to specific measures and making the most extraordinary treaties and sacrifices of the public interest in order to secure the passing of these definite bills.  But Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is exclusively a parliamentary man; he knows contemporary parliamentary “shop” as a clerk knows his “guv’nor,” and he thinks in the terms of his habitual life; he sees representatives only as politicians financed from party headquarters; it is natural that he should fail to see that the quality and condition of the sanely elected Member of Parliament will be quite different from these scheming climbers into positions of trust with whom he deals to-day.  It is the party system based on insane voting that makes governments indivisible wholes and gives the group and the cave their terrors and their effectiveness.  Mr. Ramsay Macdonald is as typical a product of existing electoral methods as one could well have, and his peculiarly keen sense of the power of intrigue in legislation is as good evidence as one could wish for of the need for drastic change.

Of course, Sane Voting is not a short cut to the millennium, it is no way of changing human nature, and in the new type of assembly, as in the old, spite, vanity, indolence, self-interest, and downright dishonesty will play their part.  But to object to a reform on that account is not a particularly effective objection.  These things will play their part, but it will be a much smaller part in the new than in the old.  It is like objecting to some projected and long-needed railway because it does not propose to carry its passengers by immediate express to heaven.

THE AMERICAN POPULATION

Sec. 1

The social conditions and social future of America constitute a system of problems quite distinct and separate from the social problems of any other part of the world.  The nearest approach to parallel conditions, and that on a far smaller and narrower scale, is found in the British colonies and in the newly settled parts of Siberia.  For while in nearly every other part of the world the population of to-day is more or less completely descended from the prehistoric population of the same region, and has developed its social order in a slow growth extending over many centuries, the American population is essentially a transplanted population, a still fluid and imperfect fusion of great fragments torn at this point or that from the gradually evolved societies of Europe.  The European social systems grow and flower upon their roots, in soil which has made them and to which they are adapted.  The American social accumulation is a various collection of cuttings thrust into a new soil and respiring a new air, so different that the question is still open to doubt, and indeed there are those who do doubt, how far these cuttings are actually striking root and living and growing, whether indeed they are destined to more than a temporary life in the new hemisphere.  I propose to discuss and weigh certain arguments for and against the belief that these ninety million people who constitute the United States of America are destined to develop into a great distinctive nation with a character and culture of its own.