It seems strange now that this scheme should have received serious consideration.  Mr. Hare was so much under the spell of the apparent justice of the underlying principle that he was blind to its results.  But it was soon perceived that the electors would not group themselves as Mr. Hare supposed; that the personal ideal of every class of electors would be simply men of their own class.  It was further pointed out that cranks and faddists and every organization founded on questions of the remotest interest would combine to secure representation.  Mr. Disraeli declared it to be “opposed to every sound principle, its direct effect being to create a stagnant representation ... an admirable scheme for bringing crotchety men into the House.”  Mr. Shaw-Lefevre condemned it as “a vicious principle based upon a theory of classes,” and Mr. Gladstone said that it regarded electors “not as rational and thinking beings, but merely as the equivalents of one another.”  Walter Bagehot, in his standard work on the “English Constitution,” opposes the principle of voluntary constituencies, because it would promote a constituency-making trade.  “But upon the plan suggested,” he writes, “the House would be made up of party politicians selected by a party committee, chained to that committee, and pledged to party violence, and of characteristic, and therefore unmoderate, representatives for every ‘ism’ in all England.  Instead of a deliberate assembly of moderate and judicious men, we should have a various compound of all sorts of violence.  I may seem to be drawing a caricature, but I have not reached the worst.  Bad as these members would be if they were left to themselves—­if in a free Parliament they were confronted with the perils of government, close responsibility might improve them, and make them tolerable.  But they would not be left to themselves.  A voluntary constituency will nearly always be a despotic constituency.”

The practical difficulties in the application of Mr. Hare’s scheme are almost insuperable, but it is not worth while pursuing the subject, since it is now admitted by recent advocates that the faddist argument is fatal.  This is an admission that Mr. Hare completely neglected the factor of human nature.  Professor Nanson writes:—­“Hare proposed that there should be only one electorate, consisting of the whole State.  It is unfortunate that this proposal was made.  There can be no doubt that it has retarded the progress of true electoral reform for at least a generation ... it would inevitably lead to the election of a certain number of faddists.”

+John Stuart Mill.+—­The great vogue which the Hare system has obtained is to be traced more to the influence of John Stuart Mill than to that of anyone else.  Mill was captivated by the apparent justice of the proposal, and devoted a chapter of his “Representative Government” to it, wherein he declared:—­“Mr. Hare’s scheme has the almost unparalleled merit of carrying out a great principle of government in a manner approaching