choice names, and count for them.  That is the essential idea of the whole thing.  At a stroke all that anxiety about wasting votes and splitting votes, which is the secret of all party political manipulation vanishes.  You may vote for A well knowing that if he is safe your vote will be good for C. You can make sure of A, and at the same time vote for C. You are in no need of a “ticket” to guide you, and you need have no fear that in supporting an independent candidate you will destroy the prospects of some tolerably sympathetic party man without any compensating advantage.  The independent candidate does, in fact, become possible for the first time.  The Hobson’s choice of the party machine is abolished.

Let me be a little more precise about the particulars of this method, the only sound method, of voting in order to ensure an adequate representation of the community.  Let us resort again to the constituency I imagined in my last paper, a constituency in which candidates represented by all the letters of the alphabet struggle for twelve places.  And let us suppose that A, B, C and D are the leading favourites.  Suppose that there are twelve thousand voters in the constituency, and that three thousand votes are cast for A—­I am keeping the figures as simple as possible—­then A has two thousand more than is needed to return him. All the second votes on his papers are counted, and it is found that 600, or a fifth of them, go to C; 500, or a sixth, go to E; 300, or a tenth, to G; 300 to J; 200, or a fifteenth, each to K and L, and a hundred each, or a thirtieth, to M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, W and Z. Then the surplus of 2,000 is divided in these proportions—­that is a fifth of 2,000 goes to C, a sixth to E, and the rest to G, J, etc., in proportion.  C, who already has 900 votes, gets another 400, and is now returned and has, moreover, 300 to spare; and the same division of the next votes upon C’s paper occurs as has already been made with A’s.  But previously to this there has been a distribution of B’s surplus votes, B having got 1,200 of first votes.  And so on.  After the distribution of the surplus votes of the elect at the top of the list, there is a distribution of the second votes upon the papers of those who have voted for the hopeless candidates at the bottom of the list.  At last a point is reached when twelve candidates have a quota.

In this way the “wasting” of a vote, or the rejection of a candidate for any reason except that hardly anybody wants him, become practically impossible.  This method of the single transferable vote with very large constituencies and many members does, in fact, give an entirely valid electoral result; each vote tells for all it is worth, and the freedom of the voter is only limited by the number of candidates who put up or are put up for election.  This method, and this method alone, gives representative government; all others of the hundred and one possible methods admit of trickery, confusion and falsification.