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 I 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—­