Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/114

 tries to make the most of it. With the old restricted franchise, when the electors were a select and privileged class, no such party discipline was required. A caucus in the English sense is simply an elected committee. Sixty voters may require no such committee to prepare their business for them, simply because they are practically a committee already. It is quite another matter when the numbers rise to six hundred, or six thousand, or sixteen thousand, as the case may be. Then some understanding must be come to, some suitable machinery must be devised to give effect to the general desires. In such circumstances the English race naturally and instinctively have recourse to popular election to rectify matters; and this, after all, is the worst sin that can be laid at the door of the "caucus." The great matter, Mr. Chamberlain insists, is to insure that your hundred, three hundred, or six hundred be truly representative of the party voters. If that is secured, all is well; if not, not. Whoever distrusts the caucus honestly worked, distrusts the people as the true source of power. The party vote need not be one whit less honestly recorded because it is informal. Such, as I understand it, is Mr. Chamberlain's position, and it seems wellnigh unanswerable. What then are the advantages of such an organization of the Liberal forces? They are various. One is, and it is perhaps the most obvious, that it tends to put a strong check on what Scotsmen call "divisive courses" at elections. At the general election of 1874 twenty-six votes on a division were lost to the Liberal cause through a suicidal multiplication of Liberal candidates at the polls! There is, however, it must be admitted, another and a much more certain method of preventing such disasters; viz., the French method