want a man they can trust as their representative. In the fifties and
sixties of the last century, in which this electoral reform movement
began and the method of Proportional Representation was thought out, it
was possible for the reformers to work untroubled upon the assumption
that if a man was not necessarily born a

"... little Liber-al,
or else a little Conservative,"

he must at least be a Liberal-Unionist or a Conservative Free-Trader.
But seeking a fair representation for party minorities, these reformers
produced a system of voting at once simple and incapable of
manipulation, that leads straight, not to the representation of small
parties, but to a type of democratic government by selected best men.

Before giving the essential features of that system, it may be well to
state in its simplest form the evils at which the reform aims. An
election, the reformers point out, is not the simple matter it appears
to be at the first blush. Methods of voting can be manipulated in
various ways, and nearly every method has its own liability to
falsification. We may take for illustration the commonest, simplest
case--the case that is the perplexity of every clear-thinking voter
under British or American conditions--the case of a constituency in
which every elector has one vote, and which returns one representative
to Parliament. The naive theory on which people go is that all the
possible candidates are put up, that each voter votes for the one he
likes best, and that the best man wins. The bitter experience is that
hardly ever are there more than two candidates, and still more rarely is
either of these the best man possible. Suppose, for example, the
constituency is mainly Conservative. A little group of pothouse