ars between the adoption of Sane Voting and the
disappearance of the Cabinet from British public life. It would become
possible for Parliament to get rid of a minister without getting rid of
a ministry, and to express its disapproval of--let us say--some foolish
project for rearranging the local government of Ireland without opening
the door upon a vista of fantastical fiscal adventures. The
party-supported Cabinet, which is now the real government of the
so-called democratic countries, would cease to be so, and government
would revert more and more to the legislative assembly. And not only
would the latter body resume government, but it would also necessarily
take into itself all those large and growing exponents of
extra-parliamentary discontent that now darken the social future. The
case of the armed "Unionist" rebel in Ulster, the case of the workman
who engages in sabotage, the case for sympathetic strikes and the
general strike, all these cases are identical in this, that they declare
Parliament a fraud, that justice lies outside it and hopelessly outside
it, and that to seek redress through Parliament is a waste of time and
energy. Sane Voting would deprive all these destructive movements of the
excuse and necessity for violence.

There is, I know, a disposition in some quarters to minimise the
importance of Proportional Representation, as though it were a mere
readjustment of voting methods. It is nothing of the sort; it is a
prospective revolution. It will revolutionise government far more than a
mere change from kingdom to republic or vice versa could possibly do; it
will give a new and unprecedented sort of government to the world. The
real leaders of the country will govern the country. For Great Britain,
for example, instead of the secret, dubious and dubitable Cabinet, which
is the real British government of to-day, poised on an unwieldy and
crowded House of Commons, we should have open government by the
representatives of, let us say, twenty great provinces, Ulster, Wales,
London, for example, each returning from twelve to thirty members. It
would be a steadier, stabler, more confident, and more trusted
government than the world has ever seen before. Ministers, indeed, and
even ministries might come and go, but that would not matter, as it does
now, because there would be endless alternatives through which the
assembly could express itself instead of the choice between two parties.

The arguments against