were all politicians, and nearly all the names
were those of persons belonging to that small group of forty or fifty
whose faces the caricaturists of the Christmas numbers expect their
readers to recognise.

At our dinner party not much unreality was introduced by the
intellectualist assumption that the list of names were, as a Greek might
have said, the same, 'to us,' as they were 'in themselves.' But an
ordinary list of candidates' names presented to an ordinary voter is 'to
him' simply a piece of paper with black marks on it, with which he will
either do nothing or do as he is told.

The Proportional Representation Society seem to assume that a sufficient
preliminary discussion will be carried on in the newspapers, and that
not only the names and party programmes but the reasons for the
selection of a particular person as candidate and for all the items in
his programme will be known to 'the ordinary newspaper reader,' who is
assumed to be identical with the ordinary citizen. But even if one
neglects the political danger arising from the modern concentration of
newspaper property in the hands of financiers who may use their control
for frankly financial purposes, it is not true that each man now reads
or is likely to read a newspaper devoted to a single candidature or to
the propaganda of a small political group. Men read newspapers for news,
and, since the collection of news is enormously costly, nine-tenths of
the electorate read between them a small number of established papers
advocating broad party principles. These newspapers, at any rate during
a general election, only refer to those particular contests in which the
party leaders are not concerned as matters of casual information, until,
on the day of the poll, they issue general directions 'How to vote.' The
choice of candidates is left by the newspapers to the local party
organisations, and if any real knowledge of the personality of a
candidate or of the details of his programme is to be made part of the
consciousness of the ordinary voter, this must still be done by local
electioneering in each constituency, _i.e._ by meetings and canvassing
and the distribution of 'election literature.' Lord Courtney's proposal,
even if it only multiplied the size of the ordinary constituency by six,
would multiply by at least six the difficulty of effective
electioneering, and even if each candidate were prepared to spend six
times as much money at every contest, he cou