A Mathematical Approach To Proportional

Representation Duncan Black On Lewis Carroll 1st

Edition Iain S Mclean download

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-mathematical-approach-to-
proportional-representation-duncan-black-on-lewis-carroll-1st-
edition-iain-s-mclean-54688676

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

A Mathematical Approach To Marxian Value Theory Time Money And Labor

Productivity Dongmin Rieu

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-mathematical-approach-to-marxian-
value-theory-time-money-and-labor-productivity-dongmin-rieu-48684852

A Mathematical Approach To Human Resources Teena Mishra

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-mathematical-approach-to-human-
resources-teena-mishra-56739492

A Mathematical Approach To Research Problems Of Science And Technology

Theoretical Basis And Developments In Mathematical Modeling 2014th
Edition Ryuei Nishii

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-mathematical-approach-to-research-
problems-of-science-and-technology-theoretical-basis-and-developments-
in-mathematical-modeling-2014th-edition-ryuei-nishii-4739312

A Mathematical Approach To Multilevel Multiscale Health Interventions

Pharmaceutical Industry Decline And Policy Response 1st Edition
Rodrick Wallace

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-mathematical-approach-to-multilevel-
multiscale-health-interventions-pharmaceutical-industry-decline-and-
policy-response-1st-edition-rodrick-wallace-5065544
A Mathematical Approach To Protein Biophysics 1st Edition L Ridgway
Scott

https://ebookbell.com/product/a-mathematical-approach-to-protein-
biophysics-1st-edition-l-ridgway-scott-6841542

Neutropsychic Personality A Mathematical Approach To Psychology Third

Updated Edition Florentin Smarandache

https://ebookbell.com/product/neutropsychic-personality-a-
mathematical-approach-to-psychology-third-updated-edition-florentin-
smarandache-51139634

Pro Deep Learning With Tensorflow 20 A Mathematical Approach To

Advanced Artificial Intelligence In Python 2nd Edition Santanu
Pattanayak

https://ebookbell.com/product/pro-deep-learning-with-
tensorflow-20-a-mathematical-approach-to-advanced-artificial-
intelligence-in-python-2nd-edition-santanu-pattanayak-47554298

Alm Modeling And Balance Sheet Optimization A Mathematical Approach To

Banking Diogo Gobira

https://ebookbell.com/product/alm-modeling-and-balance-sheet-
optimization-a-mathematical-approach-to-banking-diogo-gobira-50855234

Distributed Control Of Robotic Networks A Mathematical Approach To

Motion Coordination Algorithms Course Book Francesco Bullo Jorge Corts
Sonia Martnez

https://ebookbell.com/product/distributed-control-of-robotic-networks-
a-mathematical-approach-to-motion-coordination-algorithms-course-book-
francesco-bullo-jorge-corts-sonia-martnez-51951784
A MATHEMATICAL APPROACH TO
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION:

Duncan Black on Lewis Carroll

 A MATHEMATICAL APPROACH TO
PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION:

Duncan Black on Lewis Carroll

edited by

lain McLean
(Official Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford)

Alistair McMillan
(Research Officer, Nuffield College, Oxford)

and

Burt L. Monroe
(Assistant Professor of Political Science, Indiana University)

l1li...

"
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A C.P.1. Catalogue record for this book is available from

the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-94-010-3735-8 ISBN 978-94-007-0824-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-0824-2

Copyright @ 1996 by Springer Science+Business Media New York

Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1996
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996
AlI rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical,
photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Assinippi Park,
NorwelI, Massachusetts 02061.

