inhabitants I do not know. _Every effort will be made to prevent any of
those electors knowing--in fact, it would be impossible for any of them
to know--whether they voted for me or not, or at any rate whether they
effectively voted for me or not, or whether the vote which they wished
to give to me was really diverted to somebody else_."

Only in a house of habitually inattentive men could any one talk such
nonsense without reproof, but I look in vain through Hansard's record
of this debate for a single contemptuous reference to Mr. Chamberlain's
obtuseness. And the rest of his speech was a lamentable account of the
time and trouble he would have to spend upon his constituents if the new
method came in. He was the perfect figure of the parochially important
person in a state of defensive excitement. No doubt his speech appealed
to many in the House.

Of course Lord Harcourt was quite right in saying that the character of
the average House of Commons member will be changed by Proportional
Representation. It will. It will make the election of obscure and
unknown men, of carpet-bag candidates who work a constituency as a
hawker works a village, of local pomposities and village-pump "leaders"
almost impossible. It will replace such candidates by better known and
more widely known men. It will make the House of Commons so much the
more a real gathering of the nation, so much the more a house of
representative men. (Lord Harcourt's "faddists and mugwumps.") And it is
perfectly true as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald (also an opponent) declares, that
Proportional Representation means constituencies so big that it will be
impossible for a poor man to cultivate and work them. That is
unquestionable. But, mark another point, it will also make it useless,
as Mr. Chamberlain has testified, for rich men to cultivate and work
them. All this cultivating and working, all this going about and making