once to the most stimulating exercise of the rights of citizenship, and vote before they forget their lessons in history and geography and economics and so forth. Why should they have to wait for years, forgetting nearly every general idea they have learnt before the vote comes to rouse them? But the reader will object that this means giving the vote to children of fourteen or indeed in some American States to children even younger. I submit that is no disproof of the principle I have laid down, but only a disqualification of the shocking inefficiency of the educational systems of the English-speaking world. We have no right to cheat our young people out of their votes because we are defrauding them of the best part of their education.

I am one of those people who believe that the minimum age at which whole-time general education should cease is sixteen, and that for at least two years more education in some form, a technical or industrial training at least, associated perhaps with productive employment, and a continuation of the general intellectual work should be given. That would make eighteen the boundary between tutelage and complete responsible citizenship. And to that age I am willing and anxious to see the franchise extended. Education and the franchise are correlated questions, and I do not believe a community can be in a sound state of political organisation until education has moved up and the vote moved down the scale of age to this meeting-point.

Let us consider first the justice of this. Think what we thrust upon the youth of eighteen in our communities. We voters, a good third of us above military age, will treat him as citizen enough to undergo the utmost fatigues and horrors of war, and to be maimed and to die for us, and the girl of fourteen (is it?) may marry, and the girl of sixteen may commit herself to dishonour, and either man or girl may toil in factory or foundry. All that we put upon them. We force them by need and circumstance to forgo the better part of their education, to subdue all the wide and wonderful imaginations of these opening years, and we oblige them to contribute to the wealth of the State in unattractive work. But they may have no voice in matters in general until they are thoroughly broken in. I can see a sort of expediency in disenfranchising unsuccessful people after forty or so, they are dull and cowed by that time and will bring little to the polls but their fears and inferiorities. But why gag the young for three of their most vivid years?

And next there is to be considered the benefit to the individual citizen of stepping straight from learning to responsibility. He will be brought into conscious and effective relationship with political and industrial institutions at the same time; he will face them as two aspects of one thing just when the spirit of inquiry is strongest in him. And such of the younger women who are waking up to what Sir Martin Conway calls the "glory of life" will realise that childbearing is a thing of issues wider than the fireside; they will be called upon to think of war and education and the whole future in the very time when the continuity of life is brought most effectively before their minds. What sort of a world, what sort of political process can Sir Martin be thinking about when he suggests that a vision of the glory of life ought to disqualify a voter?

And finally let us consider the benefit to the country and the world at large of a more youthful electorate. To bring in voters in their nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first years will be to bring in three million and more fresh minds, all unsettled as yet, all facing the world adventurously. They will be a wholesome counterweight to the grudging ratepayer, the small shopkeeper, the rentier, the anxious and hopeless and fearful multitude of the unsuccessful and defensive middle-aged, the great supporters of "Anti-Waste" campaigns, "safety" armaments, policies of "security," and all sorts of patriotic cowardice. These elder folk think of the next quarter day or the next year; it is all that interests them; they will be dead soon and they want to shuffle along as comfortably and with as little troublesome novelty as possible until then. The interests of the youth of eighteen reach forward half a century and they may work with a reasonable hope of a better world for themselves as well as their children. They may have the more wisdom for the very reason that they have acquired less worldly discretion. And for all of us who believe that education is already touched by a new spirit and that it is surely being made better, the younger the age of enfranchisement the greater our hopes of an early effect of the new education upon the affairs of mankind.

"Universal education up to eighteen, universal enfranchisement at eighteen"; along that line lies our path to a real civilisation. Along that path we shall go as the breath of a new generation blows into Congress and Parliament and these assemblies cease to be the gatherings of political botchers and tinkers representing the broken spirit and curtailed desires of a forty-year-old electorate. For round about forty must be the average age of the present-day British elector.

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## LABOUR POLITICIANS:  
THE EVAPORATION OF THE INTELLIGENZIA

10.5.1924

Table of Contents

At the last General Election the British Labour Party was supported with the most whole-hearted enthusiasm by a great cloud of artistic and intellectual workers. It had the Intelligenzia solidly for it. It had all the higher and better theatrical and artistic workers on its side: such great literary names as Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, such men of science as Soddy. They supported it for a variety of very understandable reasons. They were revolted by the mean and sterile dullness of the two historical but disintegrating parties. They were bored to death by Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Baldwin, Lord Birkenhead, their endless differences, and their essential resemblance. They were attracted by the brave hopefulness and the constructive programme of the new party. They were even allowed to dot the i's and cross the t's of its ample promises. No doubt they helped at the election, though Heaven knows to what extent. They certainly brought in youth, ever in love with ideas, to canvass and toil for the party; they brought in clever journalists and able controversialists.

But all that was six months ago. Now Labour has been tarnished by office I doubt whether it will exercise the same compelling magic upon intellectually adventurous people. There is all the difference in the world between encouraging a Labour Party which promises everything glorious, and bolstering up a Labour Government which does nothing amusing. I doubt if the Intelligenzia is likely to be very energetic when the next election comes.

It is not in the nature of an Intelligenzia to support a political party in office. Its function in the community is to criticise actuality, and to startle and enlarge people's aesthetic, scientific, political, and social perceptions. It is always against the thing that is, and it is always in advance of the thing that can practically be. And what it is saying of the Labour Government now is that it is just as dull and just as shifty and just as futile as a Left Liberal Government would have been. Mr. C. P. Trevelyan seems to have some meritorious intentions about education, and there has been a recognition of Russia—which the Liberals would have given us just as well. Apart from that, what have the Intelligenzia got for all their support of Labour?

In Mr. Ramsay MacDonald we have one of the ablest of living public speakers, a Prime Minister of unparalleled piety and gentility, but that is insufficient to console the Intelligenzia for their general disappointment. The more brightly the personality of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald shines, the less visible are the creative ideas for which their advanced spirits followed him. Instead of some genuine effort toward disarmament there has been the most foolish treatment possible of the business of the five cruisers. There has not even been a gesture towards the nationalisation of transport, mines, and the production of staple commodities. At least the Labour Ministers might have availed themselves of official files and opportunities, to prepare reports, digest facts and set inquiries afoot that would open a way to future nationalisation. The Capital Levy has gone behind a screen. There has been a muddle over housing and a resort to Liberal assistance. These Labour leaders over whom the Intelligenzia waved its banners of constructive Socialism and of a world remade, so bravely, turn out to be for the most part just ordinary politicians abjectly afraid to stop anything or start anything that may affect votes.

There is the utmost symbolical value in the behaviour of the new Labour Ministers towards Court affairs. Great Britain is a monarchy and the Ministers must go to Court, but there was no law and no necessity to require a Labour representative in a Labour Ministry to dress up in an expensive and unsuitable livery. The neat blue serge suit in which such a man would attend a Labour Congress or pay his respects to his God in church or chapel was surely good enough for a Court visit. A red tie, perhaps, in suitable cases could have emphasised the note of Socialism. But no! These men the Intelligenzia worked for and elected as the representatives of a new age must needs set out at once to beg, borrow, or steal the uniform of the old. As the newspaper photographs witness, most of them wear it with little grace or dignity. They have the self-conscious solemnity of a new local mayor in his robes. As a rule it matters little what a man wears, but these liveries betrayed stupendous acquiescences. It was unfortunate for the good relations of the Intelligenzia with the Labour Party that two police spies were found under the platform of a private meeting of the Communist Party the other day. The Intelligenzia will always have a very tolerant corner in its heart for the Communist Party in Britain and America. The party gets hold of a lot of the best of the young people and does them a lot of good. It is extremist, and you cannot have a healthy mental life in a community in which extremist opinions and intentions are not fairly stated. Prohibition of opinions is an insult to adult citizens. In Great Britain at least the Communist Party is a perfectly legal organisation. It has as much right to hold a private meeting as the Liberal or Tory Party. It is the business of the police and Government to respect and protect its privacy. Mr. Henderson ought to know a lot about the Communists. They supply a healthy criticism and irritant on the Left wing of his party. He ought to have known this police annoyance was going on, and he ought to have stopped it as soon as he came into office. Either he knew this meeting was going to be spied upon or he did not. If he did he does not understand freedom, and if he did not his officials are lacking in respect for him.

In a large number of quite symptomatic affairs the Labour Government either through ignorance or through other preoccupations has failed to take advantage of its opportunities, and each one of these failures estranges some new group of intelligent people. For example, everyone with a vision a little wider than the politician's realises the importance of China to the future of mankind. In the long run, even the question of the mishandling of the five cruisers may prove less serious than negligence on the part of our Government toward the China Boxer indemnity money. The Chinese ask for a directive voice in that matter. Dr. Tsai is the Chancellor of Pekin University; he represents the best educational influences in China. He comes to London, but he finds most of the Ministers he wants to see too busy trying on their breeches and stockings to see him. He is given a nice talk with a permanent official, and told in the best official style that all his suggestions will be most carefully considered by the "Committee." The Committee which is to be set up may be just the sort of Committee that destroys the confidence of progressive Chinamen in British good faith. As it was first planned it represented material interests strongly; it had only one member who could be called an educationist; and there was no representative of New China upon it at all. There has been much coming and going since then, and the situation may be to a large extent saved, but if so it will be in spite of rather than thanks to any creative comprehension on the part of the Foreign Secretary or any member of the Labour Government.

