as the outcome of our electoral methods, attracted considerable
attention during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and several
legislative proposals were carried with the specific object of remedying
the evil. Indeed every electoral reform bill, beginning with that of
1832, has been accompanied with a demand or a suggestion for an
improvement in methods of election in order to secure for the House of
Commons a fully representative character. For it was clearly realized
that without some such improvement neither an extension of the franchise
nor a redistribution of seats would necessarily make the House a mirror
of the nation. These attempts to secure representation for minorities
have, however, often been confounded with the movement in favour of
proportional representation--the just representation of all parties--and
this confusion of thought may be partly due to the eloquent plea for the
representation of minorities advanced by Mill in the chapter in
_Representative Government_ devoted to the advocacy of Hare's scheme of
proportional representation. This confusion showed itself in the speech
which the Marquis of Ripon contributed to the debate[1] on the second
reading of the Municipal Representation Bill, introduced by Lord
Courtney of Penwith in 1907, for the purpose of enabling municipalities
to adopt a system of proportional representation. "It was a remarkable
thing," Lord Ripon said, "that so far as the experiments had gone they
had not succeeded, and that, he thought, should make them cautious when
looking into proposals of this kind." The experiments to which Lord
Ripon referred were legislative proposals for the representation of
minorities, and it cannot be admitted that these experiments were
failures. They did secure the representation of minorities. The
machinery provided did not enable them to do more, and an analysis of
the results of these experiments will show to what extent they succeeded
in their object, and at the same time disclose in what respects these
experiments fell short of a true electoral method.