[77] Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6.

I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were distributed at the end of a dinner party.  No discussion of the various candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him to my next neighbour.  We were all politicians, and nearly all the names were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their readers to recognise.

At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might have said, the same, ‘to us,’ as they were ‘in themselves.’  But an ordinary list of candidates’ names presented to an ordinary voter is ’to him’ simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will either do nothing or do as he is told.

The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficient preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in his programme will be known to ‘the ordinary newspaper reader,’ who is assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen.  But even if one neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to the propaganda of a small political group.  Men read newspapers for news, and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of the electorate read between them a small number of established papers advocating broad party principles.  These newspapers, at any rate during a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until, on the day of the poll, they issue general directions ‘How to vote.’  The choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local electioneering in each constituency, i.e. by meetings and canvassing and the distribution of ‘election literature.’  Lord Courtney’s proposal, even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six, would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six times as much money at every contest, he could not multiply by six the range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a day.