delegates representing these
fractions you will have an assembly representing the sum total of public
opinion.

The issue is quite clear. Are we to have two parties aiming at the
control of administration and appealing to all sections for support, or
the separate delegation of a number of sections? In the one case we will
have parties based on national policies, and in the other case we will
have a number of factions, each wanting something different and
determined to block progress till it gets it. Remember that it is a mere
matter of electoral machinery which will determine the choice. It is
true that at present we do not have two very coherent parties, but that
is the fault of the present electoral system.

It would seem that there can be but one answer to this question, and yet
the "representative principle" shows such wonderful vitality that it is
worth while considering the arguments on which it is based, and the
various stages through which the idea has passed.

+Mr. Hare's Scheme.+--The "representative principle" was first
propounded in England in 1857 by Mr. Thomas Hare. He proposed that the
United Kingdom should be constituted one huge electorate for the return
of the 654 members of the House of Commons. The people were to group
themselves into 654 voluntary unanimous sections, each returning one
member, and each gathered from every corner of the kingdom. We propose
to consider here not the scheme itself but only the principle on which
it was founded. Mr. Hare rightly conceived that the great evil of the
present system is the exclusion of the minority in each electorate, but
he altogether failed to appreciate that the excluded minority nearly
always represented one of the two main parties. He could not see, in
fact, that to divide each electorate into majority and minority is to
divide the whole country into majority and minority, nor that the
injustice is tolerated because it is usually as bad for one party as the
other. Instead, therefore, of proposing to do justice to both the
majority and the minority in each electorate, he proposed to allow
representation to as many minorities as possible. To him, the rule of
the majority was the rule of a majority of interests; this he called the
constitutional majority, as opposed to the "mere rule of numbers." Now,
at the time Mr. Hare wrote party government was rather weak in England.
He quotes with approval a statement of Mr. Sidney Herbert, M.P., that
the House w