the form of the abolition of many of the elected boards and officials, and the substitution for them of a single elected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated commissions, and whose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election to all the voters, and therefore must he seriously considered by his nominators.  One noticed again the growing tendency to substitute a quantitative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of the electoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up by the House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election (or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous to themselves.  Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if allowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to the electoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by the House of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press.  Lord Robert Cecil alone, whose mind is historical in the worst sense of that term, objected ’What a commentary was that on the “will of the people,"’[80] and thought it somehow illegitimate that Mr. Samuel should not defend democracy according to the philosophy of Thomas Paine, so that he could answer in the style of Canning.  The present quarrel between the two Houses may indeed result in a further step in the public control of the methods of producing political opinion by the substitution of General Elections occurring at regular intervals for our present system of sudden party dissolutions at moments of national excitement.

[80] Times, June 25, 1907.

But in the electoral process, as in so many other cases, one dares not hope that these slow and half-conscious changes in the general intellectual attitude will be sufficient to suggest and carry through all the improvements of machinery necessary to meet our growing difficulties, unless they are quickened by a conscious purpose.  At my last contest for the London County Council I had to spend the half hour before the close of the vote in one of the polling stations of a very poor district.  I was watching the proceedings, which in the crush at the end are apt to be rather irregular, and at the same time was thinking of this book.  The voters who came in were the results of the ‘final rally’ of the canvassers on both sides.  They entered the room in rapid but irregular succession, as if they were jerked forward by a hurried and inefficient machine.  About half of them were women, with broken straw hats, pallid faces, and untidy hair.  All were dazed and bewildered, having been snatched away in carriages or motors from the making of match-boxes, or button-holes, or cheap furniture, or from the public house, or, since it was Saturday evening, from bed.  Most of them seemed to be trying, in the unfamiliar surroundings, to be sure of the name for which, as they had been reminded at the door, they were to vote.  A few were drunk, and one man, who was apparently a supporter of my own,