Proportional Representation is not a faddist proposal, not a perplexing ingenious complication of a simple business; it is the carefully worked out right way to do something that hitherto we have been doing in the wrong way.  It is no more an eccentricity than is proper baking in the place of baking amidst dirt and with unlimited adulteration, or the running of trains to their destinations instead of running them without notice into casually selected sidings and branch lines.  It is not the substitution of something for something else of the same nature; it is the substitution of right for wrong.  It is the plain common sense of the greatest difficulty in contemporary affairs.

I know that a number of people do not, will not, admit this of Proportional Representation.  Perhaps it is because of that hideous mouthful of words for a thing that would be far more properly named Sane Voting.  This, which is the only correct way, these antagonists regard as a peculiar way.  It has unfamiliar features, and that condemns it in their eyes.  It takes at least ten minutes to understand, and that is too much for their plain, straightforward souls.  “Complicated”—­that word of fear!  They are like the man who approved of an electric tram, but said that he thought it would go better without all that jiggery-pokery of wires up above.  They are like the Western judge in the murder trial who said that if only they got a man hanged for this abominable crime, he wouldn’t make a pedantic fuss about the question of which man.  They are like the plain, straightforward promoter who became impatient with maps and planned a railway across Switzerland by drawing a straight line with a ruler across Jungfrau and Matterhorn and glacier and gorge.  Or else they are like Mr. J. Ramsay Macdonald, M.P., who knows too well what would happen to him.

Now let us consider what would be the necessary consequences of the establishment of Proportional Representation in such a community as Great Britain—­that is to say, the redistribution of the country into great constituencies such as London or Ulster or Wessex or South Wales, each returning a score or more of members, and the establishment of voting by the single transferable vote.  The first, immediate, most desirable result would be the disappearance of the undistinguished party candidate; he would vanish altogether.  He would be no more seen.  Proportional Representation would not give him the ghost of a chance.  The very young man of good family, the subsidised barrister, the respectable nobody, the rich supporter of the party would be ousted by known men.  No candidate who had not already distinguished himself, and who did not stand for something in the public eye, would have a chance of election.  There alone we have a sufficient reason for anticipating a very thorough change in the quality and character of the average legislator.