best; in practice there are only two or three candidates, and the voter votes for the one most likely to beat the candidate he likes least.  It cannot be too strongly insisted that in contemporary elections we vote against; we do not vote for.  If A, B and C are candidates, and you hate C and all his works and prefer A, but doubt if he will get as many votes as B, who is indifferent to you, the chances are you will vote for B. If C and B have the support of organised parties, you are still less likely to risk “wasting” your vote upon A. If your real confidence is in G, who is not a candidate for your constituency, and if B pledges himself to support G, while A retains the right of separate action, you may vote for B even if you distrust him personally.  Additional candidates would turn any election of this type into a wild scramble.  The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently demanded.  The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged.  Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb.

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort.  They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control.  For twenty-five years I have been a voter, and in all that time I have only twice had an opportunity of voting for a man of distinction in whom I had the slightest confidence.  Commonly my choice of a “representative” has been between a couple of barristers entirely unknown to me or the world at large.  Rather more than half the men presented for my selection have not been English at all, but of alien descent.  This, then, is the sum of the political liberty of the ordinary American or Englishman, that is the political emancipation which Englishwomen have shown themselves so pathetically eager to share.  He may reject one of two undesirables, and the other becomes his “representative.”  Now this is not popular government at all; it is government by the profession of politicians, whose control becomes more and more irresponsible in just the measure that they are able to avoid real factions within their own body.  Whatever the two party organisations have a mind to do together, whatever issue they chance to reserve from “party politics,” is as much beyond the control of the free and independent voter as if he were a slave subject in ancient Peru.

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic.  In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form and substance.  The old spirit of freedom and the collective purpose which overthrew and subdued priestcrafts and kingcrafts, has done so, it seems, only to make way for these obscure political conspiracies.  Instead of liberal institutions, mankind has invented a new sort of usurpation.  And it is not unnatural that many of us should be in a phase of political despair.