uine. He followed Mr. Burdett Coutts, in support of Mr. Burdett
Coutts, with the most Christian disregard of the nasty things Mr.
Burdett Coutts had seemed to be saying about the Birmingham caucus from
which he sprang. He had a childish story to tell of how voters would not
give their first votes to their real preferences, because they would
assume he "would get in in any case"--God knows why. Of course on the
assumption that the voter behaves like an idiot, anything is possible.
And never apparently having heard of fractions, this great Birmingham
leader was unable to understand that a voter who puts 1 against a
candidate's name votes for that candidate anyhow. He could not imagine
any feeling on the part of the voter that No. 1 was his man. A vote is a
vote to this simple rather than lucid mind, a thing one and indivisible.
Read this--

"Birmingham," he said, referring to a Schedule under consideration, "is
to be cut into three constituencies of four members each. I am to have a
constituency of 100,000 electors, I suppose. How many thousand
inhabitants I do not know. _Every effort will be made to prevent any of
those electors knowing--in fact, it would be impossible for any of them
to know--whether they voted for me or not, or at any rate whether they
effectively voted for me or not, or whether the vote which they wished
to give to me was really diverted to somebody else_."

Only in a house of habitually inattentive men could any one talk such
nonsense without reproof, but I look in vain through Hansard's record
of this debate for a single contemptuous reference to Mr. Chamberlain's
obtuseness. And the rest of his speech was a lamentable account of the
time and trouble he would have to spend upon his constituents if the new
method came in. He was the perfect figure of the parochially important
person in a state of defensive excitement. No doubt his speech appealed
to many in the House.

Of course Lord Harcourt was quite right in saying that the character of
the average House of Commons member will be changed by Proportional
Representation. It will. It will make the election of obscure and
unknown men, of carpet-bag candidates who work a constituency as a
hawker works a village, of local pomposities and village-pump "leaders"
almost impossible. It will replace such candidates by better known and
more widely known men. It will make the House of Commons so much the
more a real gathering of the nation, so much the more