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