THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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ignorant voters and votes as a means by which to win the stakes? When I heard in the Congress on Civil Government the comparison of the parties to gamblers playing for high stakes, I felt tempted to interpolate, “ and these stakes are not their own, but the money paid by the citizens for honest work, and not for dishonest gambling.”

Thus all that is faulty and mischievous in your American institutions depends on your majority or plurality system of representation, which has been inherited from your English forefathers.

I do not know if you in America suffer as much from merely local interests in political matters as we do in Australia and in Canada. The large electoral district will retain much that is good in local representation, and will do away with much that is belittling and mischievous.

You may say that this is a large reform, that it demands besides a change in the method of voting, a reconstruction of districts so as to allow quota representation room to play. I never said that it is a small reform. I have not given my life to tin­kering at old methods, old and imperfect, but for the sake of radically changing them; and I believe that if the collective conscience of America is fairly aroused, it will be strong enough to affect this indispensable reform. The Proportional Representation League is intensely interested and in earnest, and means to arouse this collective con­science, not merely to protect, but to act and to conquer.

Your parties are Republican and Democrat. Our parties in Australia have advanced beyond yours and are actually the parties of capitalists and laborers. It was when I first saw these parties organized for offensive and defensive war that I abandoned the part of an occasional writer for that of public lecturer on any platform open to me. I traveled all over my own province of South Australia, and addressed between fifty and sixty public meetings with ballot papers with the names of well- known political men as candidates.

The problem of our day is to devise some means of reconciling the claims of cap­ital and labor, and I felt assured that if these were pitted against each other in every electoral district in Australia as enemies, they would be embittered against each other, and it would become more and more difficult to harmonize their actions. It is by the admission of the best men of both parties, and also of representatives of outside parties into our legislature, that some modus vivendi may be found.

And there is an object lesson for America to be read and studied in Australia now. We are passing through a severe financial crisis, brought on by two main causes; first,, the collapse of the land boom, which was always and everywhere a most mischievous thing, and, second, the steady fall in the price of our products. Not to the deprecia­tion of silver; silver has not depreciated. It buys as much of everything as we want to buy now as it ever did. But it is owing to the appreciation of gold, which makes our public and private indebtedness so much heavier. All the Australian colonies have this financial difficulty, but in the two colonies, New Zealand and South Austra­lia, which have had the courage to impose direct taxation, and, above all, which have taxed land values, excluding improvements, we see a wonderful difference for the bet­ter as compared with New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, which will not adopt such methods, but which seek to balance the revenue to the expenditures by increase of customs duties. New Zealand is prosperous and has a surplus revenue. South Australia has been deeply implicated in the misfortunes of the adjacent colonies, and she depends so much on the large silver mines which are close to her border and largely owned by her people, though they are actually situated in New South Wales. So the silver question is trying her greatly. But still she stands, and is increasing her direct taxation and decreasing her indirect. This plainly proves that a change in economic methods differentiates between peoples otherwise equally circumstanced.

I am sometimes accused of having only one idea, that of proportional representa­tion; but I have really so many ideas that it is hard for me to keep to my text, as at present. The reason why I insist so much on a ‘change in electoral methods is that I believe a real representation of the whole people, and not of a mere segment of the people, is the key to unlock the doors for all other reforms. First secure that the