ain
that the Guardians of the Poor will soon follow them. The Rural Parish
Councils, which were created in 1894, and which represented a reversion
by the Liberal Party to the older type of democratic thought, have been
a failure, and will either be abolished or will remain ineffective,
because no real administrative powers will be given to them. But if we
omit the rural districts, the inhabitant of a 'county borough' will soon
vote only for parliament and his borough council, while the inhabitant
of London or of an urban district or non-county borough will only vote
for parliament, his county, and his district or borough council. On the
average, neither will be asked to vote more than once a year.

In America one notices a similar tendency towards electoral
concentration as a means of increasing electoral responsibility. In
Philadelphia I found that this concentration had taken a form which
seemed to me to be due to a rather elementary quantitative mistake in
psychology. Owing to the fact that the reformers had thought only of
economising political force, and had ignored the limitations of
political knowledge, so many elections were combined on one day that the
Philadelphia 'blanket-ballot' which I was shown, with its parallel
columns of party 'tickets,' contained some four hundred names. The
resulting effects on the _personnel_ of Philadelphian politics were as
obvious as they were lamentable. In other American cities, however,
concentration often takes the form of the abolition of many of the
elected boards and officials, and the substitution for them of a single
elected Mayor, who administers the city by nominated commissions, and
whose personality it is hoped can be made known during an election to
all the voters, and therefore must he seriously considered by his
nominators. One noticed again the growing tendency to substitute a
quantitative and psychological for an absolute and logical view of the
electoral process in the House of Commons debate on the claim set up by
the House of Lords in 1907 to the right of forcing a general election
(or a referendum) at any moment which they thought advantageous to
themselves. Mr. Herbert Samuel, for instance, argued that this claim, if
allowed, would give a still further advantage in politics to the
electoral forces of wealth acting, at dates carefully chosen by the
House of Lords, both directly and through the control of the Press. Lord
Robert Cecil alone, whose mind is histo