John Morrison Davidson

“ Courtney is so enamoured of "three-cornered constituencies" and "cumulative votes" that he positively refused to support Mr. Trevelyan's County Franchise Bill because it contained no provision for the realization of a "principle which would re-create political life, raising it out of the degradation which overlaid it." Mr. Courtney tells us we are about to be overwhelmed by the billows of a tempestuous democratic ocean abounding in unknown terrors. There is but one escape: we must all put out to sea in tiny "three-cornered" boats, on pain of universal political shipwreck. ”

“ During that time he acquainted himself with all the best writers on the subject, and became a warm advocate of the special views of John Stuart Mill. From Mill it is easy to see that he derived a great deal more than from the Alma Mater of which he is a senior fellow. With respect to the representation of minorities, and the female franchise more particularly, the mantle of the deceased philosopher has fallen on his shoulders. Mill was never at a university; yet it has been his part to fructify the intellects of such distinguished university alumni as Courtney and Fawcett. ”

“ Trevelyan's motion in favor of the county franchise, the member for Liskeard told the House, with very little circumlocution, that it had degenerated, and that the members generally were nobodies. The inference, of course, was unavoidable that the speaker was somebody. Well, I readily admit both proposition and deduction, but "hold it not honesty to have it thus set down." The great majority of Mr, Courtney's colleagues, it is true, are mere rule-of-thumb legislators,, whereas his knowledge of politics is, by comparison, scientific. ”

“ The truth, however, seems to be that the gift or knack which enables one man to manipulate algebraic quantities so much more readily than another may or may not co-exist in the mind with other, it may be, greater endowments. ”

“ He would plead, doubtless, by way of extenuation, that this was not a lowering, but an assimilation, of the franchise, and that he was not consequently compelled by consistency to encumber his bill with any three-cornered contrivances. But the point is all too fine; and the House showed its sense of the incongruity of the situation by recording a majority of a hundred and fourteen votes against the measure, as compared with eighty the year before, and this notwithstanding the fact that the member for Liskeard's arguments were most cogent. ”

“ How far marked aptitude for mathematical studies is indicative of general intellectual superiority has, been the subject of much controversy. Lord Macaulay kept an exhaustive catalogue of senior wranglers who always remained juniors in every thing but mathematics, and Sir William Hamilton estimated the disciplinary value of the study at a very low rate. ”

“ In the former case the Tories, at the general election of 1874, managed to return their candidate, simply because no human ingenuity could, with the secrecy of the ballot-box to contend against, so evenly apportion the two votes of each Liberal elector among the three Liberal candidates as to keep the Conservative at the bottom of the poll. ”