Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/150

 At the election of 1868, Lancashire, as Mr. Courtney has pointed out, with its included towns, returned twenty-two Conservative to eleven Liberal representatives; yet the Liberal vote was one hundred and four thousand strong, while the Conservative was only one hundred and two thousand. Suppose the distinction of town and county were abolished once and for all, and each shire or aggregate of shires were permitted to vote for a group of candidates in proportion to its electorate, on something like the old French system of scrutin de liste, would not that give a fairer chance to "independent members" and candidates "above mediocrity" than thoroughly artificial corners and cumulations? Let Mr. Courtney consider the matter; for certainly the minority-representation craze has landed him in strange seeming contradictions.

On the one day he opposed the enfranchisement of the count}' householder, and on the next he proposed to remove the electoral disabilities of women. He would plead, doubtless, by way of extenuation, that this was not a lowering, but an assimilation, of the franchise, and that he was not consequently compelled by consistency to encumber his bill with any three-cornered contrivances. But the point is all too fine; and the House showed its sense of the incongruity of the situation by recording a majority of a hundred and fourteen votes against the measure, as compared with eighty the year before, and this notwithstanding the fact that the member for Liskeard's arguments were most cogent. It is hardly necessary to observe, that, like all ardent advocates of female rights, Mr. Courtney is a bachelor. But there is one question with respect to which the most captious Radical can have nothing but words of