Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/148

 Mr. Mill undoubtedly regarded Mr. Hare's scheme of "proportional representation" as a political discovery of the most important character, and any such opinion of Mill's is of course entitled to respectful consideration. But Mr. Courtney is so enamoured of "three-cornered constituencies" and "cumulative votes" that he positively refused to support Mr. Trevelyan's County Franchise Bill because it contained no provision for the realization of a "principle which would re-create political life, raising it out of the degradation which overlaid it." Mr. Courtney tells us we are about to be overwhelmed by the billows of a tempestuous democratic ocean abounding in unknown terrors. There is but one escape: we must all put out to sea in tiny "three-cornered" boats, on pain of universal political shipwreck. Was there ever so great faith seen in or out of Israel? One recalls the exclamation of the Breton mariner,—"How great, O Lord, is thy ocean! and how small is my skiff!" The danger to be apprehended is no less than the gradual extinction of the "independent member."

Now, apart from the fact that the independent member is generally a member who is not to be depended on, is it a fact that our experience of the actual working of the "cumulative vote" and of the "three-cornered constituency" has been so encouraging as to induce us to withhold the franchise from the county householder until the requisite number of "comers" and "cumulations" can be created? I chance to know the electoral circumstances, parliamentary and scholastic, of two important cities in the north,—the one returning three members to Parliament by the three-cornered artifice; the other, thirteen members to