a majority so immense that the fate of every question will be foredoomed, and debate will be a farce; in one word, we shall be a nation living from hand to mouth, and with no settled principle—­an army, whose only marching orders will be “Right about face!”

His remedy was that the result of each single election should be kept secret till the general election is over:—­

It surely would involve no practical difficulty to provide that the boxes of voting papers should be sealed up by a Government official and placed in such custody as would make it impossible to tamper with them; and that when the last election had been held they should be opened, the votes counted, and the results announced.

The article on “Parliamentary Elections” proposed much more sweeping alterations.  The opening paragraph will show its general purport:—­

The question, how to arrange our constituencies and conduct our Parliamentary elections so as to make the House of Commons, as far as possible, a true index of the state of opinion in the nation it professes to represent, is surely equal in importance to any that the present generation has had to settle.  And the leap in the dark, which we seem about to take in a sudden and vast extension of the franchise, would be robbed of half its terrors could we feel assured that each political party will be duly represented in the next Parliament, so that every side of a question will get a fair hearing.

The axioms on which his scheme was based were as follows:—­

    (1) That each Member of Parliament should represent
    approximately the same number of electors.

    (2) That the minority of the two parties into which, broadly
    speaking, each district may be divided, should be adequately
    represented.

(3) That the waste of votes, caused by accidentally giving one candidate more than he needs and leaving another of the same party with less than he needs, should be, if possible, avoided.

    (4) That the process of marking a ballot-paper should be
    reduced to the utmost possible simplicity, to meet the case
    of voters of the very narrowest mental calibre.

    (5) That the process of counting votes should be as simple
    as possible.

Then came a precise proposal.  I do not pause to compare it in detail with the suggestions of Mr. Hare, Mr. Courtney, and others:—­

I proceed to give a summary of rules for the method I propose.  Form districts which shall return three, four, or more Members, in proportion to their size.  Let each elector vote for one candidate only.  When the poll is closed, divide the total number of votes by the number of Members to be returned plus one, and take the next greater integer as “quota.”  Let the returning officer publish the list of candidates, with the votes given for each, and declare as “returned”