Take almost any member of the present Government and consider his case.  You may credit him with a lifelong industrious intention to get there, but ask yourself what is this man’s distinction, and for what great thing in our national life does he stand?  By the complaisance of our party machinery he was able to present himself to a perplexed constituency as the only possible alternative to Conservatism and Tariff Reform, and so we have him.  And so we have most of his colleagues.

Now such a system of representation is surely a system to be destroyed at any cost, because it stifles our national discussion and thwarts our national will.  And we can leave no possible method of alteration untried.  It is not rational that a great people should be baffled by the mere mechanical degeneration of an electoral method too crudely conceived.  There exist alternatives, and to these alternatives we must resort.  Since John Stuart Mill first called attention to the importance of the matter there has been a systematic study of the possible working of electoral methods, and it is now fairly proved that in proportional representation, with large constituencies returning each many members, there is to be found a way of escape from this disastrous embarrassment of our public business by the party wire-puller and the party nominee.

I will not dwell upon the particulars of the proportional representation system here.  There exists an active society which has organised the education of the public in the details of the proposal.  Suffice it that it does give a method by which a voter may vote with confidence for the particular man he prefers, with no fear whatever that his vote will be wasted in the event of that man’s chance being hopeless.  There is a method by which the order of the voter’s subsequent preference is effectively indicated.  That is all, but see how completely it modifies the nature of an election.  Instead of a hampered choice between two, you have a free choice between many.  Such a change means a complete alteration in the quality of public life.

The present immense advantage of the party nominee—­which is the root cause, which is almost the sole cause of all our present political ineptitude—­would disappear.  He would be quite unable to oust any well-known and representative independent candidate who chose to stand against him.  There would be an immediate alteration in type in the House of Commons.  In the place of these specialists in political getting-on there would be few men who had not already gained some intellectual and moral hold upon the community; they would already be outstanding and distinguished men before they came to the work of government.  Great sections of our national life, science, art, literature, education, engineering, manufacture would cease to be under-represented, or misrepresented by the energetic barrister and political specialist, and our Legislature would begin to serve, as we have now such urgent need of its serving, as the means and instrument of that national conference upon the social outlook of which we stand in need.