A word of warning must be added as to the danger of holding up Belgium and Switzerland as examples of true electoral justice to Australia.  The direct government of the people which Switzerland has adopted bears not the slightest resemblance to the representative institutions of British countries.  Both the referendum and proportional delegation are suited to direct government and are destructive to party responsible government.  The Swiss adopted the referendum to save themselves from the lobbying and plutocratic character of their legislatures.  The initiative and proportional delegation have followed because they are complementary reforms.  The consequence is that the legislators have been degraded to mere agents for drawing up measures, and leadership has been transferred to the press.  It is the peculiar conditions of Switzerland which enable it to tolerate unrestrained majority rule.  It is a small country, surrounded by powerful neighbours, whose strength lies in its weakness.  Moreover, the people are very conservative.  In Zurich, for instance, which is largely devoted to manufactures, a proposal to limit the hours of work in factories to twelve hours a day was rejected by the people.  Nor is direct government proving a success; the tyranny of the majority is already apparent.  The first federal initiative demanded a measure to prevent the slaughter of animals by bleeding, designed to interfere with the religious rites of the Jews.  Despite the fact that it was opposed by the Federal Council, as contrary to the right of religious liberty guaranteed by the Constitution, it was carried by the referendum.  Belgium, again, can hardly be taken as a model of constitutional liberty.  Surely we in Australia do not want the factious strife of religious, racial, and class sections, which so nearly brought on a revolution last year.  Yet this is exactly what proportional delegation to sections would bring about.  Belgium has a hard task to reconcile two races so differently constituted as the Walloons and Flemings, and has been able to avoid instability of the ministry so far only because the Clerical party, which is mostly Flemish, still has a majority.  The new system has only consecrated the sectional principle, and will do nothing to restore harmony.

CHAPTER VIII.

PREFERENTIAL VOTING, THE BLOCK VOTE, ETC.

+Preferential Voting.+—­Laplace, the great mathematician, to whom we owe so much of the theory of probability, showed more than a century ago that although individual electors may have very different views as to the relative merits of a number of candidates for any office, still the expression of the degree of favour in which the candidates are held by the whole body of electors will be the same if each elector be assumed to have a uniform gradation of preference.  Suppose that there are ten candidates, and it is required to place them in order of general favour.  Each