and allowed the laws of chance to regulate their organization. Each
elector might have been directed to put the twenty names into his hat,
and to reject the first four he pulled out. The same evil is apparent in
Boston, where twelve aldermen are elected at large, each elector being
allowed seven votes. Each party nominates seven candidates only; and the
majority invariably elects seven and the minority five.

The Limited Vote is therefore not a satisfactory solution of the problem
of representation. It gives an artificial instead of proportional
representation, and it necessitates strict party organization and
control of nominations. At the same time it will generally give a very
fair representation if parties are not strictly organized, and might
well have been adopted for the Federal Convention, five or six votes
being allowed instead of ten. Newspaper domination would thus have been
prevented.

+Election of the Candidate Most in General Favour.+--It is often
required to ascertain the candidate most in general favour where one
party only is concerned, such as an election for leader of the
Opposition or president of a club; and the methods in general use are
very defective. We do not refer to the theoretical difficulty, which
perplexes some persons, of giving effect to the actual degree of favour
in which the candidates stand in the electors' minds, but to the simple
problem of finding out who is preferred most by the bulk of the
electors. Thus it is universally recognised that when two candidates
stand the candidate who has the support of an absolute majority of the
electors is entitled to election. Yet it is possible that the rejected
candidate may be nearly twice as popular. This might happen if the
majority held that there was little to choose between the two
candidates, while the minority thought they could not be compared. But
it is quite evident that such distinctions cannot be recognized; the
candidate who is preferred by an absolute majority must be elected. It
is when there are more than two candidates that the difficulty arises.
To elect the candidate who has most first preferences is open to very
serious objection; he may have a small minority of the total votes, and
each of the other candidates might be able to beat him single-handed.

The best way to overcome the difficulty is undoubtedly by some process
of gradually eliminating the least popular candidates till the number is
reduced to two; the candid