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.