Proportional Representation that have been
advanced hitherto are trivial in comparison with its enormous
advantages. Implicit in them all is the supposition that public opinion
is at bottom a foolish thing, and that electoral methods are to pacify
rather than express a people. It is possibly true that notorious
windbags, conspicuously advertised adventurers, and the heroes of
temporary sensations may run a considerable chance upon the lists. My
own estimate of the popular wisdom is against the idea that any vividly
prominent figure must needs get in; I think the public is capable of
appreciating, let us say, the charm and interest of Mr. Sandow or Mr.
Jack Johnson or Mr. Harry Lauder or Mr. Evan Roberts without wanting to
send these gentlemen into Parliament. And I think that the increased
power that the Press would have through its facilities in making
reputations may also be exaggerated. Reputations are mysterious things
and not so easily forced, and even if it were possible for a section of
the Press to limelight a dozen or so figures up to the legislature, they
would still have, I think, to be interesting, sympathetic and
individualised figures; and at the end they would be only half a dozen
among four hundred men of a repute more naturally achieved. A third
objection is that this reform would give us group politics and unstable
government. It might very possibly give us unstable ministries, but
unstable ministries may mean stable government, and such stable
ministries as that which governs England at the present time may, by
clinging obstinately to office, mean the wildest fluctuations of policy.
Mr. Ramsay Macdonald has drawn a picture of the too-representative
Parliament of Proportional Representation, split up into groups each
pledged to specific measures and making the most extraordinary treaties
and sacrifices of the public interest in order to secure the passing of
these definite bills. But Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is exclusively a
parliamentary man; he knows contemporary parliamentary "shop" as a clerk
knows his "guv'nor," and he thinks in the terms of his habitual life; he
sees representatives only as politicians financed from party
headquarters; it is natural that he should fail to see that the quality
and condition of the sanely elected Member of Parliament will be quite
different from these scheming climbers into positions of trust with whom
he deals to-day. It is the party system based on insane voting that