1895.] 4by [James. 



of the plan now known as minoritj', or proportional, representation. 

 The paper antedates Thomas Hare's earliest essays on the subject of mi- 

 nority representation by thirteen years ; and that of James Garth Mar- 

 shall by almost ten years. 



The author wrote in a city, the members of whose legislative body, 

 called councils, were elected at the time on a general ticket by a major- 

 ity of the votes. The results had been unsatisfactory. It seemed to Gil- 

 pin that such a plan was based on two principles, one of which was 

 sound, and the other unsound. It is right that the majority shall govern, 

 but not right that the voice of the minority shall be unheard. He, there- 

 fore, undertook to examine the question whether a legislative assembly 

 can be so elected as to represent the respective interests of the community 

 in deliberation and to allow to the majority that control in its decisions to 

 which it is entitled. 



The political evils from which the city of Philadelphia suffered at that 

 time seem to be the same as at present — bossism and the subordination of 

 local to national issues. The caucus comes in for severe criticism, and 

 one of the arguments the author advances for his system is, that in his 

 opinion, it would prevent "those hasty and unjust displacements from 

 office which have taken place by granting to the successful parly all the 

 benefits of office, so offensive to the sentiments and feelings of a large 

 and independent part of the community, desirous only of a steady, just 

 and impartial administration of government." From which it would 

 seem as if the spoils system had already become firmly established in 

 Philadelphia by 1840, or even earlier. 



The system of election by a majority, as distinct from plurality, vote, 

 the author thinks was occasioning many evils — not the least among them 

 that of giving to a small third party an entirely disproportionate influ- 

 ence when the two great parties were nearly equal in numbers. Thus, 

 he said, the system of majority voting in Massachusetts had thrown an 

 entirely undue power into the hands of the abolitionists, who, by giving 

 their support first to one party and then to another, could practically 

 make their own terms, and was thus forcing both the other parties to 

 become radical on the slavery issues, when otherwise neither of them 

 would have been so. Nor did he think that the plan of plurality 

 voting, just then adopted by Massachusetts, as a remedy for this evil, 

 would help matters— on the contrary, it would make it worse, since it, 

 might give to a party, absolutely in the minority, the power of con- 

 trolling the public policy of the community, without consulting the 

 other parties at all. 



The plan proposed by the author was very simple. Each party was to 

 put up its candidates as usual, a n-umber equal to the whole number to be 

 elected. The voting was to go on in the usual way, each voter having 

 one vote for each of, say, twenty men — that was the number then in 

 Councils. After the election each party was to have a number of repre- 

 sentatives assigned to it, bearing the same ratio to twenty, as its vote 



