Number 2. If 2 isn't in need of all of it, the rest goes on to 3. And so
on. That is the profound mathematical mystery, that is the riddle beyond
the wit of Westminster, which overpowers these fine intelligences and
sets them babbling of "senior wranglers." Each time there is a debate on
this question in the House, member after member hostile to the proposal
will play the ignorant fool and pretend to be confused himself, and will
try to confuse others, by deliberately clumsy statements of these most
elementary ideas. Surely if there were no other argument for a change of
type in the House, these poor knitted brows, these public perspirations
of the gentry who "cannot understand P.R.," should suffice.

But let us be just; it is not all pretence; the inability of Mr. Austen
Chamberlain to grasp the simple facts before him was undoubtedly
genuine. He followed Mr. Burdett Coutts, in support of Mr. Burdett
Coutts, with the most Christian disregard of the nasty things Mr.
Burdett Coutts had seemed to be saying about the Birmingham caucus from
which he sprang. He had a childish story to tell of how voters would not
give their first votes to their real preferences, because they would
assume he "would get in in any case"--God knows why. Of course on the
assumption that the voter behaves like an idiot, anything is possible.
And never apparently having heard of fractions, this great Birmingham
leader was unable to understand that a voter who puts 1 against a
candidate's name votes for that candidate anyhow. He could not imagine
any feeling on the part of the voter that No. 1 was his man. A vote is a
vote to this simple rather than lucid mind, a thing one and indivisible.
Read this--

"Birmingham," he said, referring to a Schedule under consideration, "is
to be cut into three constituencies of four members each. I am to have a
constituency of 100,000 electors, I suppose. How many thousand