OPPORTUNISM AND THE BALLOT

Evening Post, Volume CII, Issue 40, 16 August 1921, Page 6

OPPORTUNISM AND THE BALLOT

The opinion of the people, as ascertained by secret ballot, is at best the opinion of the people at the time'. 1 at which the ballot was taken. Sometimes public opinion flows and ebbs in waves, and it is never absolutely certain that the ballot-verdict of one month will be the ballot-verdict of the next. In order to make public opinion func\tion and register as accurately aB possible, politicians have devised a host of expedients, from the secret ballot down to the widest forms of .adult" suffrage, including one-adult-one-vote and one-vote-one-value, the latter principle being pursued to the last fraction in proportional voting. But no improvements in the franchise and in the registering machinery can remove the inherent difficulties of masspsychology, the.. movements of which may be politically exploited by the shrewd timing of a ballot;box appeal. In this category is placed the " khaki election " (Mr. Chamberlan's Boer War coup), and British Independent Liberals bracket .with it the 1 last United Kingdom election, by which Mr. Lloyd George won a huge majority for the Unionist-Liberal Coalition. The question is revived by the report that. Mr. Lloyd George may not attend the Washington Disarmament Conference—a report which, whether true or false, promptly gave rise to a suspicion that the adroit Welshman planned an autumn to the electors. In >the days of the oldest and most crusted aristocracies, the success of a courtier depended in large measure on the time and the "method selected for the pressing of his suit; and it is even so to-day. The mind of the mass, like the mind of the King, is plastic to the psychologist.