Parliamentary elections, disfranchise the elector as effectually as the present system. It is the prerogative of the elector to have a voice in the choice of all his rulers, but if there are five judges, say, to be elected and no voter can vote for more than three, then, quoad the restriction, his liberty of choice is circumscribed. Yet another objection is, that as disproportionate a representation may be obtained under Minority Representation as under the existing system. It is unfair that where there are 3,000 A votes and 2,000 B, with 3 members to be elected, that the A votes should elect all; but if there are 2,000 A voters and 1,200 B voters, with two members to be elected by the cumulative vote-by which each elector will have two votes-the poll may stand: for C, 3,000 A votes; for D, 1,000 A votes; for E, 2,400 B votes, and C and E are elected, or with but a trifle over onethird of the vote, the B party obtains one-half the representation. It is inferior electorally to its opponent, but representatively of equal strength. Again, unless the majority party know its own strength and divide it out among its candidates skilfully, it may not only lose its proper share of the representation, but be actually thrown into a minority. Thus in an English school board election one candidate of the majority party was so popular as to engross almost the entire vote of that party, whereby the minority party, which more evenly distributed its votes, succeeded in electing a majority of the members. Still other objections to Minority Representation are the complexity and novelty of its schemes, and the many openings its processes present for chicanery, deceit, and fraud.

Considerable as are these objections, there are some cogent reasons in favor of Minority Representation. One of great weight is, that its adoption would bring into and keep in public life, able and powerful men who have neither the ability nor disposition to win political success in the ordinary party way. Independent men will not bargain with party directors to act this way or that in return for their election, and are, consequently, overslaughed in favor of the supple and serviceable. Scholarly men, also, are at a discount; the electors who would be happy to vote for them, and could elect them if allowed so to vote, being ordinarily so scattered about, a few in this district

and a few in that, that their support is virtually forbidden. Few men, of course, of this stamp could be chosen, even under the most unrestricted system, but the all but vital necessity of some in public life is self-apparent. One keenly logical man may set a whole deliberative assembly right about a fallacy; one cold, unimpassioned intellect, such as cannot win the plaudits of the populace, may restrain the full tide of resentment and momentary overpoise of judgment which threatens to sway a Legislature or a Congress out of its good sense and propriety; one deeply read member may adduce, just at the critical moment, a law or a precedent of the utmost importance to great interests about to be adversely resolved. Individuality is our great public need, and as the present electoral system rules all men down to the dull level of party, a breaking of the shackles by some form of Minority Representation will permit self-consciousness in public life to have its proper assertion. As to the majority ruling, it is a shrewd remark of Napoleon III., in his Life of Cesar, that " A State is often enfeebled by an exaggeration of the principles on which it is based." That the "majority must rule” is the principle, but that the minority should be unheard and unheeded is the exaggeration which enfeebles the State. Beyond the hearing which Minority Representation secures the weaker party, it affords such a division of power in the law-making body as, under our peculiar polity, is often effectual for the public good. Throughout the whole of American polity, State and Federal, there runs a quasi recognition of the minority, and a half-spoken utterance that the majority should not always under all circumstances rule. When the faith of the United States is to be pledged to a treaty, it is not a majority of the Senators which suffices: two-thirds of those present must concur. No bare majority, but a two-thirds, is competent to impeach an unfaithful public officer or override an executive veto. From the greatest requisition that three-fourths, and not one over a half, of the States must ratify in order to validate an amendment to the Constitution down to the least, that two-thirds of the village must vote "aye" on an issue of town-pump bonds, the idea of something more than a majority being wise and prudent pervades the American governmental system. With this reliance in all cases of

moment not upon the majority alone nor the minority alone, but upon the majority and the minority, does not our very system of government seem to argue in favor of proportional representation—that a mere majority party on the popular vote may not be a two-thirds party in legislative halls, and so utterly nullify the restraining influence of that opposition on which both Federal and State constitutions in arduis rebus rely?

