elections in the least literate of the Irish constituencies. [Footnote:
There is a very suggestive book on this aspect of our general question,
_The Crowd_, by M. Gustave le Bon, which should interest any one
who finds this paper interesting. And the English reader who would like
a fuller treatment of this question has now available also
Ostrogorski's great work, _Democracy and the Organization of
Political Parties_.] It is not a question of accidentals, but a
question of the essential mechanism. Men have sought out and considered
all sorts of devices for qualifying the present method by polling;
Mills's plural voting for educated men will occur to the reader; Hare's
system of vote collection, and the negative voting of Doctor Grece; and
the defects of these inventions have been sufficiently obvious to
prevent even a trial. The changes have been rung upon methods of
counting; cumulative votes and the prohibition of plumping, and so on,
have been tried without any essential modification of the results.
There are various devices for introducing "stages" in the electoral
process; the constituency elects electors, who elect the rulers and
officers, for example, and there is also that futile attempt to bring
in the non-political specialist, the method of electing governing
bodies with power to "co-opt." Of course they "co-opt" their fellow
politicians, rejected candidates, and so on. Among other expedients
that people have discussed, are such as would make it necessary for a
man to take some trouble and display some foresight to get registered
as a voter or to pass an examination to that end, and such as would
confront him with a voting paper so complex, that only a very
intelligent and painstaking man would be able to fill it up without
disqualification. It certainly seems a reasonable thing to require that
the voter should be able at least to write out fully and spell
correctly the name of the man of his choice. Except for the last, there
is scarcely any of these things but its adoption would strengthen the