Page:Notes on democracy - 1926.djvu/100

 house commonly shows something of the same disharmony, even when it is ostensibly based upon proportional representation, for the cities grow in population much faster than the country districts, and reapportionment always lags behind that growth.

These facts fever certain romantic fuglemen of so-called pure democracy, and they come forward with complicated remedies, all of which have been tried somewhere or other and failed miserably. The truth is that disproportional representation is not a device to nullify democracy, but simply a device to make it more workable. All it indicates, at least in the United States, is that the sovereign people have voluntarily sacrificed a moiety of the democratic theory in order to attain to a safer and more efficient practice. If they so desired they could sweep all of the existing inequalities out of existence—not instantly, perhaps, but nevertheless surely. Every such inequality is founded upon their free will, and nearly every one enjoys their complete approval. What lies under most of them is not a wish to give one voter an advantage over another, but a wish to