Mr. Courtney made a singular mistake last week in adducing
Geneva as an example of the evil effects of uninominal voting, and, above all, in pointing his moral with the assertion that one of the consequences of the system had been the oppression of a Radical majority by a Conservative minority. It is just the other way about. Before 1842 a state of things something like that described by Mr. Courtney may have prevailed, but never, so far as we are aware, was the Canton of Geneva, or any other Swiss Canton, split up into single-Member constituencies. For more than forty years Geneva, for local electoral purposes, has been divided into colleges, to one alone of which are assigned no fewer than seventeen Deputies. The system is thus Serutin de Liste in its most aggravated form, a system under which victory inclines, not necessarily to the most numerous, but to the most united and best-disciplined party. The side that votes for the entire party list—if fighting with opponents who are divided among themselves, or cannot agree on a list—wins to a dead certainty ; and the minority, or, in easily conceivable circum- stances, the majority, is simply annihilated. At Geneva, on more than one occasion, the Conservative Opposi- tion has been represented in the Great Council by a single Member who had the good-fortune, owfng to his personal popularity, to be included in the list of both parties. With the imaginary single-Member wards of Mr. Courtney this could not have come to pass, for some of them at least—probably a good many—would have chosen Conservative Deputies ; and it would have been impossible for a Central Committee to manipulate the entire constituency. It is significant of the difficulty which people of our own country find in understanding the politics of another that, while the Journal de Geneve is astonished by Mr. Courtney's blunder in regard to Geneva, it ascribes that gentle- man's retirement from office to his disgust with the " shameful surrender " of Mr. Gladstone to the Tories, in the matter of the Redistribution Bill !
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