One could multiply instances of this sort of wasted opportunity, in which the Labour Government has displayed itself as obtuse and blind as any Government could have been. Mr. Smillie, the other day, rejecting "all understandings with Liberals," declares that the Labour Party is "out to deal with root causes." But this Labour Government has never dared to be caught looking at a "root cause" yet. Take the question of birth-control. England is over-populated; it has a million unemployed; it cannot house its population decently, and it cannot educate its numerous progeny above a miserably low standard. But the Roman Catholic vote is organised against birth-control, and the Labour politicians dare not offend the Roman Catholic vote. Yet the housing problem, the unemployment problem, the organisation of education, the relations of the British Empire with other countries, the question of the necessity of war, all become absolutely different according to whether the population of the country is considered as being stationary or expansive. But this present Labour Government does not know whether it is for birth-control or against it. It does not know anything of that sort about itself. It does not know whether it is shaping the future for a restrained or overflowing population. The Intelligenzia, in the enthusiasm of its plunge into politics, thought that the Labour Party—as distinguished from all other parties—did. And generally they are coming to realise how greatly they overrated the creative power and the creative will of Labour.

As the exhilaration consequent upon being allowed _carte blanche_ to write promises for the Labour Party evaporates, the Intelligenzia will revert to its normal and proper aloofness from politicians. The Intelligenzia are the rain and the wind and sunshine of the political field, but not the field-workers of politics. To have the Intelligenzia in a party is like an elemental being married to a mortal. Elementals have magic gifts, but they are not always comfortable to live with. The Labour politicians will feel more and more masters in their own house—at least until the next election—as the critical, exacting Intelligenzia evaporate from the party.

* * *

## CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS AND  
THEIR RELATION TO CURRENT POLITICS

17.5.1924

Table of Contents

Mr. Smillie, a little while ago, was talking of the peculiar mental virtues of the Labour Party. It was "out to deal with root causes" and so forth. There was to be no parleying with Liberals. This was immediately before Mr. Snowden produced the greatest Liberal Budget in history; something off something for everybody and no Socialist confiscation. I was moved at the time of Mr. Smillie's speech to point out that the Labour Government had not been caught looking at the root cause of anything whatever since it came into office. It had put on its Court livery like little gentlemen, and done as it was told. That "root cause" delusion was created in the mind of Mr. Smillie by reading the election addresses of his associates.

For a time, until it got into office, the Labour Party was a magnificent hoarding for the constructive Radical. At bottom it is a party of feelings rather than ideas. It became boldly, outspokenly Socialist. It was declared to stand for a broad collective handling of our common interests, for scientific method. It wasn't afraid of bankers or landowners or Protection-seeking trade monopolists. It stood for the free, high constructive future against the injustice and mean limitations of the present. It was the New Age struggling to be. But really it wasn't for all those things because it was so at heart, but because it had to say something different from all other parties, and the creative Intelligenzia prompted it. So long as it was out of office active constructive minds could do its public thinking for it. But now that the Labour Party has taken office it has come of age and become an adult political party; it has lost the wild freshness and promise of youth, and begun to act for itself. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, with his piety and his political dexterity, is extremely like a Scotch, instead of a Welsh, Lloyd George, and the array of his colleagues is revealed as the very twin brothers of the Tory and Liberal knights, local councillors, provincial mayors, and so forth we have always known. The Labour Party brought down from the cloudland of promise to performance is seen to be little more than another of the numerous Liberal parties that have appeared in the vast inchoate world of British Liberalism. It has appeared and struggled to office because Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith were tiresome, obstinate egotists without an up-to-date idea between them, and because the complexity of self-conscious interests in Great Britain is too great any longer for the magnificent simplicity and "loyalties" of the old two-party system.

All this is perfectly natural and necessary. All political parties must represent the present, existing interests, existing social fears and jealousies, current delusions. No political party can represent the future, as Mr. Smillie would have us believe the Labour Party does. But it was the delusion of Karl Marx that the expropriated masses of mankind, living at a disadvantage, would necessarily realise the desirability of a more highly organised Socialist State and evolve a collective will to bring it about. This idea, through the devoted repetition of the Marxists, has infected the greater part of Socialist thought. It had manifestly infected Mr. Smillie. In so far as modern social inequalities and injustices, illuminated by modern educational influences, have brought out a steadily increasing hostility between the masses and the classes with an advantage, Marx was right, but in so far as that has involved the development of any capacity whatever to achieve a new and better order, he was wrong. The uncomfortable masses seek uncritically for some expression of their antagonism to the lucky, the dexterous, the unscrupulous, and the far-sighted who enjoy the advantages of the existing social and economic tangle, and their suffrages and passion will go to support the particular lucky, dexterous, unscrupulous, or far-sighted politicians who seem most in harmony with the hates and hopes of the stinted, hampered, and oppressed multitude. But the antagonisms and discords of the present system are as much a part of the present as its order and its success. The Labour Party as a Labour Party is no more inherently reconstructive than the Banking Interest or the Shipping Interest. Like them, it merely wants an excessive and inconsiderate share of present power and satisfactions.

I suppose if we could set aside the entangling influences of social position and traditions we should find that men and women fell into a series between two extremes of temperamental type; the Conservatives at one end, who like things to go on very much as they are going, only to be just a little richer and sounder and sunnier, and at the other end the disturbers who like fresh things to happen and who make fresh things happen. And of the disturbers there seem to be two main types: the personal adventurers who want a series of vivid events centring upon themselves, and do not care very much how much disorder is caused by their careers, and the innovators with an instinct or a mental habit of creative service—the scientific worker, the educationist, the innovating artist, the men with a passion for industrial and financial and social organisation, who will ultimately remake the world. These types mingle in most of us, we are all something of each, but in such prominent British figures as Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Winston Churchill, or Lord Beaverbrook we seem to have almost pure adventurers, and in Mr. Sidney Webb or Mr. C.P. Trevelyan almost pure creative service innovators. But the great financial adventurers are not in politics. They are behind politics. The unco-ordinated, inexplicit world of to-day is all for the bold acquisitive egoist; he causes wars and prevents peace, the industrialist is in his financial net, he does things to the exchange and the money in our pockets becomes worthless counters, he controls the news in our newspapers, and buys the house over our heads and the ground under our feet. He turns up in all parties as they suit him, and his eternal antagonist, the creative service innovator, must use all parties as he can against him.

No party has a monopoly of creative ideals; the Labour Party little more than the Conservative. For consider what the great constructive ideas before the world at the present time are. There is the rescue of civilisation from the destructive pressure of unregulated births through the extension of the necessary knowledge for efficient birth-control. There is the reorganisation of educational method throughout the world to develop the habits of service and co-operation upon the lines so admirably demonstrated by Sanderson and the re-orientation of educational aims and material by making universal history the basis of the conception of a universal citizenship. There is the rescue of democracy from its hopeless suffocation under the party system, by the reduction in the size of representative bodies to efficient proportions, and the adoption of the method of proportional representation in large constituencies. Only in that way can the ordinary citizen be released from his slavery to party managers and brought into a direct personal relationship to the member his vote elects. There is the liberation of the economic life of the world from restrictive and destructive financial manipulations by the creation of a world authority for a regulated currency and the clearing of the world debt jungle. There is the lifting of the waste and weight of private profiteering and nationalist sabotage, from shipping and world transport and the staple productions of the world, through the creation of a group of world authorities for these ends. Everybody of intelligence knows that these are just possible achievements for mankind, and that the outlook for mankind is dangerous and on the whole dingy until they are attained and secured. But there is no political party in the world that dare do more in office than fumble and prevaricate about any of them.

* * *

## THE EXTINCTION OF PARTY GOVERNMENT

31.5.1924

Table of Contents

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.

For trivial reasons Hare's voting method, which would give us an almost pure representative democracy, has been modified in all the practical proposals made by the division of the country into large constituencies instead of leaving it one whole, and the assignation of a limited but still large number of members to each. But its virtue of comparative veracity in representation still to a large extent remains. Mr. Rendall's recent Bill proposed constituencies returning not less than three and not more than seven members. This is much too small for a real representation of British opinion, but it was as much as the party wire-pullers would allow. When the question is reopened this maximum should be increased.

Of course the systems called Proportional Representation in use in France and Italy are scoundrelly caricatures of the idea. Under them the voters vote not for men but for party gangs, and the whole object of Proportional Representation is to release men from servitude to party manipulation.

The objections to the measure made in the debate upon the rejected Bill were mostly very trivial or based on positive misconceptions. The question was indeed not discussed. Most of the opponents from the Labour side contented themselves with twitting the Liberal politicians with change of heart upon the question. They behaved just as the Liberal Party hacks did in 1918 because they are exactly the same sort of men. The mentality of the party hack, Liberal, Labour, or Conservative, is very much on a level in this matter. Most of the big men in all parties are for Proportional Representation, because they know they are outstanding enough to survive its establishment. The party hack knows he lives through and by his party: the voter does not choose him but suffers him, and at the first clear opportunity the voter will push him out of the way and choose a more interesting non-party man. About seventy Labour men who have at one time or another professed approval of Proportional Representation did not vote.

