At a very successful meeting of the Proportional Represen- tation
Society in London on Friday week Lord Balfour of Burleigh said that in the last thirty years the relative position of the private Member towards the Government bad changed, and changed to his disadvantage, and what was wanted was "One man one vote; one vote one value." But how could that be when a man represented, say, a few wards of the city of Manchester or of Glasgow, rather than his proportionate share of the whole of those cities ? Under the scheme of the Society each Member would represent some distinct shade of opinion in the city, In the last Parliament the disproportion of power to the feeling of the country was bad ; in the present Parliament it was worse. The meeting, we must add, repre- sented every shade of political opinion, and the progress the Society is making in popularising the idea of proportional representation is most encouraging. A speaker mentioned that in one Parliament the Liberal Party was in a minority of seventy-seven seats, but had a majority of twenty-five thousand votes in the country. Could any electoral system be much more unsatisfactory than the one which produced that result ?
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