makes governments indivisible wholes and gives the group and the cave
their terrors and their effectiveness. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is as
typical a product of existing electoral methods as one could well have,
and his peculiarly keen sense of the power of intrigue in legislation is
as good evidence as one could wish for of the need for drastic change.

Of course, Sane Voting is not a short cut to the millennium, it is no
way of changing human nature, and in the new type of assembly, as in the
old, spite, vanity, indolence, self-interest, and downright dishonesty
will play their part. But to object to a reform on that account is not a
particularly effective objection. These things will play their part, but
it will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old. It is like
objecting to some projected and long-needed railway because it does not
propose to carry its passengers by immediate express to heaven.

THE AMERICAN POPULATION

Sec. 1

The social conditions and social future of America constitute a system
of problems quite distinct and separate from the social problems of any
other part of the world. The nearest approach to parallel conditions,
and that on a far smaller and narrower scale, is found in the British
colonies and in the newly settled parts of Siberia. For while in nearly
every other part of the world the population of to-day is more or less
completely descended from the prehistoric population of the same region,
and has developed its social order in a slow growth extending over many
centuries, the American population is essentially a transplanted
population, a still fluid and imperfect fusion of great fragments torn
at this point or that from the gradually evolved societies of Europe.
The European social systems grow and flower upon their roots, in soil
which has made them and to which they are adapted. The American social
accumulation is a various collection of cuttings thrust into a new soil
and respiring a new air, so different that the question is still open to
doubt, and indeed there are those who do doubt, how far these cuttings
are actually striking root and living and growing, whether indeed they
are destined to more than a temporary life in the new hemisphere. I
propose to discuss and weigh certain arguments for and against the
belief that these ninety million people who constitute the United
States of America are destined to develop into a great distinctive
nation with a character a