The opposition to Proportional Representation of Mr. Sidney Webb and his little circle is a trifle more “scientific” in tone than these naive objections of the common run of antagonist, but underlying it is the same passionate desire to keep politics a close game for the politician and to bar out the politically unspecialized man.  There is more conceit and less jobbery behind the criticisms of this type of mind.  It is an opposition based on the idea that the common man is a fool who does not know what is good for him.  So he has to be stampeded.  Politics, according to this school, is a sort of cattle-driving.

The Webbites do not deny the broad facts of the case.  Our present electoral system, with our big modern constituencies of thousands of voters, leads to huge turnovers of political power with a relatively small shifting of public opinion.  It makes a mock of public opinion by caricature, and Parliament becomes the distorting mirror of the nation.  Under some loud false issue a few score of thousands of votes turn over, and in goes this party or that with a big sham majority.  This the Webbites admit.  But they applaud it.  It gives us, they say, “a strong Government.”  Public opinion, the intelligent man outside the House, is ruled out of the game.  He has no power of intervention at all.  The artful little Fabian politicians rub their hands and say, “Now we can get to work with the wires!  No one can stop us.”  And when the public complains of the results, there is always the repartee, “You elected them.”  But the Fabian psychology is the psychology of a very small group of pedants who believe that fair ends may be reached by foul means.  It is much easier and more natural to serve foul ends by foul means.  In practice it is not tricky benevolence but tricky bargaining among the interests that will secure control of the political wires.  That is a bad enough state of affairs in ordinary times, but in times of tragic necessity like the present men will not be mocked in this way.  Life is going to be very intense in the years ahead of us.  If we go right on to another caricature Parliament, with perhaps half a hundred leading men in it and the rest hacks and nobodies, the baffled and discontented outsiders in the streets may presently be driven to rioting and the throwing of bombs.  Unless, indeed, the insurrection of the outsiders takes a still graver form, and the Press, which has ceased entirely to be a Party Press in Great Britain, helps some adventurous Prime Minister to flout and set aside the lower House altogether.  There is neither much moral nor much physical force behind the House of Commons at the present time.