are the advocates on either side. But the best arguments for
Proportional Representation arise out of its opponents' speeches, and to
these I will confine my attention now. Consider Lord Harcourt--heir to
the most sacred traditions of the party game--hurling scorn at a project
that would introduce "faddists, mugwumps," and so on and so on--in fact
independent thinking men--into the legislature. Consider the value of
Lord Curzon's statement that London "rose in revolt" against the
project. Do you remember that day, dear reader, when the streets of
London boiled with passionate men shouting, "No Proportional
Representation! Down with Proportional Representation"? You don't. Nor
do I. But what happened was that the guinea-pigs and solicitors and
nobodies, the party hacks who form the bulk of London's
misrepresentation in the House of Commons, stampeded in terror against a
proposal that threatened to wipe them out and replace them by known and
responsible men. London, alas! does not seem to care how its members are
elected. What Londoner knows anything about his member? Hundreds of
thousands of Londoners do not even know which of the ridiculous
constituencies into which the politicians have dismembered our London
they are in. Only as I was writing this in my flat in St. James's Court,
Westminster, did it occur to me to inquire who was representing me in
the councils of the nation while I write....

After some slight difficulty I ascertained that my representative is a
Mr. Burdett Coutts, who was, in the romantic eighties, Mr.
Ashmead-Bartlett. And by a convenient accident I find that the other day
he moved to reject the Proportional Representation Amendment made by the
House of Lords to the Representation of the People Bill, so that I am
able to look up the debate in Hansard and study my opinions as he
represented them and this question at one and the same time. And, taking
little things first, I am proud and happy to discover that the member