The struggle against Proportional Representation is really the life struggle of the professional party politician. Under Proportional Representation the legislative assembly, instead of being elected by a small majority, or even a minority of the voters in the country, will be representative of nearly the whole country. In a constituency electing ten members, for instance, there will probably be less than a tenth of that constituency not actually represented by members returned. This wipes out every hope of a bilateral political system, because it will fill the assembly with free members, responsible only to the voters who have returned them, and practically independent of organised party support. They will necessarily be very various in their opinions.

It is not yet sufficiently realised, even by the supporters of Proportional Representation, that a country which returns men because they are distinctive and significant to its Legislature—and that is what the adoption of Proportional Representation means—will need an assembly of a different size and type from the present clumsy crowd of notables and nobodies at Westminster. There are too many members of Parliament at Westminster for efficiency, just as there are too many Congressmen at Washington. They loaf about. They do mischief in obscurity.

They make trouble in order to realise their own existence. They are to public affairs what excessive fat is to the body of a man. These big legislative bodies date from a time when group psychology was not thought of. It is even possible that a big legislative body elected by Proportional Representation would be a worse evil even than the party house. Released from the party ties that control them, bunched into fluctuating groups, the scores and hundreds of unnecessary members would obstruct and confuse every legislative proposal. Proportional Representation must mean not only the suppression of the hack politician, but also the suppression of the commonplace member. For efficient government we want a Legislature no larger than is fairly representative of the broad varieties of public opinion. At the largest we need only from two hundred to three hundred members, a grand committee of the nation, appointing Ministers severally, assigning tasks to sub-committees, and expressing the general ideas of the country. We shall certainly be able to dispense with the rotation of the "ins and outs" and possibly with the organised Cabinet in such a Legislature. The adoption of Proportional Representation will be a much profounder and more revolutionary change than a mere change in voting procedure. It will necessitate an entirely new type of representative government. In that lies its importance in the world's affairs and its fascination and desirability for most intelligent people.

* * *

## THE SPIRIT OF FASCISM:  
IS THERE ANY GOOD IN IT AT ALL?

12.7.1924

Table of Contents

During the last few weeks an extraordinary fuss has been made over the brutal murder of one of Signor Mussolini's most able and honourable opponents. Fascism has been put upon its defence. Weak but distinct sounds of disapproval have come from the more respectable sections of the Italian public. Even the London _Times_ has published leading articles that seem to hint at a faint reluctant perception that the Italian dictator is remotely connected with the bloody and filthy terrorism on which his power rests.

It is, I say, an extraordinary fuss, a remarkable and almost unaccountable outbreak of the public conscience of Europe. Because it is surely a matter of common knowledge that hundreds of people have been beaten and tortured to death by the Fascisti, that innumerable outrages of a peculiarly dirty kind have been committed, that arson, wreckage, and threats are the normal expedients of Italian political life, and that the power of Mussolini has been built up upon the organisation of such violence. These things have been going on for some years in Italy. Ambitious imitators have arisen in France and Germany and Britain. British "Crusaders" have gathered for the blessing of the Duke of York and strange young men in Oxford and Cambridge have braved misunderstanding by wearing badges bearing the challenging initials B. F. Young Italians in black shirts have even been allowed to insult the decent British dead by cocking snooks—or performing whatever the Fascist salutation is—holding out an arm and twiddling the fingers or something of that sort—at the Westminster Cenotaph. In America, however, there does not seem to be much of a Fascist movement. There has been no temptation for America, with the Ku Klux Klan in active operation and a long tradition of lynch law, to adopt the Italian model. But there have been many American expressions of sympathy with Fascism. And then in the full tide of sunny approval just one more little murder occurs—a murder not esentially different from many other Fascist murders—and the world wakes up to the infernal vileness of a thing that has been plainly before its eyes for years.

There never was so remarkable a case of the camel bearing itself bravely up to the very moment of the last straw.

To me this break back from Fascism is astonishing. I am inclined to think that Signor Mussolini found it so too. His prompt repudiation of the crime, his eager search for the body of his butchered antagonist, his sacrifice of valued cronies and close associates seem to show that his rich, emotional, rhetorical nature was very considerably scared. Nitti's house had been burnt and Nitti driven abroad. No one had protested, except perhaps Nitti. No apology to Nitti has been made by Mussolini, and no apology, no reparation for the stupid, malicious violence shown him, is likely to be made. And now, simply because Matteotti had been more difficult to handle and had got himself rather nastily killed, this uproar! It may be some time before the dictator is really comfortable again about the matter.

I do not propose to speculate here whether the storm will blow itself out and leave Signor Mussolini still on his blood-stained pedestal doing his solemn gestures of good government before the world, or whether we are in sight of the beginning of the end of Fascism. What interests me most is the complex of motives that drives behind Fascism, Ku Klux Klanism, the British Crusaders, and all these romantic attempts to organise ultra-legal tyrannies. The destructive instinct that gives us all a pleasure in smashing plates is plainly there, the natural malice against the unlike or the disturbing is very powerfully present, and the craving to exercise power. The stuff is in all of us, almost ineradicably so. (It betrays itself in this article.) We repress these impulses to a very large extent largely out of a fear of our fellow creatures' reprisals. But by joining a great society with high and disinterested professions of purpose we can conspire with a certain number of our fellows for a common indulgence of this malignant drive, and we can get some protection from the consequences and establish a real sense of moral justification. Many of us who would never dare to stab a negro in the street because of his offensive contrast with ourselves, or even to push him off the sidewalk if we encountered him alone, can respond to the call for his lynching with a tremulous reassurance. Many an Italian employer who would not dare to face his workers in a crisis about wages will help burn up a Labour Party office with a stout heart.

But it is claimed in the case of all these societies for intimidation and cruelty that the main motive is something higher and better than this. A state of danger, social indiscipline, and slackness is alleged; a failure of the normal processes of law and police. The cruelties and filthy outrages that are the normal activities of these organisations are declared to be the acts of strong men resolute to restore peace, justice, and confidence to a disordered world.

There is something in this plea. It is not to be too lightly dismissed. The condition of Italy before the Fascista movement crystallised out was certainly very bad. The lawlessness of Italian life existed before the Fascists and will outlive them. After the war it expressed itself in terms of Communism; robbing took the name of expropriation, and the natural resentment of human beings at uninteresting and inferior work expressed itself in entirely-mischievous strikes. The manifest injustices of the social system were made the plea for a multitude of outrages that did nothing to remedy them. There have been Communist murders and Communist outrages in Italy, though nothing to parallel the extensive systematic terrorism of the Fascista regime. The difference between Communist and Fascist is mainly this, that one conspires and does mischief and cruelty to bring about a state of order and justice that cannot exist, and the other to defend and sustain one that exists only in his imagination.

Moscow and Rome are alike in this, that they embody the rule of a minority conceited enough to believe that they have a clue to the tangled incoherencies of human life, and need only sufficiently terrorise criticism and opposition to achieve a general happiness. Violent revolution and violent reaction are two aspects of one asinine thing, violent uncritical conviction. Neither recognises the enormously tentative quality of human institutions, and the tangled and scarcely explored difficulties in the path of social reconstruction. But they feel these things they will not recognise, these tangles and possible complications, as perverse opposition, and their impatient souls rebel. Your party Communist, like your Fascist, is neither hero nor criminal; he is an ignorant, immodest, impatient fool who wants to grab the glory of inaugurating an epoch that cannot yet possibly begin. The great future of our race will owe little to either of these current nuisances. The maker of that future is the unconvenanted scientific man who works on without hurry and without delay, dissolving problem after problem in the solvent of clear knowledge, insisting on plain speech and free publication, refusing concealment, refusing to conspire and compel, respecting himself completely in his infinite respect for his fellow-men.

At the present level of education in the world, progress is like pushing one's way through a riot. The underlying fact in all these matters is that the common uneducated man is a violent fool in social and public affairs. He can work in no way better than his quality. He has not sufficient understanding to work in any other way. If there were no Fascism there would be something else of the same sort. The hope of the world lies in a broader and altogether more powerful organisation of education. Only as that develops will the vehement self-righteous and malignant ass abate his mischief in the world.

* * *

#### Wells aims

* * *

## The Governments of Mankind... ****

Table of Contents

### A Short Study of the British Government at Work.

From: _The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_. (chapter 12. section 2.)

But there is no reason why we should go on with this simple business statement of what is needed for the proper management and direction of Great Britain Ltd. The reader approaching the subject thru museum avenues of business appliances, industrial layout, and rationalisation expedients, will be in a position to imagine all the necessary efficiency. Let us, since our concern is not with what men might do but what they do now, turn rather to the actual working mechanism of British government in a period of dire stress and danger for all the world.

Our first intimation of incongruity comes when we contemplate the buildings, the Houses of Parliament, in which this great business is carried on. They do not look in the least businesslike. Nor did they make up in dignity or splendour of feeling what they lack in mechanical efficiency. They look as if a late Gothic cathedral had an illegitimate child by a Flemish town hall. Even as an exhibition of the Victorian Gothic temperament, the building is less entertaining than (say) the London Law Courts or the Tower bridge over the Thames.

