MR. COURTNEY'S OPPOSITION.
MR. COURTNEY'S resignation and opposition to the Redistribution Bill, so far as it is founded on the plan of dividing the counties and the great boroughs into constituencies returning single Members, will crystallise and give expression to the not inconsiderable aversion which is felt to that scheme. But Mr. Courtney would, as Mr. Glikdstone in his reply hinted, have done much better—for the purpose, at least, of striking a blow against the Bill as it is,—if he had not suggested that the only way out of the difficulty is to adopt Mr. Hare's scheme, and let every voter indicate the candidates to whom his vote is to be in order transferred, if it is not needed for the man whom he chiefly de- sires to have for his representative. That scheme is open to far more fatal objections than any other which has been proposed. It would result in a House largely filled by Members whom the popular imagination would justly describe as not only pis-aller representatives, but pis-alley representatives who had been practically indicated as pis-allers, as second-bests, as third-bests, or as the least objectionable, by the electors themselves Now, we are not denying that Mem- bers may have often been returned for whom not a few votes had been given simply on this ground,—that the elector thought them only less objectionable than any other candidate for whom he had the opportunity of voting. But whether it were so or not, there was at least no record of the fact. The Member so elected took his seat in the House with the full authority accorded to every other Member, so far as the election was concerned. And this is a matter of the very first importance. Whatever we do, we must do nothing to weaken the authority of the representatives to act in the name of their constituencies. We should do not only something, but a great deal, to weaken that authority, if we lent the agitators against Parliamentary action the best grounds not only for asserting but for proving that a very great number of the Members who wield the power of the Legislature were mere " third-bests " or " least-objectionables," whom the parti- cular constituency had returned for the want of men in whom they felt a greater confidence. The Hare plan, no doubt, greatly extends the discretion of each elector. But such an extension of his discretion and judgment may involve many great evils. In a great democracy it is of the last im- portance that you shall not be able to go behind the record of the constituency's choice so as to weaken the public effect of that choice. You would be able under the Hare system to go behind the result of the poll, and to show how many men had been returned tp whom very few had given their hearty allegiance as the men in whom they felt complete confidence. This seems to us, we confess, an objection of a far more fatal character than any founded on the mere inade- quacy of the representative picture of the nation's mind, which any House of Commons may contain. It is far better to have even a very imperfect representation of the people's will, with full authority to act, and no paralysing distrust of its significance, than even to have a much more perfect repre- sentation of the people's will, enfeebled by very plausible objections which could be brought up against it out-of-doors, and by a widely diffused doubt whether the subtlety of the method applied in determining the election did not render the whole election questionable. Simplicity of system is the first of all requisites under a Democratic Constitution. But even if Mr. Courtney had omitted the advocacy of the particular plan which derogated so much from the effect of his speech, and of his disinterested act in resigning office that he might consistently make the speech., though his speech would have produced a very much greater effect, it would have been, to our minds, a singularly short-sighted one. As Mr. Glad- stone justly said, there is no conceivable system to which serious objection may not be taken; and no doubt there are objections, and serious objections, to the single-seat system. But, in the first place, it is quite untrue to say that it is a new one, or that it has not been tried with eminently good results. Not only is Mr. Courtney himself the Member for a constituency which seats only a single Member, but as Mr. Gladstone re- marked, he himself, the Prime Minister, is in the same posi- tion, and so is Mr. Trevelyan. Indeed, if you pick out the Members who represent single seats with any considerable number of constituents, you will find some of the weightiest men in the House. Mr. Cobden himself sat for many years as Member for Rochdale, which is such a constituency. We
still have Mr. Dillwyn, the Member for Swansea ; Mr. Burt, the Member for Morpeth ; Sir George Campbell, the Member for Kirkcaldy District ; Mr. Laing, the Member for the Orkney and Shetland Islands ; Mr. Barclay, the Member for Forfarshire ; Mr. Evelyn Ashley, the Member for the Isle of Wight; Mr. Rath- bone, the Member for Carnarvonshire ; Sir Edward Reed, the Member for Cardiff District ; Mr. Rylands, the Member for Burnley ; Lord Richard Grosvenor, the Member for Flintshire ;
Mr. Horace Davey, the Member for Christchurch, and a number of others. We venture to say that, take them as a whole, the Members sitting for single-seated constituencies of any magnitude are amongst the elite of the House of Commons. And this is our answer to our correspondent, Mr. Malleson, who assails the system of single seats in a letter in another column. We simply do not believe that in a con- stituency of 50,000 and upwards local and municipal influences will be allowed to override the interest of Imperial issues. On the contrary, we believe that constituencies with only one seat to dispose of will do their work better than constituencies with more seats. Fix the imagination of a large constituency on a single task, and it will usually discharge it well. Give it a variety of Members to elect and it will choose a good first, a poor second, and probably a shady third. But then comes Mr. Courtney's objection that you may have, and often have had, —in the United States and elsewhere,—the minority so dis- tributed that it will return a majority of Members, in consequence of the waste of an immense majority in one district, and the economical use of a very small majority in other districts. Of course, it may so happen, but if it does happen very often, it must be due to the carelessness or corruption of those who determine the boundaries of the con- stituencies ; and to this cause doubtless such a misfoitune has often been due in the United States. It is " gerrymandering " alone which would account for the frequent occurrence of such a fault as this. We trust our own Boundary Commission is far above the danger of " gerrymandering." Moreover, we hold that the single-seat system works excellently in this, that it requires not only in general that the majority of the nation should be on the winning side, but that a widely diffused majority should be on that side ; and nothing is more essential than this- to the firmness and stability of political life. Under any system of scrutin de lisle, or even under Mr. Hare's scheme, if applied to the whole country, you might well have a real majority of the people asking for one policy, when throughout two-thirds of the country, geographically speak- ing, the majority went the other way. The North of England, for example, will get a great and a most justly-acquired weight under the new Bill ; but if we do not take any guarantee that the political wishes of the victorious party are to be widely diffused throughout the country, the North might almost come to impose their policy on a reluctant Midland and South.
Again, the friends of- the minority system may say that the same minority may be practically extinguished in scores or even hundreds'of constituencies. But really a minority which cannot turn1itself into a majority in quite as many con- stituencies as its substantial national strength represents, is not a minority worth much consideration. The Boundary Commissioners are virtually directed to select the new con- stituencies with a view to permitting all the variety that is possible in the constitution of a constituency large enough for separate representation. And we can imagine no better guarantee than this for a real and substantial representation of the views of all numerous minorities. - For the rest, we do not want to see all the odds-and-ends of obsolete views care- fully represented in Parliament. That would make Parliament combine the function of registering the convictions of the past and the germs of the opinion of the future, with the function, of representing the energies of the present. If the friends of proportional representation were strictly consistent, they would not confine themselves to representing the minorities of indi- vidual constituencies, but would allow the strong thinkers of all England to combine among themselves to return a Member if they would. And if they did, a nice Parliament of crotcheteers we should have. However, the great argu- ment against them is that the English people would greatly distrust a Parliamentary majority gained by a large infusion in it of minority representatives, and that this would strike at the authority of our Parliamentary institutions by undermining the confidence placed in them. In that way it would really undo much of the advantage gained by this Bill. Perhaps the very greatest of these advantages is the new force with which Parliament will speak in the name of the nation. If the English people get the notion that many of those who so speak do not carry with them even the hearty support of their own constituents, there will be a germ of distrust sown in their minds at the very moment when we want to see them backing- up Parliament with their whole hearts, and insisting on the suppression of the triflers and mutineers who are turning deliberation into a mockery, and legislation into a dream.
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