Proportional Representation | Page 8

double function of affording an adequate basis of support to the Government which springs from it, and of legislating in accordance with the nation's wishes, the resultant dissatisfaction and instability must give rise to a demand for their improvement. The House of Commons must re-establish itself upon surer foundations.
_Strengthening the foundations of the House of Commons._
Each change in the constitution of the House of Commons--and its foundations have been strengthened on more than one occasion--has been preceded by a recognition of its failure to meet in full the requirements of a representative chamber. Large changes have again and again been made in consequence of such recognition since the day when Burke alleged that its virtue lay in its being "the express image of the nation." At the close of the eighteenth century, when these words were spoken, it could be alleged with apparent truth that 306 members were virtually returned by the influence of 160 persons.[7] The consciousness that such a House could not be the express image of the nation produced the Reform Bill of 1832, and a further recognition that a still larger number of the governed must be associated with the Government, produced the further changes of 1867 and of 1884, embodied in measures significantly called Acts for the Representation of the People. These changes, by conferring the franchise upon an ever-widening circle of citizens, have, from one point of view, rendered the House of Commons more fully representative of the nation at large. But even whilst the process of extending the franchise was still in operation, it was recognized that such extensions were not in themselves sufficient to create a House of Commons that could claim to be a true expression of the national will. The test of a true system of representation, laid down by Mill in Representative Government, has never been successfully challenged. It still remains the last word upon the subject, and, until the House of Commons satisfies that test with reasonable approximation, it will always be open to the charge that it is not fully representative, and that in consequence its decisions lack the necessary authority. "In a really equal democracy," runs the oft-quoted phrase, "any and every section would be represented, not disproportionately, but proportionately. A majority of the electors would always have a majority of the representatives; but a minority of electors would always have a minority of the representatives. Man for man, they would be as fully represented as the majority." [8]
Mill's philosophy finds but little favour in many quarters of political activity to-day, and the rejection of his philosophy has induced many to regard his views on representative government as of little value. Even so staunch an admirer as Lord Morley of Blackburn has underestimated the importance of Mill's declaration, for, in a recent appreciation of the philosopher[9] he declared that Mill "was less successful in dealing with parliamentary machinery than in the infinitely more important task of moulding and elevating popular character, motives, ideals, and steady respect for truth, equity and common sense--things that matter a vast deal more than machinery." Yet Lord Morley, in his attempt to make a beginning with representative institutions in India, found that questions of electoral machinery were of the first importance; that they, indeed, constituted his chief difficulty; and he was compelled in adjusting the respective claims of Hindus and Muhammadans to have recourse to Mill's famous principle--the due representation of minorities. Mill, as subsequent chapters will show, understood what Lord Morley seems to have insufficiently recognized, that the development or repression of growth in popular character, motives and ideals, nay, the successful working of representative institutions themselves, depends in a very considerable degree upon electoral machinery. Its importance increases with every fresh assertion of democratic principles, and the constitutional issues raised during the Parliaments of 1906, 1910, and 1911 must involve a revision of our electoral methods before a complete solution is attained. The demand on the part of the House of Commons for complete sovereignty must evoke a counter demand that that House shall make itself fully representative.
_The rise of a new party._
But the relations which should subsist between the two Houses of Parliament, whether the upper House is reformed or not, is not the only question which is giving rise to a closer examination of the foundations of the House of Commons. To this external difficulty there must be added the internal, and in the future a more pressing, problem created by the rise of a new organized party within the House of Commons itself. The successive extensions of the franchise have given birth to new political forces which are not content to give expression to their views along the old channels of the two historic parties, and the growth of the Labour Party must accelerate the demand