A closer acquaintance suggest that the architects first designed the exterior and then rather inattentively fitted in an interior. There are the legislative chambers themselves with their lobbies, presidential throne, bilateral arrangement of seats for the "Ins" and the "Outs" in the struggle for office, galleries for admirers, and so forth, and beyond these there are a network of passages and staircases into which open various offices and chapel-like committee rooms devoid of any modern business convenience. The legislative chamber, in the case of the elected representatives, has seats for rather less than half the total number of members. But, of course, since forty-odd hours of oratory per week is more than any but the hardiest can bear to listen to, most of its seats are ordinarily empty. Scattered about the building are a few crypt-like apartments, capable of accommodating perhaps five per cent of the legislators, in which they can work individually with their secretaries. There are, literally, miles of corridors, but only one lift to serve the four floors used by members. Only ministers and under-ministers have rooms of their own. A large proportion of these are of the kind which would be set apart for the use of servants in Victorian dwelling-houses – ill lit and ill ventilated. And as the building dates from Victorian times and lends itself but poorly to modernisation, many of them are still fitted with the sacristy containing an ewer and basin for ablution. The ordinary members have only small lockers of the kind allotted to schoolboys in Victorian seminaries for their private books or papers. Every member has a hook all to himself in the cloakroom, and to this hook a loop of pink tape (renewed every session) is tied, in which he can hang his sword! Interviews with visitors from outside must be carried on either in corridors or in one or two underground tea or smoking rooms. There is no modern system of communication between the various parts of the building. As in primitive Africa, human porterage is relied upon as the means of conveying messages, and an hour may easily elapse between a visitor's arrival and the unearthing of the member he wishes to see. What this method lacks in speed, however, it makes up in dignity, the messengers being large and slow-moving men, wearing evening dress even in daylight, and ornamented with large gilt chains and badges after the manner of provincial mayors. Kitchens are interspersed among committee rooms, and for a considerable period every evening favoured regions of the building are pervaded by the sounds and the odours of good, old-fashioned English cooking. These, however, are not the only odours which are distributed by the ventilation. In some mysterious manner the drainage and the Thames contributes an intermittent miasma to a perennial stuffiness. Yet surely, for such important business as is done here, it would be better to drench the workers in super-oxygenated air of the utmost purity. Everywhere, even in the case of kitchens, lockers, smoking rooms and lavatories, and elaborate imitation Gothic scheme of decoration prevails. In his utmost privacy the member of Parliament still crouches in a niche.

The building is of a type of limestone exceptionally sensitive to the acids of the London atmosphere, and a touch of eventfulness is given to its facades by the occasional fall of lumps of the decaying stuff. This is most felt upon the celebrated Terrace, a long narrow passage between the building and the river. Here teas are served to members and their friends and constituents, heedless of the occasional avalanches. Here social influence is brought to bear upon the legislator, as the student may learn from the still sufficiently contemporary novels of Mrs Humphrey Ward.

The enquiring stranger will naturally wish to be shown the library and the organisation for prompt information. He will find three or four rooms lined chiefly with files of state papers and with collections of books on British birds and field sports – dating from the times when the majority of elected members were country gentlemen. True, a selection of the customary reference books to be found in clubs and hotels, and a few recently published political biographies, along with a small shelf of current books from a circulating library, indicate a faint recognition of modern requirements. But no effort is made, even from such pathetically inadequate material as this library comprises, to assemble for the use of members from time to time such books or papers as bear on subjects under discussion in the legislative chamber. There are no research workers, preparing synopses or abstracts of information: no effort, indeed, at all to relate the library, as such, to the specific needs of those who might use it.*(*No "wireless" is permitted anywhere in the Houses of Parliament.)

For obscure tactical reasons in the Party Game, the House of Commons consists of 615 members, a crowd too great for free deliberation and too small for mass-meeting treatment. When most of them are present, a number must stand and cluster. There are about 760 peers in the House of Lords, about 28 are minors at the time of writing, and most of the others stay away, so that there is not the same congestion. At the risk of seeming farcical to the uninitiated it may be worthwhile to give some particulars of the way in which the business of a great empire is conducted in this ill-equipped, ill ventilated and totally unsuitable building.

Every legislative measure must go through several stages of debating the elected assembly – second reading,* (*First reading has, surprisingly, been abbreviated to a mere formality occupying only a few seconds.) Committee, financial resolution (when money has to be found), report, third reading – before being sent to the hereditary chamber for further consideration and discussion there. It is the nominal aim of the Ins to keep the debates on each of these stages as short as possible, in order that the promises they have made to the electors may be redeemed at an early date. The ordinary members on their side of the House are accordingly expected to remain silent, leaving it to their leaders to make explanationary statements in reply to the criticisms of the Outs. These latter, on the other hand, since the basic article of their creed is that everything proposed by the Ins is bad, and since furthermore they will, in the ordinary course of events, be outvoted anyhow, aim at lengthening out and delaying the debates as much as possible in order to hinder the Ins from carrying through their legislative programme. The business of talking is on their side, accordingly, not confined to the leaders, but is enthusiastically carried on by as many of their supporters as can contrive to speak for half an hour or more without too often repeating what has already been said several times, and without making too apparent their lack of knowledge of – and often indeed, lack of interest in – the subject under discussion. This kind of debating sometimes goes on into the small hours of the morning, sometimes right through the night, the Outs hoping that sheer physical fatigue may force the Ins upon "the rack", to make concessions. The Ins may retaliate by moving and carrying the closure of a debate, but they do this at the peril of being represented (by the Outs) to every elector in the country as enemies of freedom of debate, betrayers of democracy, etc. And although every elector knows that the voting which ultimately decides every question is carried out on strict party lines, and knows, too, that most members do not listen to the debates, he has been trained to the belief that this freedom of debate is a highly important thing, in the vein of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

Recently a small group of members (including Sir Oswald Mosley and Mr Maxton) became convinced that the economic situation demanded certain urgent remedies, and they did their best to work out how long these urgent measures would take. After the most careful enquiry and computation, they came to the conclusion that the measures immediately needed would take at least ten years of parliamentary time to put through.

This normal routine of parliamentary procedure may not strike the outside observer as an altogether dignified way of giving effect to the national will. But that is because he does not realise with what solemnity and formality it is carried on. There are certain honoured quaintnesses even in the discussion. All speeches must be addressed to "Mr Speaker", the chairman of the assembly, and other members may only be alluded to by an elaborately circumlocutionary form of address. For the convention of addressing the Speaker there is something to be said. It keeps debate impersonal; it prevents wrangling duels and direct insults "as man-to-man". But the other circumlocutions are a great strain. Ministers and ex-ministers are "right honourable gentleman"; ordinary members "honourable gentleman"; members with military or naval posts "honourable and gallant gentleman"; and members who are also lawyers "honourable and learned gentleman". Their surnames must never be used, but only the name of their constituencies. Plain Mr X thus becomes "the honourable and learned gentleman, the member for –-- ". A similar rule forbids any direct mention of the hereditary chamber, the House of Lords, which can only be referred to as "another place". Furthermore, the proceedings are in costume. On his entry into the chamber Mr Speaker, who is always attired in eighteenth-century court dress, plus a wig and gown, is attended by another functionary, the Sergeant at Arms (wearing a sword to justify his title), who carries the Mace, symbol of the Speaker's authority. This is deposited upon the table of the House, and it is removed as ceremoniously, and placed onto books under the table, when the assembly sits "in committee" and Mr Speakers place is taken by the Chairman of Ways and Means. There is no rule forbidding general conversation while someone is addressing the assembly; but there are strict rules against a member speaking with his hat on, tho he may wear it while sitting.* (*He must also put it on – or borrow someone else's to put on – if he wishes to rise to a point of order after a vote has been called. Otherwise, hatless, Mr Speaker would not "see" him. There is much innocent fun when a large-headed member is thus forced to use a small-headed members hat, or vice versa. The presence of women members has now brought in an added touch of humour when, for example, an eager hapless man finds nothing but a bonnet available to restore him to technical visibility.) And although members may walk in and out of the chamber as often as they please, whether anyone is speaking or not, they must always bow to Mr Speaker or his deputy on entering or leaving. No member may stand in the chamber unless he is speaking, except on a certain marked-off area of the floor which is deemed to be outside the House. If the members to protrude across the line of tape (called "the Bar") marking the boundary of this area, he is guilty of a grave breach of decorum, and all those members in the chamber who've witnessed it are expected to chant, "Bar! Bar! Bar!" Until the intruding toe is withdrawn. So, too, if in the excitement of speech-making he chances to step away from his seat and set his foot in the gangway.

The debates are occasionally interrupted by a message from "another place" demanding Mr Speakers presence in the hereditary chamber to hear some message from the king, or to witness the Royal Assent being given (in archaic French – "Le Roy le veult") to certain measures. The hereditary chamber thus asserts its superiority by compelling the attendance of representatives of the Lower House within its own precincts, while the latter saves its dignity by ceremoniously closing its door in the face of the peers messenger and obliging him to knock and then knock again and then knock, three times altogether, before he is admitted. He then enters and delivers his invitation, and the Speaker, after repeating in full the invitation which everyone has just heard, heads a procession of members to the "other place". He and they clustered just outside the doorway and remain dutifully standing while the King's message is read. The procession then returns to the elected chamber, and the Speaker reads out the message in full once more.

