tortoise? No answer is audible in the business sections of our cities, in the schoolrooms or in the colleges. The church's answer is derided or ignored by a large fraction of us. But it is the right one; and we shall learn to listen to it or pay the penalty. Government does not rest ultimately on the consent of the governed, but on their conformity to the will of the World-Spirit who makes and unmakes civilizations.

Success in industry, in art, or in love is saved from bitterness and disappointment because we regard our achievements far more symbolically than we know, and rest far more than we are aware upon the backing of God.

Assuming that in everyone there is an infinite and restless desire to get into the life of the World, -to share any and all life that is hot and urgent or cool and clear, we can tackle this infinite task in two ways:

By trying to understand the universe in the samples of it which come into our ken and to draw from these bits a knowledge which typifies and represents the whole. That is science.

By trying to serve. Service is one of the ways by which a tiny insect like one of us can get a purchase on the whole universe. If he finds the job where he can be of use, he is hitched to the star of the world, and moves with it.

VOL. 112 - NO.5

So long as space, in contradiction to Kant, asserted its substantial reality by holding men apart, social relations were limited narrowly, and the process of their orderly organization was very slow. In this matter our age has experienced the most marvelous of the great changes of circumstance that have occurred in the life of mankind. We have seen space become so collapsible, as we may say, in the hands of the engineer and the electrician, and so feeble an obstruction to human intercourse, that it is hardly, any longer, in the reckoning of difficulties to any social undertaking, however big. As a consequence, the organizing of human relations, in every possible articulation of common interests or reciprocal services, is now the busiest and most important work of our time. Everywhere, on an always expanding scale, people are giving the organic corporate structure to everything they do: to their industries, their commerce, their works of education, their pursuits of science, their entertainments, and equally to their iniquities and their reforms.

In other words, society is being organized with remarkable completeness in a disjunctive way; while integrally, in its wholeness, it has no more organization than it had a hundred years ago. Its organizable wholeness is, of course, only that of its political incorporation, through which runs the single thread of social relationship that ties each to every other of the individuals who inhabit given sections of the earth. In this relationship the social

organization of mankind is showing nowhere a distinct advance. To us, whose political incorporation is that of a representative democracy, undertaking entire self-government, this unorganized condition is a serious fact; and the more serious because the process of disjunctive organization has been applied to it with alarmingly disjunctive results. Its members, so far as they will submit to it, are organized to mechanical perfection as political partisans; but as constituents of the sovereign democracy, the basic social body, they have no organization, and seem generally unconscious of their need to have any.

The needed organization for democracy in its wholeness is one that shall be inclusive of everything requisite for party organization, carrying in itself such forms, agencies and processes as will offer free and ready service to all assortments and combinations of differing political opinion, equipping them with equal opportunity to contest the ordering of public affairs. A true democracy is impossible without the fluency of popular action in politics which these conditions would secure, and which can be lost under despotic parties as well as under despotic kings.

Primarily, the needed organization must be based on a representation of the people in their government by a truer assorting of them than is possible to our present method, which takes them as they are grouped by the mere accident of their residence together within given districts of ground. Of

course it is impossible to devise a system of selection (nomination) and election which would give exactly correct weight to agreements and disagreements of choice, and make every functionary of government a strictly true representative of his constituency; but it cannot be impossible for an intelligent, ingenious, resourceful democracy to achieve something nearer to that result than has been thus far realized. It has never even attempted to make opinion the basis of its political representation. It has never tried to form constituencies for representation by an assortment of voters according to what they most strongly desire their government to do. It contents itself with bunching them in districts of territory, as they happen to be living together, and thus representing, not the voters and their opinions and wishes, but certain areas of house-lots and farms, within each of which whatever happens to be the uppermost disposition of mind, as expressed at the polls by any majority whatsoever, shall be taken for an expression of opinion and will from the community entire.

In all cases this annuls some large part of the votes cast; in most cases nearly half of them; in many cases more than half (when pluralities instead of majorities prevail); extinguishing completely the public opinion and will expressed in these minorities of votes, and carrying into government a delegation of authority and a dictation of policy which rarely come from any large proportion of the governed. When we bring our political beliefs and desires to the polls of such an election, the best we can do is to pick out one or two, on which we may possibly combine votes with enough of our accidental neighbors to secure some chance of accomplishing an election, with some hope that the chosen representative of our patch of ground may coinciden

tally represent our individual selves in some fractional way. It seems farcical to call this a system of government representative of the people.

Naturally, in such circumstances, we have drifted into the two-party division of the mass of voters in our districted constituencies; and just as naturally those make-shift parties are steadily losing their last remnants of meaning and purpose as organs of popular opinion and will. A few people among us- prohibitionists, populists, socialists are sufficiently earnest in particular aims to throw away their votes on hopeless candidatures, rather than contribute to a misrepresentation of what they care for most. In this there is a fidelity to democratic principle which claims high respect, and which ought to have the encouragement and the cultivation that a reality of representation would give it.

If the best were made of the geographical formation of representative constituencies it would still be farcical in its pretension to organize self-government by the governed. But the best is never made of it, and never can be, for the reason that, in the working of our two-party politics, one or the other party will always have power to gerrymander the carving of districts, for the wasting of its opponent's votes, and will never fail to employ that fraud. I doubt if an instance to the contrary can be found in any districting of constituencies, for city, county, state, or national elections, within these United States. Examples of the gerrymander and its juggling are everywhere. I take the one that lies readiest to my hand, in the ward elections of 1911 in my own city. The city is divided into twentyseven wards, of a carefully calculated eccentricity in their shapes. It had one alderman to elect in each. Regular nominations were made on each side of our ridiculous two-party division; a

few independent candidacies were undertaken; some scattering and some blank votes were cast; and the whole aldermanic vote in the city was 70,611.