Printed an acid-free paper.

 v

Contents

Editors' Preface vii

Introduction IX
l. What is the Theory of Voting? ix
2. Duncan Black and the Study of Theoretical Politics xiii
3. The Duncan Black Archive at the University of Glasgow xiv
4. Black's Struggles for Recognition xvi
5. Black and Lewis Carroll XIX
6. Carroll's Principles ofParliamentary Representation xxi
7. The Making of This Book xxviii
References for the Introduction xxxi

Part 1. The Life and Logic of Lewis Carroll 1

1.1. Government by Logic 12

Part 2. The Principles of Parliamentary Representation 45

2.1. An Outline of Carroll's Argument. 45
2.2. The Central Argument in The Principles of Parliamentary
Representation 51
2.3. Carroll and the Cambridge Mathematical School ofPR:
Arthur Cohen and Edith Denman 63

Part 3. An Analysis of Carroll's Argument 91

3.1. Carroll's Scheme of Proportional Representation 91
3.2. The Desiderata: In at the Deep End 93
3.3 . The Droop Quota in a Two-Party System 98
3.4. The Representation of the Droop Quota 105
3.5. Walter Baily and the Number of Voters Unrepresented 112
3.6. J G Marshall and the Two-Person Zero-Sum Game 114
3.7. Demand Curves, Maximin, and the d'Hondt Scheme ofPR 120
3.8. The Fourfold Table and Carroll's Quota, Q(s) 129
3.9. Carroll's Practical Scheme and the Single Transferable Vote 139
3.10. Allocating Members to Districts 144
 vi

Part 4. Reprints of Original Material 151

4.1. Lewis Carroll: The Principles of Parliamentary Representation,
with Supplement and Postscript to Supplement 151
4.2. James Garth Marshall: Minorities and Majorities;
Their Relative Rights 175
4.3. Walter Baily: Proportional Representation in Large
Constituencies 180

Index 185
 vii

Editors' preface

This book has been thirty years in the making. As we explain in our Introduction,
the main part of it is the posthumous work of the Scottish economist Duncan Black
(1908-91). Black was an original and neglected thinker who had unusual difficulty
in getting his work published. He was also a perfectionist. He told his friends that
this book was ready to publish in the late 1960s, but he was never satisfied and
continued to make additions and changes throughout the rest of his life. The small
circle of people who knew the importance and originality of this work waited eagerly
but in vain.
Black wanted Kluwer Academic Publishers, who had published the
facsimile reprint of his classic The Theory of Committees and Elections (1958;
Kluwer reprint 1987) to publish this book; but it was far from being in a fit state to
publish at his death. Black was a widower with no immediate family, and at his
death his books would have been sold and his papers dispersed had it not been for
the intervention of Richard Alexander, an economist at the Royal Naval College,
Dartmouth, Devon, and a neighbour of the agent charged with disposing of Black's
real estate after his death. On fmding that his house contained a substantial quantity
of academic books and papers, Mr Alexander alerted Black's almae matres the
University College of North Wales, Bangor (which declined them) and the
University of Glasgow (which accepted them for its Archives). One of us (1M)
visited Black's house with Zachary Rolnik of Kluwer. Amidst four roomfuls of
miscellaneous papers, one of the fITst things we found was a chapter plan for this
book. This helped us to decide that it was feasible to carry out Black's wishes.
(Later, we discovered many other chapter plans, all different). The papers were
hurriedly removed from Black's house and taken to Glasgow. Work on cataloguing
them, with the help of a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council,
began in 1993 and was completed in 1994. A grant from the Newlands fund of the
University of Glasgow enabled BLM to join AM in Glasgow during the cataloguing.
We were also assisted by Gordon Tullock (University of Arizona) and Gordon Brady
(Sweet Briar College), who both visited Glasgow during the cataloguing process.
The University of Warwick and Nuffield College, Oxford, successively administered
 viii

the grants. Michael Moss and his staff at the University Archives in Glasgow were
extremely generous and helpful hosts to the project.

Duncan Black was elusive and self-effacing. We are very grateful to Nick
Baigent, Alec Caimcross, Ronald Coase, and Donald Stokes for their help in
enabling us to learn more about him as a person. For expert advice on Lewis Carroll
we wish to thank Morton N. Cohen. The Bodleian Library and the library of Christ
Church, Oxford, contain some of our primary sources and we are grateful for their
help.
Parts of the Introduction have appeared in the Journal of Theoretical
Politics, 7(2), 1995. We are grateful to the publishers for permission to reproduce
that material here.
To all those who have helped rescue Duncan Black's papers, we give our
heartfelt thanks.

