nse of the word a utilitarian, always
remained an intellectualist, and he made in the case of the Ballot the
old mistake of giving too intellectual and logical an account of
political impulses. It is true that men do not act politically upon a
mere stock-exchange calculation of material advantages and
disadvantages. They generally form vague ideas of right and wrong in
accordance with vague trains of inference as to the good or evil results
of political action. If an election were like a jury trial, such
inferences might be formed by a process which would leave a sense of
fundamental conviction in the mind of the thinker, and might be
expressed under conditions of religious and civic solemnity to which
publicity would lend an added weight, as it does in those 'acts of a
man's life which concern his duty to others,' to which Mill refers--the
paying of a debt of honour, for instance, or the equitable treatment of
one's relatives. But under existing electoral conditions, trains of
thought, formed as they often are by the half-conscious suggestion of
newspapers or leaflets, are weak as compared with the things of sense.
Apart from direct intimidation the voice of the canvasser, the
excitement of one's friends, the look of triumph on the face of one's
opponents, or the vague indications of disapproval by the rulers of
one's village, are all apt to be stronger than the shadowy and uncertain
conclusions of one's thinking brain. To make the ultimate vote secret,
gives therefore thought its best chance, and at least requires the
canvasser to produce in the voter a belief which, however shadowy, shall
be genuine, rather than to secure by the mere manipulation of momentary
impulse a promise which is shamefacedly carried out in public because it
is a promise.

Lord Courtney is the last survivor in public life of the personal
disciples of Mill, and at present he is devoting himself to a campaign
in favour of 'proportional representation,' in which, as it seems to me,
the old intellectualist misconceptions reappear in another form. He
proposes to deal with two difficulties, first, that under the existing
system of the 'single ballot' a minority in any single-member
constituency may, if there are more candidates than two, return its
representative, and secondly, that certain citizens who think for
themselves instead of allowing party leaders to think for them--the
Free-Trade Unionists, for instance, or the High-Church Liberals--have,