Although there is no urgent demand for a closer approach to manhood suffrage, there has long been a strong desire to restrict each man to a single vote. That a man should have a vote in two different constituencies is as clearly a breach of political equality as if he had two votes in the same place; and for this reason, as well as from the fact that most of the men who have more than one vote are Conservatives, a demand for the abolition of plural voting has been for many years an article in the Liberal programme. So far as the franchise is not dependent upon residence there is nothing to prevent a man from voting in every constituency where he possesses a qualification.[214:1] Now for the counties and the universities residence is not necessary; and even in the boroughs, where it is required, plural voting is restrained only in part, because a man may have more than one residence, and because residence within seven miles of the borough is enough, so that the men who carry on their business in the town and live in the suburbs are qualified in the borough by reason of their offices or workshops, and in a suburban borough or the county by reason of their dwellings. It is not easy to determine how many persons are entitled to vote in more than one constituency, or how much they affect the result of elections. In a return of resident and non-resident voters made to Parliament in 1888,[214:2] it appeared, as was natural, that the proportion of the latter was greatest among the freeholders in the counties, nearly one quarter of whom were non-residents. In all there were about two hundred thousand non-resident voters in England and Wales. This is between four and five per cent. of the total electorate, which does not seem an important fraction; but it fails to express the full effect of plural voting, because it does not include the persons who have more than one residence, or who live outside the limits of a borough but within seven miles of it, or those again who reside in a borough that forms part of a county and are qualified to vote in both. Moreover, the men with more than one vote, although a small proportion of the whole electorate of the kingdom, are quite numerous enough to turn the scale in a close constituency. One of the first acts of the new Liberal ministry in the session of 1906, was to bring in a bill to abolish plural voting altogether. This could not be done simply by making residence a condition of the franchise, because in England a man may have more than one residence. The measure provided, therefore, that the voter must elect in which of the places where he possessed a qualification he would be registered, and forbade him to vote anywhere else. The bill was passed by the House of Commons, but rejected forthwith by the Lords. [Sidenote: Number of Electors by Classes.] It is interesting to observe the number of voters registered under the different franchises. In 1906 the figures for the United Kingdom were as follows:--