version for its legislature—the Hare–Clark—a version of which has been used
since 1949 to elect Australia’s powerful Senate.^7
In moving from the secret ballot to PR we move from a Benthamite acclam-
ation of the majority to a Millian wince at the multitudes.
An account may begin with Thomas Rowland Hill, the devisor of another
revolutionary‘bit of paper’of the Victorian age—the postage stamp.^8 In 1839,
while he was composing his proposals for postal reform, Hill was also formu-
lating electoral schemes for South Australia, in his capacity as the secretary of
its Colonization Commission. His scheme was, in fact, borrowed directly from
his father, Thomas Wright Hill (1763–1851). Raised in a strict Dissenting
household, Hill senior had taught Sunday School as a youth in Joseph Priest-
ley’s chapel in Birmingham, and was married in the city two weeks after a
raging‘Church and King’mob had destroyed Priestley’s‘meeting house’,
along with his residence and library. Hill’s electoral scheme does not impute
any superiority in judgement to the mass.
Hill’s‘Scheme for Conducting Elections’began with the contention that the
‘national assembly should be a reflex [i.e. a reproduction, as if in a mirror]...of
the nation itself’, and must include minorities, since‘in the minority the most
intelligent part of the nation is often found’(Hill 1860, p. 86). Specifically, he
proposed a scheme of a multi-member electorate, where any collection of
voters of a minimum number were free to constitute themselves into a
‘quorum’that would return one member to represent them. It was Thomas,
the third of hisfive sons—all destined for noteworthy careers in public
administration—who actualized the scheme in Adelaide in 1840.
Hill’s scheme of election would very possibly have perished but forfinding
its evangelist in Thomas Hare. The general context of Hare’s sense of mission
was his disappointment at the outcome of the Great Reform Act.‘The system
since 1832’, complained Hare,‘vastly increases the number of electors who are
subject to moral or mental degradation, or both, and at the same time, with
few exceptions,fills the representative assembly with an inferior class men...
a legion of other spirits more vile than those which were cast out’(1873,
pp. 88–90). Hare’s scheme is, then, at bottom, an expression of a Millian
repugnance at the great throng of base natures and superficial minds.
Hare’s individualist (‘elitist’?) position was shared by Helen Spence
(1825–1910), Australia’s earliest and most indefatigable advocate of PR. One
may concede a significance to the fact that her father had been town clerk at
the much remembered essay of PR in Adelaide Municipality in 1840; and that
(^7) Perhaps only the second chambers of the USA and Italy have more power than Australia’s
Senate. 8
In a prompt adoption of Hill’s proposal, New South Wales (NSW) issued the world’sfirst pre-
paid (if unadhesive) postage stamps.
William O. Coleman