a matter for speculation whether my member is arguing that a caucus can rig an election carried on under the Proportional Representation system or that it cannot.  At the first blush it seems to read as if he intended the former.  But be careful!  Did he?  Let me suggest that in that last sentence he really expresses the opinion that it cannot.  It can be read either way.  Electors under modern conditions are not going to obey the “orders” of even the “most drastic caucus”—­whatever a “drastic caucus” may be.  Why should they?  In the Birmingham instance it was only a section of the majority, voting by wards, in an election on purely party lines, which “obeyed” in order to keep out the minority party candidate.  I think myself that my member’s mind waggled.  Perhaps his real thoughts shone out through an argument not intended to betray them.  What he did say as much as he said anything was that under Proportional Representation, elections are going to be very troublesome and difficult for party candidates.  If that was his intention, then, after all, I forgive him much.  I think that and more than that.  I think that they are going to make party candidates who are merely party candidates impossible.  That is exactly what we reformers are after.  Then I shall get a representative more to my taste than Mr. Burdett Coutts.

But let me turn now to the views of other people’s representatives.

Perhaps the most damning thing ever said against the present system, damning because of its empty absurdity, was uttered by Sir Thomas Whittaker.  He was making the usual exaggerations of the supposed difficulties of the method.  He said English people didn’t like such “complications.”  They like a “straight fight between two men.”  Think of it!  A straight fight!  For more than a quarter-century I have been a voter, usually with votes in two or three constituencies, and never in all that long political life have I seen a single straight fight in an election, but only the dismallest sham fights it is possible to conceive.  Thrice only in all that time have I cast a vote for a man whom I respected.  On all other occasions the election that mocked my citizenship was either an arranged walk-over for one party or the other, or I had a choice between two unknown persons, mysteriously selected as candidates by obscure busy people with local interests in the constituency.  Every intelligent person knows that this is the usual experience of a free and independent voter in England.  The “fight” of an ordinary Parliamentary election in England is about as “straight” as the business of a thimble rigger.