ld not multiply by six the
range of his voice or the number of meetings which he could address in a
day.

These considerations were brought home to me by my experience of the
nearest approximation to Proportional Representation which has ever been
actually adopted in England. In 1870 Lord Frederick Cavendish induced
the House of Commons to adopt 'plural voting' for School Board
elections. I fought in three London School Board elections as a
candidate and in two others as a political worker. In London the legal
arrangement was that each voter in eleven large districts should be
given about five or six votes, and that the same number of seats should
be assigned to the district. In the provinces a town or parish was given
a number of seats from five to fifteen. The voter might 'plump' all his
votes on one candidate or might distribute them as he liked among any of
them.

This left the local organisers both in London and the country with two
alternatives. They might form the list of party candidates in each
district into a recognisable entity like the American 'ticket' and urge
all voters to vote, on party lines, for the Liberal or Conservative
'eight' or 'five' or 'three.' If they did this they were saved the
trouble involved in any serious attempt to instruct voters as to the
individual personalities of the members of the list. Or they might
practically repeal the plural voting law, split up the constituency by a
voluntary arrangement into single member sections, and spend the weeks
of the election in making one candidate for each party known in each
section. The first method was generally adopted in the provinces, and
had all the good and bad effects from a party point of view of the
French _scrutin de liste_. The second method was adopted in London, and
perhaps tended to make the London elections turn more than they
otherwise would have done upon the qualities of individual candidates.
Whichever system was adopted by the party leaders was acted upon by
practically all the voters, with the exception of the well-organised
Roman Catholics, who voted for a Church and not a person, and of those
who plumped for representatives of the special interests of the teachers
or school-keepers.

If Lord Courtney's proposal is adopted for parliamentary elections, it
is the 'ticket' system which, owing to the intensity of party feeling,
will be generally used. Each voter will bring into the polling booth a
printed copy of the ballot