Oxford
Bloomington, Indiana
April 1995
Introduction ix

Introduction

1. What is the Theory of Voting?

This book is about a well-known writer, Lewis Carroll, and about a little-known
subject, the theory of voting. It has been edited from the manuscripts of a writer who
is still not as well known as he should be, Duncan Black. There is no need to explain
who Lewis Carroll was, but every need to explain who Duncan Black was, and what
the theory of voting is, as it is a generally misunderstood subject.
It is best to begin by explaining what the theory of voting is not. It is not about
the content of voting, nor yet about whether (and if so, how) a rational voter would
ever vote. It is purely about voting procedures. A voting procedure has two main
components. First, it prescribes how each voter should cast her vote: perhaps for
just one candidate and perhaps for more than one; perhaps by ranking the candidates
from best to worst; perhaps by dividing them into the two categories 'acceptable' and
'unacceptable'; perhaps for individual candidates, perhaps for a party list. Secondly,
it prescribes how the individual votes are added up ('aggregated') to determine the
group's choice, or the group's ordering. This may sound both routine and as dry as
dust. It turns out that it is far from routine, and as a consequence that it is not at all
dry.
There are a number of introductions to the theory of voting. Barry and Hardin
(1982, Part II), Mueller (1989) and Saari (1994) are introductions to the concepts.
McLean and Urken (1995) is an introduction to the history, with texts. Duncan
Black's own The Theory of Committees and Elections (Black 1958) is an excellent
introduction to both topics, up to the date when he wrote. Here, we will present only
enough of the theory as is needed to provide a context for this book.
The theory of voting has two main subdivisions: the theory of majority rule, and
the theory of proportional representation. 'Majority rule' has a clear meaning when
only two candidates, or issues, are in contention. If one option wins more than half
of the votes cast, it is unambiguously the majority's choice. Simple majority rule
satisfies some classically desirable properties of fairness; furthermore, it is the only
voting procedure that does so (May, 1952). But as soon as there are more than two
candidates, simple majority voting may perform very badly. For instance, a
x A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

candidate may be the plurality winner (that is, get the largest number of votes of any
of the candidate, but fewer than half of the votes cast), while being the absolute
majority loser (that is, ranked last of all by more than half of the voters). An obvious
way to avoid this problem is to conduct exhaustive pairwise voting. Each candidate
is compared with each other. If the voters are asked to rank the candidates, this may
be done at the second stage in the procedure, the aggregation stage. There is no need
for the voters actually to vote on each pair. Exhaustive pairwise voting was first
proposed by Ramon Lull in 1283. If it yields a clear winner, that is a candidate who
has won a majority against every other, taken one at a time, that candidate has an
obvious claim to be considered the best. Such a candidate is called the Condorcet
winner after the Marquis de Condorcet (1785), the greatest figure in voting theory
before this century.
Unfortunately, the Condorcet winner may not exist. Whenever there are at least
three candidates and at least three voters, there is a possibility that A wins a majority
against B, who likewise beats C, who likewise beats A. Here is Lewis Carroll's
statement of the problem (from Dodgson 1876, in Black 1958, p. 227):

Let us suppose that there are II electors, and 4 candidates, a, b, c, d; and

that each elector has arranged in a column the names of the candidates in the
order of his preference; and that the II columns stand thus:

a a a a b b b c c c d
d d b b c c d b b b c
c c d d a a c d d d b
b b c c d d a a a a a

Here the majorities are cyclical, in the order a d c b a, each beating the one
next following.