The method of taking a vote of the members is as deliberate as the rest of the proceeds. It is processional. (Edison invented a method of voting and counting all the votes in a minute or so without a member leaving his place, half a century ago. In Texas a mechanical voter is actually in use, and the result is recorded in twenty seconds.) Every member must leave his seat in the chamber and walk in queue through the fairway of one or other of two lobbies, the "Ayes" or the "Noes", passing through a sort of wicket, where he gives his name to a Clerk, and then through a door where he is counted by two tellers. And so round the course home. When all have been counted, the tellers advance to the table of the House and, after bowing twice, read out their figures. This arrangement occupies from ten minutes to a quarter of an hour, and can even be made to last longer by the adoption of dilatory methods if either side is intent on hindering the course of the debates. Sometimes during the committee stage of the measure, votes on several amendments are taken in quick succession, and member spend from two to three hours in a single evening filing through the lobbies.

This registering of his vote is, of course, the most important part of an ordinary members duties. His efficiency, or otherwise, as a legislator is rated by his constituents according to the number of divisions in which he votes. Since he is seldom in the chamber when a vote is called, Whips appointed by his party are stationed at the door to tell him which lobby to enter and, if he is of the curious, troublesome type, what the voting is about. Apart from voting, his chief opportunity for individual participation in the business of legislation comes during question-time, when, during the first fifty minutes of each day's proceedings, he may put questions to Ministers on any matters of public importance. Questions in the main fall into three groups: those put down by the Outs with the aim of embarrassing the government by compelling them to make a definite statement on some issue about which the government prefers to be indefinite; those referring to matters of local constituency interest, put down by members to advertise to their constituents the fact of their presence in Parliament; and those which genuinely seek information on some point of policy or administration or aim at securing publicity for some genuine grievance.

But the student must not imagine that the private member may ask any questions he pleases. There are intricate rules and regulations about what he may or may not ask and about the form in which his question may be put. You would imagine that somewhere among the pillars and and vaults and masonry a small bureau would have been established to which members would take their questions and have them put into acceptable form and passed, but that is not the Westminster way. The Member of Parliament must hand his questions, while debating is in progress around him, to the "Clerk at the Table", who sits immediately in front of the Speaker. He must then stand meekly by, like a schoolboy at the headmaster's desk, while the official ponders his question and discovers breaches of the rules in it. Having been instructed to alter it, but not daring to ask for any explanation lest he be called to order for brawling under the Speakers very nose, he goes out and writes out another form of words. And so on, and so on – until the master is satisfied. A sufficiently lucid code of regulations as to the correct phrasing of questions could probably be drawn up in ten minutes and printed on a postcard. But apparently no one at Westminster has thought of this.

If he fails to obtain what he considers a satisfactory answer, our questioning member may announce his intention of raising the matter on the adjournment of the House, that is, after the business of the day is over, late at night, when both he and the Minister concerned are usually too tired to take more than a perfunctory interest in anything, and when, incidentally, it is too late to get any notice in the press of the matter. Or, if he feels acutely about the subject and desires some publicity for it, he may get himself suspended (i.e., expelled from the sittings of the chamber for a week or longer) by refusing to obey Mr Speakers order to him to sit down after his question has been dealt with. Then there is a "scene" in the House, which gets duly reported in the newspapers.

Often when the question is inconvenient to the government, the member will get no open reply at all. He will be asked to wait while enquiries are made. Unless he is obstinately persistent he may hear no more about the subject. A special report from the department concerned may be placed quietly in the library at some later date, but he will not necessarily be informed of this, and the information may lie safely hidden on the top shelf or in an obscure cupboard. This, of course, can happen very easily indeed to questions on foreign or colonial subjects, where some time must elapse before replies from the territory concerned can be obtained.

During certain parts of every session one day, sometimes two, in a week are set apart for the discussion of private members motions or bills (which of them are thus discussed is decided by ballot); but as there is practically no likelihood of these debates influencing the course of legislation already decided upon by the government, they may be regarded as academic exercises, of use only to those members who desire practice in the art of speech-making.

We have noted the phases through which a bill must pass before it goes to "another place". That is only half its career. After the Commons it must go through similar stages in the House of Lords. But here business is expedited somewhat, and their lordships rarely sit longer than from tea-time to dinner time.* (*They have, of course, no budget or estimates to deal with, entire control of finance being vested in the Commons.) (Voting is carried out in the same way as in the Commons, except that the lords, instead of being divided into "Ayes" and "Noes", declare themselves "Contents" or "Not Contents".) If a bill is passed by the lords it needs only the Royal Assent to become an Act of Parliament. In the event of the lords rejecting a bill, the commons may pass it again, this time with the minimum of formality and discussion; and if they repeat this procedure a year later and again a year after that (which assumes that the Ins have not become Outs in the meantime), the bill becomes law without the consent of the lords. [Subsequently, the Lords power of delay was reduced from two years to one.]

The Parliamentary session has a variable length, but is never less than a year (about eight months of actual sitting). It is opened by a King's Speech, written, of course, by ministers, which outlines in brief the programme of forthcoming legislation. This speech is read by the monarch himself to the assembled Lords and Commons, and the occasion is marked by a large amount of pageantry, with Goldsticks-in-Waiting and Gentlemen of the Household greatly in evidence.

At the end of the session all incomplete bills are dropped entirely. This is called the "Massacre of the Innocents" by "old parliamentary hands". Every scrap of work done upon these frustrated measures is absolutely wasted. Everything must begin again at the next session – the same stages, the same speeches, the same arguments, the same indignation – all over again.

For traditional reasons of a complex type, the government is regarded as a solid body of inseparables. If the members want to get rid of an incompetent minister of finance, they cannot do so without turning out the entire government and breaking off every other ministerial activity in progress. The Prime Minister, defeated or in a bad temper, may decide to advise the King to dissolve parliament, and then back go the affairs of the nation, in all their complexity and incompletenesses to the general population, under conditions we will consider a little more closely in our section on Assent....

From section 4.

"It was rather amusing in [section] 2, even though it may have seemed a little irreverent to some of our readers, to survey the sacred procedures of the British Parliament in the light of modern rationalization. Manifestly we were dealing in this instance with a very old-established and intensely self-satisfied body. It has muddled along in the sunshine of British good luck for so long that it is still saturated with the idea that the sunshine is the outcome of its own peculiar virtues. It palavers, it plays its little slow game of processions and ceremonial, it rejoices in its leaders and "characters", it delays and obstructs human progress – with an unsullied conscience. Since the social machine does in a manner get along from day to day, and since the permanent official is relatively invisible, the public shares this delusion of the politician's essential importance. And there is no fundamental difference in quality, though there may be differences in degree, when we turn from the British government to other contemporary sovereign powers."

### Assent.

(From section 5.)

Let us for a section revert to the elementary psychology of human association with which we have already dealt in chapter the eighth. It has been difficult to consider the existing governments of mankind from the point of view of an efficient discharge of functions, without a note of derision creeping into the account. That note will pass into dismay and monstrous foreboding as this chapter proceeds to the consideration of international relations and the clumsy dealings of these inept governments one with another. But when we consider them, not from that point of view, but as aspects in the slow, progressive adjustment of a very ego-centred and recalcitrant animal to social life, the calm of biology returns to us, we see how inevitable these evils were, and the flavour of exasperation and indignation fades out of our description.

Before we take up the activities of war and the mutual injuries of states, let us seek an explanation of this outstanding ineptitude which still pervades political life and which contrasts so vividly with man's present scientific and industrial achievement. Why are our ostensible governments so manifestly inferior in their working and adjustments to railway engines or telephone exchanges?

The answer is latent in the account we have given of social origins. Man, we have to reiterate, is social in spite of himself. He is by nature self-centred, fierce and resentful, and to make up society it has been necessary that he should be educated, cajoled and subdued. Fear, superstitions and the gods, religions, histories, initiations and educations, example and precept have all played a part in the complex, always imperfect, process of breaking him in to collective life. Beating, promises, flattery and training have each contributed to win his assent to his role in the scheme of things, his willing participation in the give-and-take of the community.

In the smaller, simpler, stabler cities and states of the past, it was possible to browbeat and accustom ordinary people to the obediences and co-operations of collective life. The community carried on. If any chose to be recalcitrant, disapproval and compulsion of a practicable sort were close at hand. If in return the ruler proved too oppressive, a straightforward revolt and a change of ruler could occur and clean up the situation.

But with the growth and increasing complexity of modern communities, assent became a less simple matter. Government became distant, it became distant in space, and it receded from popular view behind a growing thicket of intermediaries. It ceased to feel the fluctuations of individual assent. Britain lost her American colonies because, weeks and weeks away across the Atlantic, men could get together and say freely what they thought of taxation by Westminster, while Westminster unaware could do nothing to suppress them or reconcile them. The French monarchy collapsed because France beyond Versailles would not assent to continually increasing taxation. Most of the social and political stresses of the past three centuries have been due to the dissentience of people out of touch with, and refusing assent to, governments. The nineteenth century, from the first to last, was experimenting with representative democracy in the hope of sustaining the minimum of assent necessary for the working of a continually more extended, detailed (and more costly and taxing) governing machine.

