Explore "A Year of Prophesying" by H.G. Wells on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
That muddle-headed process, the General Election, is over in Great Britain; the votes have been counted and the results are out -- and everybody now is free to speculate what it was that the British Demos was trying to say to the world.
The idiotic simplicity of the voting method employed leaves the intelligent observer entirely free to put whatever interpretation he likes upon these results, and the British and foreign Press are taking the fullest advantage of this freedom. Confronted by a complex of issues and two or three usually very unpalatable candidates, the poor voter has voted anyhow or abstained from voting. Poor Demos might just as well have stayed away from the polls altogether for any chance he has had of expressing himself about France or about Russia or about the Singapore dockyards or anything of positive importance in the outer world. The single non-transferable vote system which prevails in the British communities and in America is almost as good a political gag as the old Russian autocracy, and may in the end provoke as violent a reaction.