ot papers which had
the most preferences expressed should be transferred; still a good deal
was left to chance or to the sweet will of the returning officer, and
this has always been admitted as a serious objection. The process of
elimination is still more unsatisfactory. Mr. Hare was from the first
strongly opposed to the elimination of the candidate who had least first
preferences, and he therefore proposed that, in order to decide which
candidate had least support, all expressed preferences should be
counted. This involved such enormous complication that in the 1861
edition of his work he abandoned the process of elimination altogether
in favour of a process of selection. He then proposed to distribute
surplus votes only, and to elect the highest of the remainder,
regardless of the fact that they had less than a quota. He then
wrote:--"The reduction of the number of candidates remaining at this
stage of the election may be effected by taking out the names of all
those who have the smallest number of actual votes--that is, who are
named at the _head_ of the smallest number of voting papers, and
appropriating each vote to the candidate standing _next_ in order on
each paper. This process would be so arbitrary and inequitable in its
operation as to be intolerable. It might have the effect of cancelling
step by step more votes given to one candidate than would be sufficient
to return another.... Such a process disregards the legitimate rights
both of electors and of candidates." But the process of selection was
not proportional representation at all, being practically equivalent to
a single untransferable vote, and Mr. Hare finally adopted, in spite of
its defects, the "arbitrary and inequitable" process of elimination in
his last edition in 1873. And all his recent disciples have been forced
to do the same, because nothing better is known.

Mr. Hare's scheme has ceased to be of any practical interest, since it
is now generally admitted that electorates should not return more than
ten or twenty members. Moreover, it is admitted that the electors would
group themselves in very undesirable ways, and not as Mr. Hare expected.
And yet the only effect of limiting the size of the electorates is to
reduce the number of undesirable ways in which electors might group
themselves. Let us briefly note the different proposals which have been
made.

+1. Sir John Lubbock's Method.+--In his work on "Representation," Sir
John Lubbock s