may produce new effects.  The ordinary man, when he has twelve votes to give, likes to give them all, so that there will be a good deal of wild voting at the tails of the voting papers.  Now if a small resolute band decide to plump for T or to vote only for A and T or B and T, T will probably jump up out of the rejected.  This is the system which gives the specialist, the anti-vaccinator or what not, the maximum advantage.  V, W, X and Y, being rather hopeless anyhow, will probably detach themselves from party and make some special appeal, say to the teetotal vote or the Mormon vote or the single tax vote, and so squeeze past O, P, Q, R, who have taken a more generalised line.

I trust the reader will bear with me through these alphabetical fluctuations.  Many people, I know from colloquial experiences, do at about this stage fly into a passion.  But if you will exercise self-control, then I think you will see my point that, according to the method of voting, almost any sort of result may be got out of an election except the production of a genuinely representative assembly.

And that is the a priori case for supposing, what our experience of contemporary life abundantly verifies, that the so-called representative assemblies of the world are not really representative at all.  I will go farther and say that were it not for the entire inefficiency of our method of voting, not one-tenth of the present American and French Senators, the French Deputies, the American Congressmen, and the English Members of Parliament would hold their positions to-day.  They would never have been heard of.  They are not really the elected representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box, who have ousted the legitimate heirs from their sovereignty.  They are no more the expression of the general will than the Tsar or some President by pronunciamento.  They are an accidental oligarchy of adventurers.  Representative government has never yet existed in the world; there was an attempt to bring it into existence in the eighteenth century, and it succumbed to an infantile disorder at the very moment of its birth.  What we have in the place of the leaders and representatives are politicians and “elected persons.”

The world is passing rapidly from localised to generalised interests, but the method of election into which our fathers fell is the method of electing one or two representatives from strictly localised constituencies.  Its immediate corruption was inevitable.  If discussing and calculating the future had been, as it ought to be, a common, systematic occupation, the muddles of to-day might have been foretold a hundred years ago.  From such a rough method of election the party system followed as a matter of course.  In theory, of course, there may be any number of candidates for a constituency and a voter votes for the one he likes