The result of the General Election has proved so much
more favourable to the Unionist party than the popular majority obtained by adding up the total votes would have warranted us in expecting, that it has excited a good deal of complaining comment in the Liberal Press. It is said, and no doubt with more or less approximation to the truth, that if our majority in seats had not been proportionally far greater than our total majority at the polls, even allowing what may fairly be allowed for the much larger number of uncontested Unionist seats than of uncontested Gladatonian seats, we should hardly have had so large a majority as the Gladstonians had in the Parliament of 1892. That may be near the truth, though we will not answer for the correctness of the arithmetic; but in the first place, Ireland has had twenty-three Members more than she was by population entitled to, and even of those whom she has had, the Protestant part of Ulster has fewer seats than by population it was entitled to ; and in the next place any re- distribution of seats in England which would have given more influence to the larger populations, and less influence to the smaller populations, and which would have divided the double- seated boroughs into two separate constituencies, would cer- tainly have tended towards a very considerable enhancement of the Unionist victory. It was not in the smaller constitu- encies that our gains were the greatest, but in the larger ones.
