a house of
representative men. (Lord Harcourt's "faddists and mugwumps.") And it is
perfectly true as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (also an opponent) declares, that
Proportional Representation means constituencies so big that it will be
impossible for a poor man to cultivate and work them. That is
unquestionable. But, mark another point, it will also make it useless,
as Mr. Chamberlain has testified, for rich men to cultivate and work
them. All this cultivating and working, all this going about and making
things right with this little jobber here, that contractor there, all
the squaring of small political clubs and organizations, all the
subscription blackmail and charity bribery, that now makes a
Parliamentary candidature so utterly rotten an influence upon public
life, will be killed dead by Proportional Representation. You cannot job
men into Parliament by Proportional Representation. Proportional
Representation lets in the outsider. It lets in the common, unassigned
voter who isn't in the local clique. That is the clue to nearly all this
opposition of the politicians. It makes democracy possible for the first
time in modern history. And that poor man of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's
imagination, instead of cadging about a constituency in order to start
politician, will have to make good in some more useful way--as a leader
of the workers in their practical affairs, for example--before people
will hear of him and begin to believe in him.

The opposition to Proportional Representation of Mr. Sidney Webb and his
little circle is a trifle more "scientific" in tone than these naive
objections of the common run of antagonist, but underlying it is the
same passionate desire to keep politics a close game for the politician
and to bar out the politically unspecialized man. There is more conceit
and less jobbery behind the criticisms of this type of mind. It is an
opposition based on the idea that the common man is a fool who does not
know what is good for him. So he has to be stampeded. Politics,
according to this school, is a sort of cattle-driving.

The Webbites do not deny the broad facts of the case. Our present
electoral system, with our big modern constituencies of thousands of
voters, leads to huge turnovers of political power with a relatively
small shifting of public opinion. It makes a mock of public opinion by
caricature, and Parliament becomes the distorting mirror of the nation.
Under some loud false issue a few score of thou