_ The modern gerrymander_

The new constituencies required by the South Africa Act of 1909 have
been arranged with the utmost care,[13] but had the delegates to the
South African National Convention adhered to their original proposal to
abandon single-member constituencies, they would have secured for South
Africa, among other invaluable benefits, complete security from the
gerrymander, any possibility of which begets suspicion and reacts in a
disastrous way upon political warfare. The gerrymander is nothing more
or less than a fraudulent practice. But the United States is not the
only country in which such practices take place. Their counter-part in
Canada was described by Sir John Macdonald as "hiving the grits," and
even in England, without any change of boundaries, practices have arisen
within the last few years which have had their birth in the same motives
that produced the American gerrymander. In boroughs which are divided
into more than one constituency there is a considerable number of voters
who have qualifications in more than one division. A man may vote in any
division in which he has a qualification, but in not more than one. He
may make his choice. In Edinburgh for many years, on both sides of
politics, there has been a constant transfer of voters from one register
to another in the hopes of strengthening the party's position in one or
other division. It was even alleged that the precise moment of a vacancy
in West Edinburgh (May 1909) was determined by the desire to ascertain
the strength of the Unionist party in that division, to discover how
many Unionist votes should be transferred for the purpose of improving
Unionist prospects or of defeating the designs of their opponents. This
allegation may be wholly unfounded, but the single-member system
encourages such a proceeding, and the statement at least indicates how
the voting power of a division may be manipulated. The mere possibility
of such an action arouses the suspicion that it has taken place. Similar