gist of this business. The difference in
effect between Proportional Representation and the old method of voting
must ultimately be to change the moral and intellectual quality of
elected persons profoundly. People are only beginning to realize the
huge possibilities of advance inherent in this change of political
method. It means no less than a revolution from "delegate democracy"
to "selective democracy."

Now, I will not pretend to be anything but a strong partizan in this
matter. When I speak of "democracy" I mean "selective democracy." I
believe that "delegate democracy" is already provably a failure in the
world, and that the reason why to-day, after three and a half years of
struggle, we are still fighting German autocracy and fighting with no
certainty of absolute victory, is because the affairs of the three great
Atlantic democracies have been largely in the hands not of selected men
but of delegated men, men of intrigue and the party machine, of dodges
rather than initiatives, second-rate men. When Lord Haldane, defending
his party for certain insufficiencies in their preparation for the
eventuality of the great war, pleaded that they had no "mandate" from
the country to do anything of the sort, he did more than commit
political suicide, he bore conclusive witness against the whole system
which had made him what he was. Neither Britain nor France in this
struggle has produced better statesmen nor better generals than the
German autocracy. The British and French Foreign Offices are old
monarchist organizations still. To this day the British and French
politicians haggle and argue with the German ministers upon petty points
and debating society advantages, smart and cunning, while the peoples
perish. The one man who has risen to the greatness of this great
occasion, the man who is, in default of any rival, rapidly becoming the
leader of the world towards peace, is neither a delegate politician nor
the choice of a monarch and his councillors. He is the one authoritative
figure in these transactions whose mind has not been subdued either by
long discipline in the party machine or by court intrigue, who has
continued his education beyond those early twenties when the mind of the
"budding politician" ceases to expand, who has thought, and thought
things out, who is an educated man among dexterous under-educated
specialists. By something very like a belated accident in the framing
of the American constitution, the P