PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1919, Page 7

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION.

:••'•' (To tha Wttor.) Sir,—ln cftmomn with many others I was disappointed at finding no reference In Mr. Mastey's ontUned pobVy as contjuiuedl In) to-day's Dally. News, to the important subject of proportional representation. The introduction of that system, long overdue, is the best and only means of safeguarding the rights of minorities. Under the present system minorities are, to a large extent, Inarticulate and defenceless. The late general election in. Britain has shown - that If free Institutions are to survive and the. country not degenerate. Into a'permanent bureaucracy, some system which ensures representation of minorities must be .adopted. Belgium, Sweden, and Switzerland have long employed the 1 system ot proportional representation. Denmark and Holland" adopted It during the war. It was .embodied. In the dead or dormant Home Rule Act of 1914,- through anxiety for the protection of the non-Catholic n-lnorlty hi Ireland. It is to be used. in Scotland under the now Education Act of, this year. It would go far towards eliminating, or at least checking, the corruption which dogs the modern State, and would advance tha true ideal of democracy—Government l of the people, by the people, for the peopleas the rule of one' class by another is a direct and manifest contradiction of democracy,—l am, etc., DEMOCRAT.