On the one hand the traditional ruler was relinquishing more and more of the detailed application of power to the skilled or routine-guided official, while on the other he was still held responsible for all this increasing amount of government. So he found himself in continually greater need of the general assent of the community. The modern politician has arisen, in effect, to meet the needs of this situation. He is a dealer, a merchant or broker in assent. He lives by assent. He gathers it in, or makes believe to gather it in, from the vague and fluctuating masses of the great modern community, he consolidates it, seems to consolidate it, always with a view to the approval of the assenting mass and a continuation of its favours, and so he transmits it to the officials, police, teachers, tax-gatherers, judiciary and so on. He interprets to the officials what the community approves and what they may do, and the officials inform him upon what issues the community needs to be instructed and directed. He has to pose as giving orders to the one and inspiration to the other. He is something quite different from a Roman Imperial statesman, an Oriental vizier, or a statesman of the Middle Ages. One must go back to the city democracies of the Mediterranean to find anything like him. He is not indeed a statesman at all, or he is a statesman by the way. He is much more akin to the actor, the writer, and the popular journalist. He deals with audiences, as they do.

To realise the intervention of these assent-organising activities and the conditions under which they must work is to begin to understand the otherwise inexplicable inefficiency of contemporary governing bodies. It was unfair to compare them to boards of directors or to any rationalised industrial organisation. They neither embody definite plans nor pursue defined ends. Nobody is quite clear and precise about what they are for. They balance and sway in the balance. The will to rule which is supposed to exist in the electorate is not there. The will to rule has evaporated from the organisation of the modern state. It is being concentrated afresh in the minds of political thinkers, business organisers, financial organisers and the modern civil service. But the politician has to pretend and sustain with all his power the pretence that the will to rule resides in the electorate. Directly it is proved that the ordinary man has no wish to rule at all, the reason for the politician's existence vanishes.

Our Museum encyclopaedia would detail all the multitudinous ways of looking at the state, still operative in the world. The religious royalist – in Britain, at least – would say that government is "for God and the King". It has to sustain the peace and order of the realm. Such Puritans as those who founded New England would have it that it is the embodiment of God's will on earth. Many minds with a Latin tradition would turn rather to the phrase of the Re-Public or the Common Weal. And then ask for an expert dictator – tho dictators are never experts. But for the past century and a half theocracy and autocracy have been more or less thrust aside by the democratic idea, the idea that the state is the "embodied world" of the people, that all power comes from the people and all governmental service is ultimately the service of the people and of their common rights and liberties. In most other systems the people are supposed to assent passively; an element of natural or divine right in the ruler or rulers is assumed, and the people are understood to recognise that; in modern democratic systems popular assent is figured as active and continuous. The people are themselves supposed to watch and understand government and to signify their assent by their votes.

The next stage to representative democracy is Anarchism, in which theory no government whatever is required, since the people are supposed to be directly and immediately capable of solving whatever collective problems may arise.

Manifestly our contemporary populations neither watch nor understand government. That they do so is a legal fiction. But we have to get along with that fiction for the present, because no one has yet invented and worked out any better way of getting a general assent to administration and legislation. A much better way cannot be beyond human contriving, but it has not yet been contrived. Meanwhile the collective affairs of mankind have to be carried on through the mediation of a patchwork of seventy-odd governments, mostly of the elective democratic type. There is nothing else to be done but to work them as well as we can until a better way appears.

Again the reader must turn his imagination to vast shadowy galleries in our Museum of Human Activities. There would be exhibits to display the past and present of electioneering and the organisation of democracies for political ends. All the machinery would be displayed from public meeting to polling station and vote counting; there should be a complete collection of election posters, cinema records of American processions and demonstrations, and a series of photographs of politicians in full harangue, with their faces distended and their uplifted and gesticulating hands and arms. In the special library there would be a collection to illustrate the relations of the press to political crises and studies of bribery under past and current conditions, intimidation, personation, the falsification of returns and the strategy of seat redistribution, freak candidates and the like.

It is impossible, under modern conditions, for politicians to mould or direct opinion. They have to pick up and marshal such feelings and opinions as exist already in the community, to "crystallise" them in catchwords, to use all the skill and science of the professional advertiser to impress their "personalities" and their panaceas on the popular imagination. Even when they are standing for a real end, its statement must be simplified down to the level of the average voter. Necessarily they must seek and use the cheapest, widest appeals to prejudice that the public intelligence will tolerate.

Cheapest and most effective of all such appeals is the appeal to patriotism. If patriotism had never existed before, modern politicians would have invented it. And almost equally powerful are class jealousy and class greed. Let the burden of taxation fall on other people: that has always been quite naturally a very popular cry. Fear of the unknown is another great force for the politicians purposes. All proposals for reorganisation must have their complexities, which may need half an hour or so of explanation – and half an hour of explanation is nine-and-twenty minutes too much for the average man. All, too, involves some experimental reservations. A twist of misrepresentation, a misleading nickname, a bold assertion of the certainty of disastrous consequences, and the carefully elaborated scheme is doomed. The common voter, unless he is in a panic or entirely desperate, will go down with the ship, will stick to the ship, that is, so long as it is above water, rather than risk the frightful jump into the lifeboat. Much more will he hold back when there are politicians to tell him that the lifeboat is a live trap, and as the ship always _has_ floated he may trust it to float forever.

As corrective to this law, so to speak, of the maximum cheapness of appeal in political life, there is nothing but a public understanding based on a sound general education – education not of the formal school type, but real education as we shall define it in chapter 15. As the level of sound education rises in the community, the quality of the politician's appeal must rise. There will come a point at which the basic grades of claptrap will discredit, and the politician will have to qualify this claptrap he uses with a certain consistency and sanity. An alert, intelligent and honest press is a powerful restraint upon the worst impulses of the politician. It can keep things in mind for and against him; it can be a constant refresher to the public mind. Unhappily, economic developments have for a time cheapened the press mentally throughout the world. But this we shall discuss later.

Posturing, intrigue and unscrupulous appeals to fear, class jealousy, and patriotism; favours, buttons, crystal and claptrap: these are the forces that bring the politicians of the great powers of the world to office. They come to government pledged to measures that must confuse economic life, cripple trade and promote those international stresses that lead to war. As far as possible, the permanent official, the sane man in a position of responsibility, does his best to prevent or delay the realisation of those pledges. And the necessary legislative and administrative incompetence of the democratic politician is always very helpful in assisting him to break his word. Moreover, as soon as his election to office is over, he has no longer any strong inducements to keep his word; it is much easier and pleasanter to let his pledges – he never, if he can help it, pledges anything tangible – slide. He promised to save the country, and is not his presence at the head of things a sufficient guarantee that the country has been saved?

In this manner it becomes clear how it is that the multitudinous governing machines that now divide human affairs so strangely between them are so inferior in efficiency to the aeroplane, the telephone exchange or the power station. When we examine the psychology of human association the wonder is, not that it works badly, but that it works at all. We have seen how in a comparitively brief period of time human communities have passed from their ancient forced assent to the arbitrary will of God's and master's, into this present state of alleged free assent – which is, to put it plainly, _humbugged_ assent. Uncertainly and desperately the educationally minded toil to overtake the blundering developments of this new situation. The problem of government remains still the obscurest of all the vital problems that now challenge mankind.

We may, perhaps, glance for a moment at various proposals that have been advanced for the improvement of the modern democratic governing machine. They are all rather hopeless proposals because they are more or less plainly and openly projects for the abolition of the contemporary type of politician, and it is only with the consent of the contemporary type of politician that they can legally be brought into operation. The proposals fall into three groups: those which concern the method of election; those which concern the size and procedure of the legislative body, and those which turn upon the necessity of the checks and delays established by our forebears.

It is maintained by a very considerable number of intelligent people that the prevalent method of election by the division of the electorate into one-seat (or in a minority of cases two or more seat) constituencies, necessarily subordinates wide to local considerations, gives no representation whatever to the minority, tho it may be only a few votes short of the majority, and leads inevitably to a two-party system which mocks at essential change. At times a party which really represents only a minority of the population, by winning a number of seats by narrow majorities and losing a few by enormous minorities, may have an actual majority in the legislative chamber.

One remedy suggested by Thomas Hare (The Election of Representatives) in 1859, and supported by John Stuart Mill, is Proportional Representation. In its original and most logical form it was a scheme for treating the whole country as one constituency and allowing a candidate to collect votes until he could obtain a quota qualifying him for election. "Practical" men have modified this project in 300 (!) different ways, but the most genuine form would have large constituencies returning up to 15 members (so Lord Courtney before the British Royal Commission in 1909) and long lists of candidates would be submitted to the electors who would mark their preferences one, two, three, and so on. A candidate, who secured more than sufficient ones to achieve the quota, would have his surplus of twos divided among candidates who had not yet received a quota, and so on, until a sufficient number of quotas would be accumulated and only a surplus of less than a quota would be left unrepresented. But this would tend to the election of outstanding representative men who are not simply party politicians. On that account it is that we have those three hundred variations of the method, all designed to keep government in the hands of party politicians by insisting upon the voters second, third and latest selection be not free but confined to tortuously fabricated party lists. These sophisticated forms of proportional representation, contrived as they are to restrict government to the professional politician, lead to a representative assembly with an inconvenient mosaic of small parties and make government a matter of tiresome bargaining and intrigue.

