Let it be imagined that at the next general election in England, the decision is to be arrived at by a direct vote of the country as a whole for a Conservative or a Liberal Prime Minister. Instead of each County and borough electing its members of Parliament (they will do that only incidentally) the real struggle will take the form of a direct contest between two men. Each of the great parties will choose its own candidate, and the Conservatives have already nominated Mr. Balfour. It remains for the Liberals to name their man who is to run against Mr. Balfour. The selection is to be made in a National Convention, to be held in Manchester, at which each County will be represented by a number of delegates proportioned to its population. Those delegates have already been elected in each County by local meetings within the Counties themselves, and in nearly every case the delegations so elected will come into the Convention Hall at Manchester prepared to vote and act as a unit. Whether that has been arrived at by choice of the individual Counties when they elected their delegations or whether the Convention itself has decided the matter by adopting the "unit rule" does not matter. The fact is that each county will be compelled to vote in a body, _i. e._, that if London has forty votes and Kent twenty, those forty votes or those twenty will have to be cast solidly for some one man. They cannot be split into thirty votes for one man and ten for another; or into fifteen for one man and one each for five other men. The Convention meets and it is plain from the first that the two strongest candidates are Lord Rosebery and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. There are scattering votes for Mr. Morley and Mr. Asquith, each of them getting the vote of one or more small Counties. But after the first ballot, which is always more or less preliminary, it is apparent that neither of those gentlemen can hope to be chosen, so the Counties which voted for them, having expressed their preference, proceed on the next ballot to give their suffrages either to Lord Rosebery or to Sir Henry. The second ballot is completed. Every County has voted, with the result that (out of a total vote of 521, of which 261 are necessary for a choice) there are 248 votes for Lord Rosebery and 253 for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. But there is still one County which has not voted for either. Kent at both ballots has cast its twenty votes for Mr. Will Crooks. The reason why Kent does this is because the representatives from Woolwich and the neighbourhood are a numerical majority of the Kent delegation and those men are devoted to Mr. Crooks.