By majorities or pluralities the nominees of one party were elected in seventeen wards, where that party polled 26,993 votes, against 20,772 in opposition. The other party was successful in ten wards by an aggregate vote of 11,729, against 11,700. The number, in all wards, of votes cast successfully, -cast, that is, for candidates who were elected, was 38,722. The total number of unsuccessful votes was 31,889. The party which carried ten wards (which was the party that had planned the ward divisions, to its own advantage) secured its representation in the board of aldermen by an average of 1173 votes in each ward. The other party suffered a wasteful expenditure of 1588 votes in the average of its seventeen wards. If the twenty-seven elected aldermen had represented equal constituencies of voters, the 38,722 votes which elected the entire twentyseven should have elected only fifteen, and the 31,889 votes which elected none, and had no voice in the city government, should have sent twelve representatives to the board.

This is a fair, common example of the working of the system under which we try to persuade ourselves that we are operating a government representative of the governed. To state the facts is enough to show how crude, how rudely fashioned a piece of social mechanism it is; how well designed to become the ready instrument of self-seeking and intrigue in politics; how very far from realizing any rational conception of a representatively self-governed democracy. The bare facts, too, show plainly that the evils which infest our politics are mostly inseparable from the practice of representing in government, not sections of public opinion, but sections

of a map. It is the difficulty of making any other than the coarsest assorting of our oppositions in political opinion, within these hard-and-fast boundaries of residence, that has driven us into our two-party organization, with its utter misfit as to all questions of local government; with its machine-like structure and working; with its wide opportunities for turning public service to personal profit, -its open temptations to corruption, its emptiness of any inspiration of political ideals.

In the primitive evolution of representative government a districted election of representatives was fallen into inevitably, because it was the simplest, easiest mode, and because it was naturally satisfying to peoples who had had no voice in government before. Habit then fixed it in use, and it was justified, perhaps, so long as restricted means of communication limited all kinds of combination to narrow neighborhoods. But that justification exists no longer. To-day, for every purpose of social cooperation, the areas of neighborhood are stretched less by a hundred miles of distance than they were by ten miles a generation or two ago.

In my belief we have nothing now but habit to hinder us from organizing undistricted constituencies of agreeing opinion, and giving them a representation in government that will be uncontested and complete. As I hope to show, it is a rearrangement of representation which need not be undertaken sweepingly, at once, in a revolutionary way, but which can be tried here and there, now and then, side by side with the existing system, beginning naturally in the fields of local government, city and county, and extended later into the larger fields of state and national politics, or abandoned, according to the satisfaction or otherwise that it gives. If it should carry the will of the people into government with more directness

and better effect than the districted method, the old political parties might be constrained to adjust their own organization to it, with advantage to their character and usefulness; but no legitimate function of theirs would be menaced in the slightest degree.

Already, it seems, there are younger communities than ours, Pretoria and Johannesburg, in South Africa, for example, in which an assorting of voters in constituencies of agreeing opinion has been accomplished with success. This is done in connection with a method of preferential voting, under a law which confers election on any candidate who receives a prescribed number of votes. The preferential voting involves some complexity which may not be serious, but which I think it possible to avoid.

As I have the thought of such undistricted constituencies, they involve no change in our present mode of preparing or polling votes. The ballot may be unaltered; the same election districts may be maintained—each citizen voting in the district of his residence, as now. The change of effect in the voting would come primarily from a more systematic registration of voters, a complete and exact enrollment, -such as all communities need for other than political purposes, and the lack of which is a fundamental crudity of our social organization.

With such a registration established and maintained, I can see no slightest impracticability in the idea of forming constituencies of people who are most nearly in agreement on the measures and policies to be dealt with by the representative whom they elect. The formation of such constituencies, according to my conception of them, would start naturally and easily from the gathering of what may be called electoral groups, made up of kindred-minded people, resident in the same election district. Let some state, in its election

laws, simply permit any number of voters in any election district to form such a group, and to associate themselves with other electoral groups of like-minded voters in other election districts, to such an extent as will make up some prescribed number of voters, sufficient for the constituency of a representative in their city board of aldermen, or their county board of supervisors, or either branch of their state legislature, or in the national Congress. If action is taken on such permission, let the law provide that the electoral groups formed in election districts, and the constituencies made up by their association, shall be officially numbered and recorded, and that the registration of citizens in each community shall cover full particulars concerning them. That is, the register of a citizen must record the electoral group, if any, to which he has attached himself, and the register of a group must record its membership and the constituency or constituencies of which it forms part.

The only needful innovation in procedure on election day would seem to be in the marking, counting, and reporting of votes. Each vote cast by a voter registered as belonging to an electoral group would bear the number of the group, and the count and return of votes would be required to show the number to the credit of the several groups so designated. If the groups united in a given constituency were shown by the returns to have polled a number of votes which satisfied the requirement from such constituency, and if the same person had been named by all or by a majority, that constituency would have elected its representative. This is all that I can see of complication that would be added to the present process, and it is too slight to have weight for a moment against the reality of representation in government that would be brought about.