But the plain fact of the case is that proportional representation aims to get rid of the party politician altogether and to substitute for his interventions a real Council of the nation. The world wants – just as far as it can – to get rid of the politician in managing its affairs, just as it wants to get rid of the middleman in trade. Both are interveners, making trouble rather than saving it. No true politician will ever concede silent working efficiency in administration if he can prevent it. He lives and dies by party. What has been overlooked, in such experiments in so-called proportional representation as have been made thus far, is that the elected chamber must be much smaller than, for instance, the British House of Commons or the American House of Representatives, and that it should have no party structure. It must be a not too big committee of the nation rather than an unwieldy bilateral debating society. Its ministers must not be a block, going in and out of office together; they must be individually responsible to the entirely more intelligent and more representative assembly the proportional representative method would produce.

We cannot enter here into the detailed discussion of the proportional representative project. The best case against it is made by asserting that an election in a modern democracy has a double purpose. Its first end is the appointment of a legislator. But equally important, say these critics, is the education of the common citizen in public issues by the speeches and canvassing of the candidates. This is only possible in small, accessible constituencies. No candidate could cover the ground of a fifteen-member constituency; and so his instructive and exalting personality could not get into touch with the uninformed common man. Proportional representation would therefore throw more political power into the newspapers and (party) publicity machinery. But think of the average party candidate – as educating anybody! The fact is that today the guiding influences in modern elections are the newspaper, the party propaganda organisation, priests (in many countries), and "movements" which canvas. A change-over to proportional representation would not really alter this at all. Further it is argued that great numbers of voters would not vote at all. That might not prove a misfortune. To abstain is practically to assent.

But most criticism of genuine proportional representation is based on an uncritical and unimaginative belief in the necessity for party government because of its supposed stability. It is held to be an excellent preventive of any essential revolution, because the party out of office (tho it consists of politicians differing in no essential respect from those in office) can pretend to take up and act for those who find the contemporary government intolerable. A change of personnel is thus foisted upon people who want a change of regime.

The whole apologetic for modern democratic government on the old party lines rests in fact upon this action in diverting and minimising the forces of change in the interests of stability. It is not realised that there may be too much stability and not enough change. But the form of government suggested by the more thoroughgoing proportional representationists – a single small chamber of the size of a big committee of from 200 to 300 members, a circular chamber, that is, and not a bilateral one, the chamber elected by immense constituencies returning from ten to eighteen members each – would certainly give better scope for the broaching of dissenting views and for compromises with them, than the present system. It would accept or reject the ministers appointed by the Premier individually, and it could go to the country triennially or quadrennially for new blood and the elimination of persons who had become unpopular. It would have far greater continuity of will and personnel than any existing government.

The professional politician has always clung as long as possible to the two-party system. When a community (as, for example, the British) has become so manifestly bored and thwarted with the Box and Cox alternation of governments, which, the more they change, the more they remain the same thing, and has, in spite of every mechanical difficulty in its wake, evoked a third or even a fourth party, then the politicians resort to the trick of the Second Ballot or Alternative Vote. These contrivances are designed to come into operation when there are three or more candidates, and none of them gets an absolute majority. The hindmost is eliminated, and the remaining two share his votes either in a second polling or by counting the second choice already marked on each voters paper. These devices have recommended themselves to legislators because they admit a third professional politician to the chances of the election and nevertheless are entirely effective in excluding any publicist, however popular, who is not attached to a fully organised party machine. The trade in assent, with all its honours and profits, remains in professional hands and that, from the politicians point of view, is the most important consideration. It is hardly surprising that representative party government on such lines has been unable to prevent an anti-Parliamentary revolution in the case of Poland and various other countries, when a bored and apathetic community has submitted to, and even found a certain relief in, a frank dictatorship. And already we have studied the desolating ineffectiveness and want of initiative of the Mother of Parliaments in the face of the dark urgencies of our time.

The fact that the prestige of the two-party system arose accidentally, because of a peculiar domestic and religious stress in seventeenth-century England, is generally disregarded in the discussion of electoral methods. But it is a vitally important consideration. The fluctuations in English affairs which led to the successive replacement of the first Stuarts, the Commonweal, the late Stuarts, the House of Orange, the Tory reaction under Anne, the House of Hanover and the raids of the Old and Young Pretenders, within the brief space of a hundred years, established an exceptional duality in English political affairs. On the one hand was the Tory, Royalist, Anglo-Catholic or Roman Catholic, and presently agriculturalist and landlord; and the other the Whig, Middle-Class Republican, Aristocratic-Republican with the tame king often urban and interested in industrial development. When the British colonies in America developed beyond the scale of an exploited group of satellites, Tory and Whig fought for subjugation or independence – the City of London was for the colonists – and the two-party system was transferred without any question of its naturalness to American political life and fixed there permanently by the adoption of a method of voting that practically necessitates the restriction of an election to one of two candidates. Tory disappeared in America, and Whig split into Republican and Democrat – we omit the intermediate phases – but the dualism remained. The economic and political prosperity, first of Great Britain and then of the United States, gave everything Anglo-Saxon a flavour of success throughout the nineteenth century, and as other countries began to modernise their governments, this purely accidental bilateral arrangement of affairs, with its alleged efficacy in burking attempts of fundamental change by diverting them into the harmless channel of "opposition" politics, became a world-wide institution.

But there is no natural necessity for it; none whatever. It is a contemporary superstition.

* * *

### Wells Sources

Social Forces in England and America.   
Also published as:  
1914: An Englishman Looks At The World.   
(The latter does not include the essay, Social Panaceas.)

1916: Elements Of Reconstruction. (HG Wells writing as "D.P". in a series of articles contributed to the _Times_.  
First book edition by Nisbet & Co., London, November 1916.)

1918: In The Fourth Year.

1924: A Year Of Prophesying.

1932 (1935 reprint): The Work, Wealth And Happiness Of Mankind.

#### _HG Wells waits for JM Barrie and friends to play._

* * *

## By Richard Lung:

Table of Contents

### Post-script

HG Wells joined the board of the Proportional Representation Society, in 1908. (There is still a Proportional Representation Society of Australia.) A man of many parts, this was not one for which he was remembered. There is no doubt that he was passionately committed to the cause.

From 1912, and alternate years to the end of the Great War, he wrote substantial chapters, in several books. This was in response to the most challenging and desperate period in British history.

This staggering of a great effort is why we do not have, for all the world to see, a volume, by HG Wells, on "Sane Voting". This was the slogan he prefered to the absurdly named proportional representation. This book would have been, and now is, one more to a row of distinguished works, by that author. More books of his, than is generally realised, are not far from excellence.

I have not adopted Wells probable choice of title, choosing instead his other phrase, "The Angels Weep", because another century has confirmed that man is not so much sane as selfish, and grievously so, in this and other respects.   
Moreover, Wells says that it is the merely thoughtless, who make for catastrophe, which he epitomes as a wading into the lakes of blood, that was the Great War.

The merely selfish make a career for themselves, as professional politicians, by clinging to their incumbency, with fraudulent elections, which allow governments literally to get away with murder.

Wells recognised that self-serving government is perhaps the biggest difficulty that mankind has with itself.   
He knew, like many others, the threat to peace, from unrepresentative and unaccountable governments making war with impunity, as agencies of armaments profiteering.

Wells famously predicted the atomic bomb, in 1914. Nuclear weapons and their atom plant accessories spread ever more dangerously. That, and other industrious weaponising, is reckless, and bodes ill for the future.

A deadly combination is weapons of mass destruction, in the control of autocratic governments. Subjugated populations have no independence of thought or action, being merely the appendages of a state body. So, the only way to stop state aggression on other nations is to destroy the aggressive states duped and enslaved population.  
The Cold War showed how perilous this situation for the prospects of mankind.

Plainly, the corporate state endangers the survival of life on earth, because its aggressions can only be halted by destroying the state in the body of its population. Therefore, survival depends on the worlds peoples being independent of their governments, not instruments of war. And freedom from physical subjugation largely depends on freedom from mental subjugation.

Oligarchy is ignorant by nature, as representation is informative by nature. A ruling class entrenches itself in power, not just by banning democracy, but by curtailing science to its own demands. Representation is information representation, the heart of science. Curtailing representation does not just exclude the many, but information that the few don't want the many to share.

In short, oligarchy maintains itself by keeping the many in mental subjugation. To be the enemy of democracy, it has to be the enemy of science, as free research, too.

Oligarchic ignorance, being unrepresentative of the broadest conception of reality, is unstable, with a maximised potential for disaster. A few in control is human aggression out of control. Oligarchy is repressive deceit institutionalised. Self-righteous rages are not helpful. We all may have work to do, to deliver ourselves from our limitations.