Lastly, it may be said for Minority or Proportional Representation that it has been adopted as a rule wherever it has been tried as an experiment. The preferential vote was first ordered into use in Denmark by a royal decree, but some years afterward the Legislative Assembly of the kingdom freely adopted it from a persuasion of its excellence, and subsequently thereto the Danish constitution was amended so as to provide that "elections of members of the Landsthing shall be made according to the system of proportional representation, as regulated by law." In England the limited vote was applied to Parliamentary elections, in the three-cornered constituencies in 1868, and in 1870 a proposition to do away with that method was voted down, and the plan re-affirmed as having been vindicated in practice. In 1867, a proposition to use the cumulative vote was voted down in the House of Commons, three to one; in 1870, that same proposition was carried; and in 1871, after elections had been held under it, a motion to do away with it in future was negatived without a division. In the State of New York the limited vote was applied to the election of delegates at large to the Constitutional Convention of 1867, and of all the amendments proposed by that convention the only one ratified by the popular voice was that applying the same method of election to the choice of a Court of Appeals. In 1872, the cumulative vote was applied to the municipal elections of New York City, by a heavy vote in the Legislature; and though the measure was vetoed by the Governor, that defeat must be charged to other considerations than hostility to Proportional Representation, his Excellency having in his annual messages of 1869 and 1872 urged that kind of representation as desirable. In Pennsylvania the cumulative vote was first applied to the Bloomsburg town elections, thence to all town elections throughout the State; and lastly Minority

Representation by another method, the limited vote, was provided for by law in the election of a convention to revise the State Constitution. Results like these-for we will not here speak of the adoption of the cumulative vote in Illinois, West Virginia, Norh Carolina, and Utah, the municipal election in Wilmington, May 6, 1872, being the only instance of a practical operation of any of these methods outside of those which have been menioned-seem to indicate that Proportional Representation has been found to stand actual wear and tear, and beyond doubt it is the tendency of the times in the United States and in Europe to give it a yet more extended trial. Should the final verdict be favorable, the second great step in the history of popular government will have been taken. The first was the substitution of a sedate council of ten representatives for a law-debating mob of a thousand citizens gathered hap-hazard in the market-place; and the second is, that behind every one of the ten councilmen shall stand one-tenth of the people.

APPENDIX.

GOVERNOR HOFFMAN'S VETO OF THE CUMULATIVE VOTE.

EXECUTIVE CHAMBER, ALBANY, April 30, 1872.

To the Assembly: I return, without approval, Assembly bill No. 118, entitled "An act to reorganize the local government of the City of New York."

The bill provides a new charter for the City of New York, the main features of which are these: One Board of 45 Aldermen, elected, nine in each Senate District, by a novel method called the cumulative vote, under which one man may vote nine times for one candidate, and whereby a minority can elect its candidate or candidates against the will of the majority in the district; this Board of Aldermen to appoint [by the same vote] four out of the five heads which are given to each of the administrative departments.

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The remedy which is relied on against the evils of misgovernment under this charter, is the cumulative system of voting, which it introduces in order to secure fuller representation of the minority. It is claimed that this will result not only in a better class of representatives, but in greater power, on the part of the minority, to restrain the majority. Nine Aldermen are to be elected in each district, and every elector is authorized, instead of voting once for each of nine candidates, to cast, if he chooses so to do, nine votes for any one candidate, or to cast three votes each for any three candidates, and so on. This plan seeks to let the party which is in a minority in any political subdivision put into office its candidate, in spite of the opposition of the political majority. Experiments are now being tried in one or two of the other States, of this cumulative method of voting as to some of their local elections; but these have been inaugurated so recently that they afford us no guide to sound judgment derived from actual practice and experience. It is proposed by this bill, that we shall try the experiment in the chief city of the continent, with its vast and complicated interests exposed to great injury if this new theory prove to be a failure. A city of 1,000,000 inhabitants is not the place for trying experiments in government, especially an experiment which many of the most thoughtful of our people believe to be visionary, impracticable, and unconstitutional. It would be much wiser for us to await the results of the trials now going on elsewhere. This would not be the first time that a scheme to allow the minority to put men into office, in spite of the opposition of the majority, has been tried in this State. For many years the Board of Supervisors in New York was elected upon this principle. In that instance the minority were allowed, practically, to choose just half the Board. This experiment, warmly and earnestly advocated at its introduction as a valuable improvement, resulted, as all admit now, in a