to ideal perfection, while it attains incidentally several other things of scarcely inferior importance.”  Believing in the absolute justice of the principle, Mill and Hare were certainly consistent in setting no limit to its application except the size of the assembly.  Mill is emphatic on this point.  “Real equality of representation,” he asserted, “is not obtained unless any set of electors, amounting to average number of a constituency, wherever they happen to reside, have the power of combining with one another to return a representative.”  Now, the recent disciples of Mr. Hare are never tired of claiming the support of Mill, although they have thrown this definition to the winds.  But they are guilty of far more than that, for in another chapter of Mill’s book we find that his conception of a representative assembly elected by the Hare system is a purely deliberative body.  He expressly declares it to be radically unfit for legislation, which he proposes to hand over to a commission appointed by the Crown.  The value of his testimony is very much discounted by this fact.

+Sir John Lubbock.+[1]—­We have asserted that the proportional principle should be applied to two parties only—­the majority and the minority, and that every section can then be represented.  Mill and Hare thought that no limit should be set except the size of the assembly.  All the recent advocates of the system take up an intermediate position.  Appreciating the serious objections against allowing independent representation to a large number of small sections, Sir John Lubbock, president of the English Proportional Representation Society, proposes to constitute electorates returning only three to five members each, thus confining representation to only three to five sections in each electorate, and sacrificing to a great extent accurate proportional representation.  In his book on “Representation,” he writes:—­“I have assumed that Parliament should be ‘a mirror of the nation;’ if the object were to secure unity of action rather than freedom of discussion, to form an executive body such as a Government, a Board of Directors, or a Vestry, the case would be quite different.  It is, however, I presume, our wish that Parliament should be a deliberative assembly in which all parties should be fairly represented.”  But to make Parliament a deliberative body is to destroy its power to secure unity of action at all, and to render it useless as a working machine.

+Miss Spence.+—­An active campaign has for some time been carried on for the adoption of the Hare system in Australia.  Miss C.H.  Spence, of South Australia, was the pioneer reformer, and has laboured in the cause by pen and voice for no less than forty years.  Great credit is undoubtedly due to Miss Spence for the clear and simple manner in which she has expounded the system, and for the good work she has done in exposing the defects of the present methods.  Not only has she lectured in all parts of Australia, but she has made visits to England, where she met Mr. Hare and Sir John Lubbock, and also to America.  But we may admire Miss Spence’s courage and devotion to principle without agreeing with her conclusions.