explanation of the representative principle. It is not merely, as more
than one speaker has pointed out, that under our existing system a
minority in the country may return a majority of the House of Commons,
but what more frequently happens, and what I am disposed to agree is
equally injurious in its results, is that you have almost always a great
disproportion in the relative size of the majority and minority in the
House of Commons as compared with their relative size in the
constituencies."

--THE RIGHT HON. H.H. ASQUITH[1]

"English writers," says Mr. Archibald E. Dobbs, in the _Irish Year
Book_, 1909, "often write as if election by a bare majority was the only
natural or possible mode of election, as if it was like day and night,
seedtime and harvest; something fixed and in the nature of things, and
not to be questioned or examined or improved." The unquestioning habit
of our minds goes even farther than Mr. Dobbs suggests. For, although
prior to the Redistribution Act of 1885, every great town in the United
Kingdom, with the exception of London, was a parliamentary unit, yet the
system of single-member constituencies made general by that Act is now
regarded by many as another essential and permanent feature of the
English parliamentary system. But if, as this chapter proposes to show,
existing electoral methods may result, and have resulted, in a complete
travesty of representation, if these methods fail in every respect to
fulfil the requirements of a satisfactory electoral system, then neither
single-member constituencies nor the majority method of election can be
permitted to stand permanently in the way of effective improvement.

_The exaggeration of majorities._