vogue, and a rude cut of the figure published in the _Centinel_ and in
the _Salem Gazette_, with the natural history of the monster duly set
forth, served to fix the word in the political vocabulary of the
country. So efficient was the law that at the elections of 1812, 50,164
Democratic voters elected twenty-nine senators against eleven elected by
51,766 Federalists; and Essex county, which, when voting as a single
district had sent five Federalists to the Senate, was now represented in
that body by three Democrats and two Federalists." [11]

Mr. Balfour's scheme did not involve a political rearrangement of
boundaries, and the word "gerrymandering" was thus incorrectly employed
in relation to it, but so long as we retain a system of single-member
constituencies a Redistribution Bill will always invite suspicion
because of the possibilities of influencing the arrangement of
constituencies which such a measure affords. Instructions are usually
given to boundary commissioners to attach due consideration "to
community or diversity of interests, means of communication, physical
features, existing electoral boundaries, sparsity or density of
population;" [12] but although such instructions are at once reasonable
and just, they would not prevent, and indeed might be used to
facilitate, a gerrymander in the American sense of the term were such a
proceeding determined upon. It is quite conceivable that a mining
district in which one party had a very large majority might be
surrounded by an area in which the political conditions were more
balanced, but in which the opposite party had a small majority. If that
mining area was, in accordance with the wording of these instructions,
treated as one constituency because of its community of interests and
the surrounding area divided into three or more districts, the minority
would in all probability obtain a majority of seats.