These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been actually adopted in England.  In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced the House of Commons to adopt ‘plural voting’ for School Board elections.  I fought in three London School Board elections as a candidate and in two others as a political worker.  In London the legal arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should be assigned to the district.  In the provinces a town or parish was given a number of seats from five to fifteen.  The voter might ‘plump’ all his votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of them.

This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two alternatives.  They might form the list of party candidates in each district into a recognisable entity like the American ‘ticket’ and urge all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative ‘eight’ or ‘five’ or ‘three.’  If they did this they were saved the trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the individual personalities of the members of the list.  Or they might practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each section.  The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the French scrutin de liste.  The second method was adopted in London, and perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates.  Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers or school-keepers.

If Lord Courtney’s proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it is the ‘ticket’ system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling, will be generally used.  Each voter will bring into the polling booth a printed copy of the ballot paper marked with the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., according to the decision of his party association, and will copy the numbers onto the unmarked official paper.  The essential fact, that is to say, on which party tactics would depend under Lord Courtney’s scheme is not that the votes would finally be added up in this way or in that, but that the voter would be required to arrange in order more names than there is time during the election to turn for him into real persons.