The revival of electoral reform in Britain, since the last quarter of the twentieth century, has seen exercises in information control, by closing down debate (the life-blood of any scientific investigation) on democratic voting method.   
Ruling class fear, of free election method, has been headed-off by sham methods that transform an election into a location or partition or both. Freedom has been travestied into freedom to vote for a party (without freedom of individual choice) or to have a local vote (meaning a locally monopolised vote). Wells wrote about both these short-comings.

Again, in 1923-4, when there seemed another chance for electoral reform, Wells returned to the grind of journalism, turning out prophetic weekly articles, often on the topic of proportional representation.

Those are Wells writings that contain the phrase "the angels weep," title of this essay collection. That passage, which prefaces this, his book, bounds, in a nutshell, the infinite futility of electoral reform, over the last century.

By 1932, in the last extract of this collection, Wells admits reform prospects to be hopeless, because legal change depends on politicians, who would lose by PR.

This is still the ruling consideration, vitiating any attempts at real change. The term, proportional representation largely has been debased to campaigns for a balance of power between the parties. This essentially is a masquerade for an unprincipled power struggle, over how many parties are to be allowed into a multi-party oligarchy.

Party democracy (an oxymoron) is favored by alleged reformers, who think this is the way the world is going, and want to be on the winning side. Electoral reform largely has degenerated to an exercise in how to fool the people. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, and that is enough.

To make clear that he meant the original unadulterated reform, by Thomas Hare (and Carl Andrae) the HG Wells formula is proportional representation with the single transferable vote in large constituencies.

Why has this editor and others, in adversity, persisted with this great cause?   
Relentless reaction has severely limited STV application and widely run down its very existence, in political institutions. Some of its dedicated support, for well over a century, lately has suffered entryism or hi-jacks. But PR by STV has held onto a modest success.   
Several recent British reports have recommended PR/STV. It established a beach-head with Scottish local elections, in 2007. And hopefully that will not be the end of it.

The intelligence of the man generally shines thru Wells writings. His personal involvement makes that particularly apparent in these essays. One passage, I have named as HG Wells law – the law of electoral entropy. (Discussed in my fourth book on electoral reform and research: FAB STV.)

About 1975, I sent electoral reform groups copies of The Disease Of Parliaments.

In 1981, UNESCO took a copyright on my essay showing that the single transferable vote follows the scales of scientific measurement. It is the title essay of a recently published booklet in French.

In short, I have a lifetimes knowledge, both of HG Wells books and of voting method. I compiled a bibliography with quotations from nearly all of Wells minor, as well as major, references to electoral justice. (That is in my book, Scientific Method Of Elections.)

That research refers also to Wells comments on the economic democracy of occupational representation. This is the scientific complement of specialist practise to the politics of general principle.

Thoughtless reformers of today presume an election always must mean a political election. They press for an elected House of Lords. Unlike Wells, it does not cross their minds that the election could be other than political, and that a second political chamber is superfluous -- except for more jobs in parties.

The necessity of an economic franchise is of comparable importance to a political franchise. One-dimensional democrats seem unaware that a second economic dimension of democracy exists. They are not even flat-landers!  
If it comes to that, they often are scarcely democrats at all, but pseudo-democratic campaigners for party oligarchy, with elections for parties with a party vote, rather than a voters vote.

The seventy years copyright limit on Wells writings expired in 2016. For the sake of compactness, I here include only Wells main contributions on electoral reform. They are ample to comprise a substantial book. The gradual accumulation of Wells thoughts, over nearly two decades, means that it interacts with the turbulent times, lending the work a dimensional depth.

"The Angels Weep: HG Wells on Electoral Reform" has the outstanding quality, that a century of like writings leave it still the most forthright account.

Elsewhere, I have touched on the range of Wellsian fore-sight. I just mention, here, one or two points.   
In 1932, Wells discussed a range of alternative energies, when they were still just in the theoretical stage.   
The governments of the world mostly appear to be coming together on addressing climate change from the greenhouse effect.

When the Trump administration reneged on that commitment, in the Paris Agreement, the source of the difficulty could be traced to polarised politics from two-sided elections (explained by Wells). This system of minimal choice, and hence minimal change, tempted the supposed party of progress, to try to get away with (none too scrupulouly) nominating a scarcely more liked candidate than their conservative opponent. This intolerably frustrated many peoples wishes for meaningful reforms.

Wells was one of the first to realise the need for conservation of resources, including respect for ones fellow creatures, lamenting their likely disappearance.   
In 1905, in the novel Kipps, the author makes the throw-away remark that over-population was the essential tragedy of the nineteenth century.   
Micawber man continues to live beyond his means.

A big incentive for mankind, to unite and work together, is the discovery of planets round local solar systems, because the challenge of their colonisation is so far beyond mankinds current technical capabilities.

Wells is well-known for his work to unify mankind. He envisaged, and we begin to see, this happening in stages, thru federations of the worlds great cultural and continental blocs, after the fashion of the United States. Wells foresaw the possibility of a European Union, as a stage towards world unity.

The United Kingdom is seceding from the EU, into a relationship akin to that of Canada and the United States.

An avowed integrationist, former Irish premier, John Bruton recommended the single transferable vote for European elections. Wells himself vehemently opposed Continental corporate elections.   
2018 saw the initiation of a World Index on Electoral Freedom, which throws a much-needed spot-light on an indifferent world performance, in this respect.

I argue that it is a scientific condition that unity depends on liberty. (That discussion is within my book: Science Is Ethics As Electics.) Not that Britain is a political example to Europe. A better comparison would be the break-away of Protestant from Catholic. The former might want religious freedom merely for themselves, rather than any-one else. The fact remains that unity cannot be imposed, as by a bureaucracy, but must be reached by consent.   
And that does not mean "humbugged assent" as Wells characterised the current state of electoral law.

#### _One of these books is not by H. G. Wells_.

* * *

## Works on electoral reform and research by the editor:   
The Democracy Science series.

Table of Contents.

My up-to-date list of books (in epub format), with links, can be found on my profile page: here.

(The Calibre program can change the epub format, which is the ebook industry standard, into other formats, such as pdf.)

The Democracy Science series of books, by Richard Lung, as described below, is edited and renovated from this authors material on the Democracy Science web-site.

### Book 1: Peace-making Power-sharing.

The first book on voting method, has more to do with electoral reform. (The second is more about electoral research.)

"Peace-making Power-sharing" features new approaches to electoral reform, like the Canadian Citizens Assemblies and referendums. I followed and took part in the Canadian debate from before the assemblies were set-up, right thru the referendums.  
This was a democratic tragedy and an epic in the dashing of idealistic hopes.

Some developments in America are reviewed.

The anarchy of voting methods, from the power struggle in Britain, is investigated over a century of ruling class resistance to electoral reform.

A penultimate chapter gives the simplest way to explain transferable voting, on to the more formal treatment of a small club election.

The last chapter is the earliest extant version of my work on scientific measurement of elections (in French).

* * *

### Book 2: Scientific Method of Elections.

The previous book had a last chapter in French, which is the earliest surviving version of the foundation of this sequel, Scientific Method of Elections. I base voting method on a widely accepted logic of measurement, to be found in the sciences. This is supported by reflections on the philosophy of science.

The more familiar approach, of judging voting methods by (questionable) selections of basic rules or criteria, is critically examined.

This author is a researcher, as well as a reformer, and my innovations of Binomial STV and the Harmonic Mean quota are explained.  
This second book has more emphasis on electoral research, to progress freedom thru knowledge.

Two great pioneers of electoral reform are represented here, in speeches (also letters) of John Stuart Mill on parliamentary reform (obtained from Hansard on-line). And there is commentary and bibliography of HG Wells on proportional representation (mainly).

Official reports of British commissions on election systems are assessed. These reports are of Plant, Jenkins, Kerley, Sunderland, Arbuthnott, Richard, and (Helena Kennedy) Power report.

The work begins with a short history on the sheer difficulty of genuine electoral reform. The defeat of democracy is also a defeat for science. Freedom and knowledge depend on each other.   
Therein is the remedy.

* * *

### Book 3: Science is Ethics as Electics.

Political elections, that absorbed the first two books in this series, are only the tip of the iceberg, where choice is concerned. Book three takes an electoral perspective on the social sciences and natural sciences, from physics to metaphysics of a free universe within limits of determinism and chance.

### Book 4:

### FAB STV: Four Averages Binomial Single Transferable Vote.

Discussions, for the general reader, about voting method, followed by an account for specialists, of the technicalities of FAB STV.

In French/En Francais:

### Modele Scientifique du Proces Electoral.

On pouvrait considérer le problème de la représentation comme va problème scientifique de mesure. Pour cela, il y a à notre disposition quatre échelles possibles pour mesurer la représentation. L'échelle classifiée ou nominale, l'échelle ordinale, l'échelle à intervalles, et l'échelle à raison.

Le scrutin transférable (ST, ou STV, en anglais) est un système co-ordonné du vote au dépouillement, dans un ordre de préférence empirique 1, 2, 3,.. à l'ordre rational de 1, 2, 3,.. membres majoritaires.

Table of contents.

