Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/14

 that candidate ; and the fidelity of the disposition will be tested by tables showing that the votes severally appropriated make up the total polled. The telegraph and the railway are not of less public utility because few who use them are masters of the science of mechanics and the laws of electricity.

The alleged impracticability of the method has recently met with an unexpected and conclusive refutation. Mr. Lytton, Secretary of Legation at Copenhagen, judging that there was no subject of internal polity, which the inquiries of our ministers abroad could elucidate, so fraught with consequences deeply affecting the public prosperity, and none, moreover, in which the institutions of free states had gathered such small improvement in the progress of civilization—in July, 1863, laid before the government at home a paper on the mode of electing the Rigsraad, or Supreme Legislative Council of what was then the United Kingdom of Denmark and the Duchies. This method, which was first adopted in 1855, at the instance of Mr. Andræ, Minister of Finance, Mr. Lytton discovered to be almost identical with that which, after several more imperfect embodiments of the same leading idea, has been propounded in this Treatise. He regarded the existence and operation, for eight years, of an electoral system, which had theretofore been considered in England as a theory only, to be a very remarkable event in the history of representative institutions. “If” Mr. Lytton says, “the question, ‘Will it work’ can be eliminated, the more important question, ‘What will be the result of its working?’ will be entitled to increased attention.” With a rare appreciation of the essential elements of the scheme, and of their bearing under different political conditions, Mr. Lytton explains the extent to which it was capable of application in the election of the Rigsraad. Of the eighty members which composed