NOTES 



Scientific Politics.— V. The Election Analysed. 



A GENERAL election does not change public opinion ; it merely 

 registers the changes in public opinion since the last election. 

 The actual results are rough and ready, and seem full of 

 anomahes — split votes, candidates elected by minorities, and 

 so on — but an analysis of the figures makes an election an 

 instrument of precision that leaves as clear a record of the 

 period as geological strata. And it may be added that almost 

 every election deposits a few political fossils in the soil, and 

 gives indications of new types emerging apparently from 

 nowhere. The last election saw the birth of a mysterious little 

 Coalition Labour Party, that called itself the National Demo- 

 cratic Party ; the flood of 1922 swept all its members out of 

 existence. And the same flood flung up a Prohibitionist at 

 Dundee, and left him high and dry— very " dry " — on the 

 beach at Westminster. 



These are the rarer species, and belong more or less to the 

 category of pohtical " sports," which seldom live long. The 

 greater parties appear time after time with little change in 

 essentials ; but their position in the nation is shown far more 

 exactly by the number of votes cast than by the seats won or 

 lost. A seat may be lost by one vote, but it may be won by 

 a ten-thousand majority. The following notes ignore individual 

 constituencies, and take voters in the mass. 



A. — There are roughly 20,000,000 voters on the register. 

 Deductions have to be made on account of death, illness, 

 removals, or unavoidable absence ; also a small number of 

 people have houses in two constituencies, and are therefore 

 on the register in both, but they are only entitled to vote in 

 one. The actual votes cast were a little over 14,000,000 ; add 

 3,000,000 in 59 uncontested constituencies, and the total poll 

 would have been nearly 17,000,000. Consequently some 70-80 

 per cent, of the electorate voted, or would have done so if it 

 had had the chance ; the percentage was higher in the towns 

 than in the country, probably owing to difficulties of communi- 

 cation. The abstentions due to apathy were therefore not very 

 many ; and the assumption that women would not trouble 

 to vote proves, as it did in 191 8, entirely unfounded. Reports 



439 



