Under these circumstances anything may happen. Exaggerated estimates of the effect of the tariff upon food prices will be used to scare the struggling voter, and particularly the women, against Protection, and--as the Labour Party has no Press worth talking about--tremendous lies will be told about the Capital Levy. It will be represented as a raid upon the savings bank deposits of the servant girl and the children’s money-boxes, although as a matter of fact it is not to touch any fortune under five thousand pounds, and only begins to press heavily upon twenty thousand and upward. The Labour leaders, being for the most part respectable but inaudible men, will never get that over to the public in time. And in the ensuing panic and scrimmage it is quite possible that that extraordinary old omnibus, the Liberal Party, with Mr. Asquith the elder statesman, Mr. Churchill the junker, Mr. Lloyd George the rather world-stained democrat, Sir John Simon, Mr. Asquith’s once prospective successor, and a miscellany of other people, pledged really to no more than the negative policy of no Protection and no Capital Levy, will make quite a respectable run and get quite a large proportion of its four hundred odd passengers into Westminster. And what they will do there Heaven knows. Possibly fight among themselves, and have another dissolution. Meanwhile, as the struggle for the wheel goes on, the British ship of state will drift through the winter as it has drifted through the autumn, and M. Poincaré will continue to do what he likes with Europe. Now this is really too preposterous a way of running the affairs of a great people. It is bound to end in some great disaster. These spasmodic appeals to the country whenever a Prime Minister gets frightened by the aspect of the skies or whenever a quarrelsome group has to be reunited somehow, produce a terrible vacillation and ineffectiveness in the national conduct. It is time Great Britain came up to date with a triennial or quadrennial election of the Legislature, after the American and French fashion, and then stayed _put_. And it is time, too, that Great Britain went beyond, and gave a lead to America and most of the world by abandoning the present method of voting with a single vote in a limited constituency, which absolutely destroys any real choice of representation by the common man. The only civilised method of democracy is Proportional Representation; in large constituencies returning many members there is no other method which gives the individual voter a reasonable opportunity of expressing his real preference. It is the right way, and all other ways are wrong and bad. This present election in Great Britain is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the current system. In the seething mass of British opinion there are: Out-and-out Protectionists hostile to Russia and France. Ditto friendly to Russia but hostile to France. Ditto hostile to Russia but abject to France.