At a meeting held at River House, Chelsea, London, in 1894, Miss Spence
submitted an analysis of 8,824 votes recorded at 50 public meetings in
South Australia. The audiences were in each case asked to select six
representatives out of twelve candidates. The result of a scrutiny of
all the votes combined was that the following six "parties" secured one
"representative" each--viz., Capital, Labour, Single Tax, Irish
Catholic, Prohibition, and Women's Suffrage. Miss Spence frankly
confesses that these "parties" are minorities, but holds that a majority
can be formed by the union of minorities, and that party responsible
government can still be carried on. Now, can any sensible man or woman
imagine a working ministry formed by a union of any four of these
"parties?" Capital would certainly be permanently opposed to Labour and
to Single Tax, and as for the others, there is not a single principle in
common. How, then, could a union be formed? The only possible way is by
log-rolling; they must make a bargain to support one another's demands.
Such a union could not possibly be stable, because the minority is free
to offer a better bargain to any one of the "parties" to induce it to
desert. Again, it may be called the rule of the majority, but what sort
of a majority? Is it not plainly the rule of a majority in the interests
of minorities? That is very different to the rule of the majority in the
interests of all, which free government demands. The simple truth is
that the "parties" are factions, and that the "representatives" are mere
delegates of those factions.

But in practice the case would be far worse than we have assumed. There
is not the slightest guarantee that the same six factions would be
elected in each six-seat electorate. We might have an unlimited number
of delegates of various religions, classes, races, localities, and
political organizations on all kinds of single questions. An assembly
formed on these lines could hardly be dignified with the name of a
representative assembly.

Mr. G. Bradford, in his work on "The Lesson of Popular Government,"
displays a more intimate knowledge of human nature than any other recent
writer. Of these schemes for the representation of minorities he says:--

As an illustration of the effect in popular government of looking
to popular impulse for the initiation of measures, it may be
observed that perhaps the worst of all expedients for remedying the
defe