422 COMPARATIVE LAW 



ticket votes continues in succession on the following candidates, 

 until there are no more straight votes available. 



Then a mere comparison of figures will determine the lucky 

 owners of the seats; namely, those who have reached the quorum, 

 either by the devolution of the straight votes or by the accumulation 

 of a sufficient number of preferential votes. 



Once more the only ones to be discarded will be the names not 

 popular enough to secure the minimum of votes necessary to acquire 

 a single seat. 



Proportional representation has been likened rather aptly to a 

 photographic proceeding, I mean, a photograph without artificial 

 corrections. Somebody also appropriately called it an electoral 

 metre, which could not possibly show wrong indications of public 

 opinion, because it works merely by the rules of the most exact of 

 sciences; and granted that it does not preclude the possibility of 

 errors at the hands of an unscrupulous operator or of an unskilled 

 calculator, there is this, however, for it, that it makes an error 

 so easily tangible and so palpably evident that it may well be said 

 to discourage any disposition to tamper with the ballot-boxes or to 

 " fix the returns " in any way. 



If it looks rather intricate and cumbersome at first sight, not 

 unlike all arithmetical problems in their exposition, yet the 

 system works in a perfectly clear and smooth way when applied to 

 figures, because it requires only elementary calculations. 



The justification one might almost say the necessity of these 

 two reforms lies in the modern conception of suffrage. The old 

 theory is generally left aside to-day, which considered the suffrage as 

 an inborn right, and it is almost everywhere looked upon as a func- 

 tion, as a duty thrust upon the citizen in the interest of the whole 

 community to which he belongs. 



Hence it is fair that this civil mandate be intrusted preferably 

 to the more enlightened, the more interested, and the more respons- 

 ible of the body politic, and to each according to his capacity or his 

 interest in the good administration of the commonwealth. 



Hence, also, it is fair that the law guarantee to those whom it 

 charges with such mandate the efficiency of the act which they are 

 to perform; for the vote has small importance indeed to the mem- 

 bers of the minority, if they can see in it nothing but a Platonic and, 

 at most, a negative demonstration, as in all the systems which 

 allow a bare majority of voters to carry all the seats in a constituency. 



However, with proportional representation, fairly and accurately 

 as it works in Belgium, there is always bound to be one or more 

 important sections of public opinion insufficiently represented in 

 Parliament or possibly altogether deprived of such representation. 

 The circumstance at first sight does not seem very remarkable, for, 



