clung to my neck while he tried to tell me of some vaguely tremendous fact which just eluded his power of speech.  I was very anxious to win, and inclined to think that I had won, but my chief feeling was an intense conviction that this could not be accepted as even a decently satisfactory method of creating a government for a city of five million inhabitants, and that nothing short of a conscious and resolute facing of the whole problem of the formation of political opinion would enable us to improve it.

Something might be done, and perhaps will be done in the near future, to abolish the more sordid details of English electioneering.  Public houses could be closed on the election day, both to prevent drunkenness and casual treating, and to create an atmosphere of comparative seriousness.  It is a pity that we cannot have the elections on a Sunday as they have in France.  The voters would then come to the poll after twenty or twenty-four hours’ rest, and their own thoughts would have some power of asserting themselves even in the presence of the canvasser, whose hustling energy now inevitably dominates the tired nerves of men who have just finished their day’s work.  The feeling of moral responsibility half consciously associated with the religious use of Sunday would also be so valuable an aid to reflection that the most determined anti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to the political power of the churches.  It may cease to be true that in England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship.  It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used.  But such improvements in the external environment of election-day, however desirable they may be in themselves, can only be of small effect.

Some writers argue or imply that all difficulties in the working of the electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social equality.  Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend on it; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or politically inactive, will bring into politics a fresh stream of unspoilt impulse.

If our civilisation is to survive, greater social equality must indeed come.  Men will not continue to live peacefully together in huge cities under conditions that are intolerable to any sensitive mind, both among those who profit, and those who suffer by them.  But no one who is near to political facts can believe that the immediate effect either of greater equality or of the extension of the suffrage will be to clear away all moral and intellectual difficulties in political organisation.