“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.