Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 152, April 25, 1917

Excerpt

A PROPER PROPORTION.

(An Interview with Mr. H.G. WELLS).

I found the Sage, as I had expected, in his study at Omniscience Lodge. There he sat in his new suit of Britlings, surrounded by novels and stories in MS. dealing with every aspect of human affairs, sixty of the more important being specifically devoted to the War and the various ways in which it might conceivably terminate. I modestly approached and presented myself.

"You have come," he said with a courteous gesture, "to discover my views on the present conflict?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"Ah," he said; "which is it, then? You can take your choice, you know. All you have to do is to select the subject," and he handed me a volume resembling Kelly's Directory in size and colour, and entitled "Classified Catalogue of Subjects on which Opinions can be furnished at the Shortest Notice." I turned the pages breathlessly until I came to "Class V, Voter; sub-class P, Proportional Representation." "There," I said, "is what I want," and I pointed the place out to him.

"Dear me," he said, "you desire guidance on a very simple matter."

"Well," I said, "I'm not so sure about that. It has rather flummoxed us in our office. We can't make head or tail—"

"You may thank your stars," he interrupted, "that you've come to the right shop. I'll make it all as clear as daylight in two shakes of a pig's whisker. Are you ready?"

I said I was, and he began to pour forth at once.

"Imagine," he said, "a constituency of 40,000 voters who elect four representatives. Obviously anyone who gets 40,001 votes is elected. Well then, there are ten candidates. All you have to do is to take the quotient of x divided by y, where x can be raised to the nth power and y can be raised to the nth-1, and add to this the least common denominator of the number of votes cast for the last three candidates, taking care to eliminate in each case the square root of z, where z equals the number of voters belonging to the Church of England, minus Archdeacons and Rural Deans, but inclusive of Minor Canons and Precentors. Do you follow me?"

"Ye-es," I said.

"I thought you would," he said. "Next we proceed to take the multiples of the superhydrates mathematically converted into decimals, and then, allowing, of course, for the kilometric variation of the earth's maximum temperature reduced by the square of the hypotenuse, you begin the delicate operation of transferring votes from one candidate to another in packets of not less than one hundred. That's easy, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes," I said, "that's quite easy."

"Very well then," he said. "You have now got two candidates elected, A. and B. You take from them 653 votes, which do not legitimately belong to them, and you mix them up with the surplus votes of the remaining eight candidates. Unless C. is a congenital idiot, or a felon, or otherwise incapacitated, he will then be found to have 4,129 votes, and he too will be elected. For the last place you must proceed on a basis of geometrical progression. There are still seven candidates, but four of these have no earthly and must be withdrawn by a writ of Ne exeat regno, taking with them the 2,573 votes which are properly or improperly theirs, and leaving 3,326 votes to be added to those already recorded for D., who, being thus elected into the position of fourth letter of the alphabet, will be returned as elected on the Temperance and Vegetarian ticket....