[79] Address at Stockport, p. 11.

To Lord Courtney the multi-member constituency, which permits of a wide choice, and the preferential vote, which permits of full use of that choice, are equally essential parts of his plan; and that plan will soon be seriously discussed, because parliament, owing to the rise of the Labour Party and the late prevalence of ‘three-cornered’ contests, will soon have to deal with the question.  It will then be interesting to see whether the growing substitution of the new quantitative and psychological for the old absolute and logical way of thinking about elections will have advanced sufficiently far to enable the House of Commons to distinguish between the two points.  If so, they will adopt the transferable vote, and so get over the difficulty of three-cornered elections, while retaining single-member constituencies, and therewith the possibility of making the personality of a candidate known to the whole of his constituents.

A further effect of the way in which we are beginning to think of the electoral process is that, since 1888, parliament, in reconstructing the system of English local government, has steadily diminished the number of elections, with the avowed purpose of increasing their efficiency.  The Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894 swept away thousands of elections for Improvement Boards, Burial Boards, Vestries, etc.  In 1902 the separately elected School Boards were abolished, and it is certain that the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them.  The Rural Parish Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have been a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective, because no real administrative powers will be given to them.  But if we omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a ‘county borough’ will soon vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council.  On the average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year.

In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoral concentration as a means of increasing electoral responsibility.  In Philadelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form which seemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake in psychology.  Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only of economising political force, and had ignored the limitations of political knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that the Philadelphia ‘blanket-ballot’ which I was shown, with its parallel columns of party ‘tickets,’ contained some four hundred names.  The resulting effects on the personnel of Philadelphian politics were as obvious as they were lamentable.  In other American cities, however, concentration often takes