400 ELECTORAL REFORM PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION. 



sentation can follow only when every possible vote is made 

 effective. This can be done by sectional election ; where each, 

 equal section of the voters elects not a member only, but a 

 representative of all that section by the votes of all the voters 

 in that section. By the British method of election this is abso- 

 lutely impossible. 



Single-member elections are seen at their best when there 

 are only two candidates ; and in such a case two points should 

 be noticed : the number of voters that must of necessity be un- 

 represented, and the number of votes that are necessarily non- 

 effective. Both these are inherent in single-member 

 constituencies, and both are non-existent where there is trans- 

 ferable voting. 



\Mien there are more than two candidates the number of 

 non-effective votes is enormously increased, for one more vote 

 than the second-best candidate obtains secures the election of 

 the member, and all the other votes are non-effective. 



With our small number of voters in South Africa, the 

 number of unrepresented voters, though proportionally large, 

 looks small. In England it amounts to hundreds of thousands 

 in every election : and this recurs year after year. In the 

 General Election in 1906, in Wales 217,462 Ministerialist voters 

 elected 30 members, while 100,547 Unionist voters elected none, 

 and were unrepresented. On the other side again : in January, 

 1910. in Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, 218.000 Unionists got 

 30 members; 134,000 on the other side got none. Thus, in these 

 two districts, 235,000 were unrepresented voters. 



We have discussed two drawbacks inherent to single- 

 member constituencies. A third, and very important one, is that 

 a minority of voters may, and often does, obtain a majority 

 of members : so that it is the minority which rules and not the 

 majority, in these cases, under the present system. 



In ^^'arwickshire in 1906 there were four constituencies ; 

 three Liberal members were returned by 22,021 voters, and only 

 one Conservative, though the Conservatives had 22,490, i.c , 

 a majority of 469 more votes. This resulted from the fact that 

 the larger Conservative majority was all in one division, while 

 the Liberal majorities were spread over the other three. 



These drawbacks inherent in single-member constituencies 

 are entirely absent in the true representation that the transfer- 

 able vote secures in all cases. 



By electing your members with the transferable vote, you 

 would gain the five following advantages : — 



The first is, that the mobile portion of your voters, who are 

 working in one place to-day and elsewhere soon after, would 

 suft'er no disfranchisement ; they could always vote wherever 

 they happened to be w^orking. 



The second is a much more important matter. With a 

 growing p()i)ulation, the question of additional representation 



