reflects so much honour on the Imperial Parliament as the voluntary transference of the duty of deciding cases to the judiciary.  In Australia this much-needed reform has not yet been introduced, and direct bribery prevails to a much larger extent than would be supposed from the number of cases investigated.  Members of Parliament are naturally loth to convict one of their own number, and the knowledge of this fact prevents petitions being lodged.

The mere existence of secret bribery is bad enough, but a greater danger is that acts of indirect bribery are openly practised, with the tacit approval of electors.  “There have been instances,” says Mr. Lecky, in his “Democracy and Liberty,” “in which the political votes of the police force, of the P.O. officials, of the civil service clerks have been avowedly marshalled for the purpose of obtaining particular class advantages—­a disintegrated majority is strongly tempted to conciliate every detached group of votes.”  In Australia this has become a regular practice; and a still worse feature is that Members of Parliament have free access to public departments to promote class and local interests.  Class legislation is frequently brought forward on the eve of an election with the sole object of influencing votes.  These conditions favour the wire-pullers and mere self-seekers, and, in so far as they prevent the electors from voting on the political views and personal merits of the candidates, they are inimical to the public interests.  Mr. Lecky has pointed out that a certain amount of moral compromise is necessary in public life, and that a politician may indulge in popularity-hunting from honourable public motives; the danger is that unworthy politicians may screen themselves under shelter of this excuse.

We do not claim that the proposed system would abolish corruption, but we are justified in hoping that it would mitigate it very much.  Even if the venal vote still held the balance of power between parties, parties are not so easily corrupted as individuals.  But the most important gain is that it could only exert an influence proportional to its numbers; it could not decide whether a party gets all the representation or none at all, as at present.  In most cases it would be doubtful if it would affect a single candidate.  Consider, again, the case of individual candidates of the same party; any candidate resorting to bribery in order to increase his chance of election would do so partly at the expense of the other candidates of his own party, who would immediately denounce him.  Instead of being forced to conciliate selfish factions, the candidates would be free to appeal for the support of the unselfish sections.