THE SECOND BALLOT.
TAE Proportional Representation Society has put out a very weighty pamphlet on "The Second Ballot." It is only eight pages long, and it costs but a penny. Con- sequently no one need be deterred from reading it by the demand, it makes either on their time or on their pockets. We welcome it the more heartily because in the first instance it looked as though the Society were not quite sound on the second ballot. All uneasiness on this score is now at an end. No one can read this pamphlet and retain any faith either in the second ballot or in the alternative vote. The writer goes straight to the root of the mischief which the Proportional Representation Society is trying to cure, and he has no difficulty in showing that neither of these remedies would be of any avail. What we need is a. House of Commons which shall reproduce in something like their true proportions the opinions of the electors. What we have at present is a House of Commons which reproduces the opinion of the majority to an extent which never corresponds exactly, and some- times does not correspond at all, to the opinions of the electors. Our object is to get at the mind of the nation, and in order to attain it we cut up the country arbitrarily into little bits of territory, returning for the most part one Member each. The vice of this system is that it gives us the mind, not of the constituency, but only of the strongest party in the constituency. Where, as now happens more and more often, the contest lies between three parties, each running its own candidate, the opinion that returns the Member may be the opinion of a minority of the electors. In a constituency of ten thousand a three-cornered fight might show four thousand votes for one candidate, three thousand one hundred for another, and two thousand nine hundred for a third, with the result that six thousand out of the ten thousand would not be represented at all. This parody of representation might conceivably be reproduced in every single-Member constitueney, and the only reason why we have tolerated it so long is our conviction that in a General Election the errors balance one another. If a minority in one constituency returns a Liberal, a. minority in another returns a Unionist, while now and again the Labour Party wins a seat as by accident. This system has only cue conceivable merit. It is charmingly unscientific. But even by Englishmen this solitary advantage cannot for ever be held to outweigh the proof afforded by one election after another that the figures of the polls need bear no relation to the result of the contest. An electorate roughly divided into three parties cannot be properly represented in a system of single-Member constitueneies. The advocates of the second ballot propose by way of palliative that in this imaginary onstitneney Of ten thousand the candidate who got four thousand votes should run in a second contest a fortnight later against the candidate who got three thousand one hundred. The two thousand nine hundred electors who voted for the third candidate would thus be set free to turn the election in favour of either of the others. But so far as the House of Commons is concerned the result is in no way improved. If the supporters of the excluded candidate vote for the man who polled four thousand votes, it is unchanged. If they vote for the man who polled three. thousand one hundred, the strongest party in the constituency is left without a Member in order to enable a minority to return the candidate it dislikes least. That is representation in a strictly Gilbertian sense.
There were some excuses for the popularity which the second ballot has long enjoyed in Prance. It was not so ill-suited to a country in which there were two part ies each containing many groups. When every Conservative was a supporter of MacMalion's policy, and every Republican a supporter of Gambetta's, the question was simply should a Conservative or a Republican be returned. The points on. which the members of each party were agreed were far more important for the immediate purpose than those on which they differed. The political situation in France has greatly changed since that time. The division between Moderate and Extreme Republicans is now so well marked that to return the official candidate is no longer the one object that a good Republican can propose to himself, it is only natural, therefore, that the second ballot should have lost much of the popularity it once had. The pamphlet we are dealing with gives several examples of this. The cardinal vice of the system is the trafficking in votes to which it gives rise. The supporters of the candidate who has retired too often become a market in which the friends of the remaining candidates are welcomed as competing purchasers. The practical working of the second ballot is most visible in Germany. At the last General Election the Social Democrats carried forty- three seats as compared with a hundred and five secured by the Centre Party. Yet the votes given for the former numbered 3,251,000 against 2,274,097 given for the Centre Party. "The second ballot has worked directly against the Social Democrats as the party most disliked. They should have had one-third of the seats; they have one-ninth." In Austria the figures are equally striking. There the Social Democrats have more than a million voteS, while the Christian Socialists have just half as many. But this disparity has not prevented the Christian Socialists from carrying ninety-six seats against eighty-six carried by the Social Democrats. If it is objected that these figures only testify to the determination of the educated and propertied classes to resist Socialism, we reply that to make the representation glaringly false is to tempt people into disregarding it as a means of giving expression to their wishes. That is the atmosphere ill which revolutions are begotten.
The writer of this pamphlet has been at the pains to work out the results of applying the second ballot in eleven three-cornered contests which have taken place since the General Election of 1906. Taken together, these eleven by-elections returned seven Liberals, two Unionists, and two Socialists. Proportional representation as it exists, say, in Belgium would have returned four Liberals, four Unionists, and three Labour men. This would have given us a reasonably accurate counterpart of the actual distribution of votes, which was : Liberal, 53,307; Unionist, 45,771; and Labour, 33,595. The second ballot would only have exaggerated the present inequality. Its results would have varied according as Liberals and Labour men combined against Unionists in the decisive contest, or Unionists and Labour men combined against Liberals, or Unionists and Liberals combined against Labour men, and in each of these cases there would have been room for further variations, according as the supporters of the excluded candidate preferred one or other of his rivals. This gives us six possible com- binations: the figures being in the first case tea Liberals, no Unionists, and one Labour man ; in the second seven Liberals, no Unionists, and four Labour men ; in the third seven Unionists, no Liberals, aud four Labour men ; in the fourth eight Unionists, no - Liberals, and three Labour men; in the fifth ten Liberals, one Unionist, and no Labour men; in the sixth eight Unionists and three Liberals. Any one of these result. would have given us a worse representation of existing parties in the constituencies than we get under the present system, far as that is from representing the actual distribution of electoral opinion. This consequence so entirely contradicts the objects for which the Proportional Representation Society has been founded that we may count upon its offering all the resistance in its power to the adoption of the second ballot even as an experi- ment or a half-way house. From this point of view the composition of its Committee is extremely satis- factory. It contains Unionists, Liberals, and Labour men,—representatives, that is, of all the three parties into which English, Scottish, and Welsh opinion is divided. Those who may be tempted to look favourably on an attempt to rush a Second Ballot Bill through Parliament will find that they will have to overcome the opposition, not merely of other parties, but of their own party, and this should be enough to secure for the question something approaching to exhaustive consideration. We may hope, indeed, that between now and the intro- duction of the Government Reform Bill the case will have become too clear to allow of Ministers entertaining any proposal in the direction of the second ballot. For our- selves, we should like to see a well-devised scheme of proportional representation included in the Bill. We will allow, however, that, judging by the pace at which great reforms get accepted, this result is hardly likely to come so soon. We shall be content if the Bill leaves the present system of single-Member constituencies untouched. That system is so plainly wanting in the essentials which belong to true representation that the one thing that could lon,g delay its abolition would be the adoption of the second ballot, and the consequent demand that time should be given for a fair trial of the new nostrum. The more public opinion becomes enlightened upon the demerits of this pro- posal, the less danger there will be that Mr. Asquith will make so great a mistake, and to this happy result the Proportional Representation Society has made a valuable contribution in this little pamphlet.
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