as a rule, no candidate representing their own opinions for whom they
can vote. He proposes, therefore, that each voter shall mark in order of
preference a ballot paper containing lists of candidates for large
constituencies, each of which returns six or seven members, Manchester
with its eight seats being given as an example.

This system, according to Lord Courtney, 'will lead to the dropping of
the fetters which now interfere with free thought, and will set men and
women on their feet, erect, intelligent, independent.'[76] But the
arguments used in urging it all seem to me to suffer from the fatal
defect of dwelling solely on the process by which opinion is
ascertained, and ignoring the process by which opinion is created. If at
the assizes all the jurors summoned were collected into one large jury,
and if they all voted Guilty or Not Guilty on all the cases, after a
trial in which all the counsel were heard and all the witnesses were
examined simultaneously, verdicts would indeed no longer depend on the
accidental composition of the separate juries; but the process of
forming verdicts would be made, to a serious degree, less effective.

[76] Address delivered by Lord Courtney at the Mechanics' Institute,
Stockport, March 22, 1907, p. 6.

The English experiment on which the Proportional Representation Society
mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means
of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society
and through eight newspapers. 'The constituency,' we are told, 'was
supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were
politicians whose names might be expected to be known to the ordinary
newspaper reader, and who might be considered as representative of some
of the main divisions of public opinion.'[77] The names were, in fact,
Sir A. Acland Hood, Sir H. Campbell-Banner-man, Sir Thomas P. Whittaker,
and Lord Hugh Cecil, with Messrs. Richard Bell, Austen Chamberlain,
Winston Churchill, Haldane, Keir Hardie, Arthur Henderson, Bonar Law,
and Philip Snowden. In all, 12,418 votes were collected.

[77] Proportional Representation Pamphlet, No. 4, p. 6.

I was one of the 12,418, and in my case the ballot papers were
distributed at the end of a dinner party. No discussion of the various
candidates took place with the single exception that, finding my memory
of Mr. Arthur Henderson rather vague, I whispered a question about him
to my next neighbour. We