n should be kept
secret till the general election is over:--

It surely would involve no practical difficulty to provide
that the boxes of voting papers should be sealed up by a
Government official and placed in such custody as would make
it impossible to tamper with them; and that when the last
election had been held they should be opened, the votes
counted, and the results announced.

The article on "Parliamentary Elections" proposed much more sweeping
alterations. The opening paragraph will show its general purport:--

The question, how to arrange our constituencies and conduct
our Parliamentary elections so as to make the House of
Commons, as far as possible, a true index of the state of
opinion in the nation it professes to represent, is surely
equal in importance to any that the present generation has
had to settle. And the leap in the dark, which we seem about
to take in a sudden and vast extension of the franchise,
would be robbed of half its terrors could we feel assured
that each political party will be duly represented in the
next Parliament, so that every side of a question will get a
fair hearing.

The axioms on which his scheme was based were as follows:--

(1) That each Member of Parliament should represent
approximately the same number of electors.

(2) That the minority of the two parties into which, broadly
speaking, each district may be divided, should be adequately
represented.

(3) That the waste of votes, caused by accidentally giving
one candidate more than he needs and leaving another of the
same party with less than he needs, should be, if possible,
avoided.

(4) That the process of marking a ballot-paper should be
reduced to the utmost possible simplicity, to meet the case
of voters of the very narrowest mental calibre.

(5) That the process of counting votes should be as simple
as possible.

Then came a precise proposal. I do not pause to compare it in detail
with the suggestions of Mr. Hare, Mr. Courtney, and others:--

I proceed to give a summary of rules for the method I
propose. Form districts which shall return three, four, or
more Members, in proportion to their size. Let each elector
vote for one candidate only. When the poll is closed, divide
the total number of votes by the number of Members to be
returned _plus_ one, and