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.