the rest of each vote is entered on to No. 2 upon that voting paper. And
so on. Now this is an extremely easy job for an accountant or skilled
computer, and it is quite easily checked by any other accountant and
skilled computer. A reader with a bad arithmetical education, ignorant
of the very existence of such a thing as a slide rule, knowing nothing
of account keeping, who thinks of himself working out the resultant
fractions with a stumpy pencil on a bit of greasy paper in a bad light,
may easily think of this transfer of fractions as a dangerous and
terrifying process. It is, for a properly trained man, the easiest,
exactest job conceivable. The Cash Register people will invent machines
to do it for you while you wait. What happens, then, is that every
candidate with more than a quota, beginning with the top candidate,
sheds a traction of each vote he has received, down the list, and the
next one sheds his surplus fraction in the same way, and so on until
candidates lower in the list, who are at first below the quota, fill up
to it. When all the surplus votes of the candidates at the head of the
list have been disposed of, then the hopeless candidates at the bottom
of the list are dealt with. The second votes on their voting papers are
treated as whole votes and distributed up the list, and so on. It will
be plain to the quick-minded that, towards the end, there will be a
certain chasing about of little fractions of votes, and a slight
modification of the quota due to voting papers having no second or third
preferences marked upon them, a chasing about that it will be difficult
for an untrained intelligence to follow. _But untrained intelligences
are not required to follow it_. For the skilled computer these things
offer no difficulty at all. And they are not difficulties of principle
but of manipulation. One might as well refuse to travel in a taxicab
until the driver had explained the magneto as refuse to accept the
principle of Proportional Representation by the single transferable vote
until one had remedied all the deficiencies of one's arithmetical