MR. COURTNEY'S APOSTOLATE. T HE enthusiasm which Mr. Courtney throws into
his some- what arid political apostolate is worthy of our deepest admiration. He uses the metaphor of Ezekiel, he uses the language of the Gospels in his speeches ; and yet his dry bones do not live, though they certainly stir and rattle, nor does he manage to convert any but those who were already converted. And if he fills with a certain fervour those who were already, in his sense, among "the elect," yet these are but an insignifi- cant proportion of the electors. If he had gone into the wilder- ness to preach a new system of logarithms, he could hardly have been less successful or more meritorious. He goes over all the old ground day after day, pointing out, what nobody doubts, that if a very widely diffused minority were of one party, and a very highly concentrated majority were of the other party, the system of single seats might result in yielding a House of Commons in which the representatives of the majority of the whole population would be hi a minority, and the representatives of the minority of the whole population in a majority. That is perfectly true, though we do not think it quite the calamity which Mr. Courtney appears to think it. The wide diffusion of any conviction is a great element of strength. Suppose it true that the number of Englishmen who hold one political creed,—say, Tory Democracy,—were in a majority in a great many more constituencies than those who hold what is called Liberalism ; but that, on the other hand, those who hold the Liberal creed are in so much greater a majority where they are in a majority at all, that counting heads, they have the largest number in their favour. Still, we think there would be no great injustice in the temporary ascendancy of the party who, though they had not the most adherents, had the most widely diffused majorities, i.e., had a larger geographical surface peopled by constituencies in favour of their view, than the Liberals could boast. Supposing that to be the case, it would become the duty of the Liberals to promote a wider diffusion of their view, and to permeate with their principles not only immense majorities in certain parts of the country, but small majorities in a great number of different quarters. We do not think it intrinsically so unfair to require that the majority should be well diffused over the whole country, as well as excessively strong in special portions of it. Mr. Courtney appears to regard this as fatal to Democracy. We cannot say that we think so. Suppose, what is quite conceivable, that the Metropolitan districts, Wales, and Scotland, taken together, were almost unanimous for one party, and that almost everywhere else that party was in a minority, though only just in a minority, would it be so unreasonable, in the Democratic sense of the word, to insist that the party commanding immense majorities in London, Wales, and Scotland should also obtain small majorities in a very large number of other constituencies before it could be recognised as the leading power in the Empire ? The Democratic idea seems to us to involve something more than a mere majority of voters,— namely, so well-diffused a majority of voters that five-sixths of the United Kingdom, geographically speaking, should not feel itself tyrannically overridden by the masses of partisans of Liberalism in the other sixth of the surface of the land. And this is really all that the proposed plan of the Government demands, as compared with the plan of the friends of-Propor- tional Representation.
But, after all, Mr. Courtney's cause is still weaker if you look into its own pretensions, than it is in the charges which it makes against the present scheme. Nothing can be more absurd than Mr. Courtney's contention, repeated again and again, that by the Hare scheme you never could fail in getting the true expression of the country's wishes. Not only is this assertion intrinsically absurd, since every one knows that no method of ascertaining the country's wishes can possibly be infallible ; but, in our belief, no plan would be so likely to miscarry in declaring the real wishes of the country as the plan of Mr. Courtney. Mr. Courtney's plan is that each voter should number the group of candidates according to his preference, and that when candidate No. 1 has already received sufficient votes to place him in Parliament, the elector who has given his second preference elsewhere should have his vote counted for candidate No. 2 who stands second in his favour, instead of for candidate No. I. Now, how will that act ? Everybody knows what political canvassers are, and what English electors are. The unpaid canvasser, probably a popular man, and often an influential man, comes to the voter and says to him, 'Well, I am not sanguine enough to hope that you will give my candidate your first vote. I know you are a Conservative, and that you want to see Mr. —, at all events, returned for the district. But just consider what my candidate's claims are. He has exerted himself for years for every useful institution in this borough, he is popular with all his workmen, he is universally respected, he is a credit to the place. At least, give him your second vote, or even only your third. Kindly gratify me by the promise that his name shall stand second, or if not second at least third, in your ballot-paper.' Of course, the average elector thinks he would like to gratify the opposite party by such promises as these ; and of course he will not generally be sharp enough to see how much, under Mr. Hare's scheme, such a promise really means. And yet that second or third vote, if given by a considerable number of Conservatives to a Liberal candidate, may result as easily as not in the return of a Liberal where the real wish of the elector who gives the vote is for a Conservative. We remember a case in which a Con- servative butcher, who had promised a vote to his own party, expressed his sincere regret to a Liberal candidate that he could not give him his vote too. "For," he said, seriously," I have often and often bought your bullocks, and they do cut up beautiful." That man would have been quite sure to promise the Liberal candidate the second place on his list ; and by doing so might as easily as not have helped to return a Liberal where his own political creed was Con- servative. You cannot generally make English electors understand that their No. 2, and No. 3, and No. 4 will really tell in any important way on the election. They will give them for all sorts of non-political reasons, for all sorts of non- political reasons which are bad reasons, and have no business to count at all in the election. One of our chief expectations from the single-seat system is that we shall get a very much truer representation of the real political wishes of' the people than we could ever get from a system in which the attention of the electors is disturbed by a variety of claims of the most different character. Let a plain Englishman say which of a. considerable number of candidates he prefers, and he will decide on principle. Give him a number of alternatives, and he will let all sorts of irrelevant considerations determine his second and third and fourth alternatives, so that they will ultimately represent not his political creed at all, but the class of social or personal considerations which weigh with him next to political considerations. No claim was ever wilder than Mr. Courtney's claim that the Hare- scheme applied to constituencies returning seven or eight Members will necessarily give a true representation of the political bias of the electors. We will not pretend to predict what will " necessarily " happen at all, for the simple reason . that we do not know. But we will say this, that in our opinion nothing is so likely as that an English constituency called upon to return eight Members by the Hare scheme would return but one or two of the eight to represent their serious political con- victions, and all the rest to represent their misgivings, their fancies, their hesitations, their general good-nature or laziness, indeed, anything but their real creed. You cannot put too simple a question before a great constituency if you wish to have a really truthful and telling reply. Mr. Courtney would put to them a catechism of preferences, in the attempt to reply to which political convictions would soon altogether dis- appear. We believe that the Government plan would, though not infallible, be as nearly certain to yield the true political opinion of the English people as any plan that could be imagined. We believe that no plan would be so certain to yield capricious and unintelligible results as the system of M. Courtney and Sir John Lubbock,
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