The Press Tuesday, May 21, 1929 Proportional Representation.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19624, 21 May 1929, Page 8

The Press Tuesday, May 21, 1929 Proportional Representation.

Our readers will not be pleased with either Mr McCombs or The Press if the discussion on P.R. is much prolonged. There are some observations, however, which may be made upon what seems to be Mr McCombs's final communication, which we print to-day. It i 3 perfectly true that in a very brief sub-leader—three inches of perfunctory regret —the London Times did say what our correspondent quotes; but it is equally true that The Times has never made any attempt to disjcuss the argument* for and against that method of voting which it was " disposed to " think " eleven years ago would come quite soon, but which has no chance whatever of being adopted. In 191S most people knew as little as The limes did about P.R.; the public and the newspapers were in much the same case as the New Zealand public was regarding the Second Ballot when that truly evil system of election was hustled through Parliament over twenty years ago. Since 191S P.R. has had so much attention paid to it that its weaknesses are now so well understood that no sober or cautious State would care to have it. Its cardinal weakness is this: that even if we concede that it is a good thing to have a Parliament which is such a perfect ''mirror" as to give representation to every group and minority, the advocates of P.R. dare not ask for its full logical application. The theory of P.R. requires that the whole nation shall be one constituency, but the advocates of P.R. ask for the division of the country into an arbitrary number of constituencies. Mill, whose fine essay on " Representa- " tive Government" is quoted by Mr McCombs, was writing over sixty years ago, at a time when electoral reform and a reformed franchise were more urgently necessary than the people of to-day can imagine. A reformer in the middle of the last century might have been excused for going to very great lengths, for going very far beyond logic and reason, in pushing any kind of reform. But Mill, as Mr McCombs seems not to have noticed, kept so close a hold upon logic that he saw that the best and most rational part of Hare's plan was the liberty of a voter in Somerset to vote for a candi- < date in Edinburgh. Mill, that is to say, knew that such virtue as might reside in Hare's plan lay in the making the Kingdom a constituency, although Mill was a little bothered —clear thinker though he was—about the need for local representation. The present-day advocates of P.R. either do not realise that the theory of P.R. requires a mechanism that cannot work or else they evade the point. One of the main objections to P.R. is that it fosters, and makes its chief claim the fact that it fosters, the multiplication of groups; and a Parliament consisting of sectional groups seems to us to be obviously the kind of Parliament that the country would be better without. In conclusion we may remark that the only signal authority quoted by Mr McCombs is J. S. Mill, whose argument, as we have pointed out, Mr McCombs has not followed with close attention. Now, this very essay on " Representative Government" on which the member for Lyttelton relies abounds in much more closely reasoned indictments of half a dozen of the pet doctrines of the modern Radical: — payment of members of Parliament, the extension of the functions of the State, single-Chamber government, the delegation theory of representation, representation without taxation, etc. Can Mill have been wrong on every point except one?