The puzzled reader should check Lewis Carroll's arithmetic, which is correct.
Candidate a beats d by 6 votes to 5; d beats c by 6 to 5; c beats b by 6 to 5; and b
beats a by 7 to 4. When such a cycle exists, 'majority rule' seems to have no
meaning: whatever society ends up with, a majority of voters would have preferred
something (somebody) else. This has deep implications for democratic theory.
An obvious way round this difficulty is the rank-order count. This was possibly
proposed by Lull in 1283 and certainly by Nicholas of Cusa in 1433, but is usually
named after its second (or third) inventor, l-C. de Borda (1733--99). The Borda
count works as follows. Each voter ranks the candidates from best to worst. Where
there are n candidates, this is done either by giving n points to one's favourite and so
on down to I to one's least-liked, or from n - I at the top to 0 at the bottom. There
are rules for equal places that need not concern us. These scores are simply added
up, and the candidate with the highest aggregate score is elected. This is beautifully
simple and, unlike the Condorcet procedure, always gives a clear result. But it is
subject to paradoxes and manipulation of its own. It may fail to select the Condorcet
Introduction xi

winner, even when one exists; it may lead to peculiar outcomes when the set of
candidates is expanded or contracted; and it is patently manipulable by voters putting
the most dangerous rival to their favourite at the bottom of their lists. 'My scheme is
only intended for honest men', said Borda when this was pointed out.
Lewis Carroll and Duncan Black both made important contributions to this
theory. Carroll independently discovered both the Condorcet and Borda rules, and
the problems listed in the last two paragraphs. He was the first to call the situation
where there is no Condorcet winner a 'cycle'. The name has stuck. As Black
explains in Part I of this book, Carroll's discovery was independent of Condorcet and
Borda. The scientific journal containing Borda's paper is in the library of Carroll's
college, Christ Church. But the pages containing Borda's paper are uncut. Nobody
has ever read them in this copy. And this is the copy that Carroll would surely have
read if he had read Borda. When Black visited Oxford in the 1950s, the same was
true of the Bodleian Library's copy of Condorcet (1785), although it is no longer
true. A full evaluation of Lewis Carroll's work on the problem of majority rule is in
Black (1958). Much of it is also contained in Part I of this book. Black's view that
Carroll deserves 'a position in the theory of elections and committees only a little
lower than that of Condorcet' is now generally accepted.
In 1829 Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first performance of J S Bach's St
Matthew Passion since Bach's death. What is now regarded as the greatest choral
work of all time had been, in effect, lost for eighty years until Mendelssohn
rediscovered it. Duncan Black was to Condorcet and Carroll as Mendelssohn was to
Bach. He made two signal contributions of his own to the theory of majority rule:
the median voter theorem, and the first statement of the problem of
multidimensionality. He proved the median voter theorem while frrewatching in
Warwick Castle in 1942, although the proof was not published until 1948, with
associated results (Black 1948a--d; Black 1991). The median voter theorem holds if
the structure of opinion is single-peaked. (The reader who wishes to know exactly
what single-peakedness is and how it gets its name should see Black 1958). Single-
peakedness is guaranteed if the possible outcomes can be arrayed along one
generally recognised dimension, perhaps from left to right. In industrial societies,
there is a general consensus that high spending on social welfare is a 'left-wing'
position, and giving priority to low taxation over high welfare spending is a 'right-
wing' position. People recognise that this scale exists, whatever their own position
on it. A left-wing person likes the leftmost option the most, and likes each
succeeding option less the more right-wing it is. A right-winger has mirror-image
preferences. Everybody else has some ideal point which is at neither extreme, and
likes each alternative less, the more extreme it is, on each side of her favourite point.
When these conditions obtain, the policy, or candidate, favoured by the median voter
is the Condorcet winner, who (which) will be chosen by any good majoritarian
voting procedure. The median voter is the voter whose has exactly as many people
to the left of her as to the right. For simplicity, we assume that there are an odd
number of voters.
xii A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Black's median voter theorem is a very powerful result, although it is often

attributed rather to Anthony Downs (1957) who popularised it. It is now at the heart
of empirical political science. For instance, it is now standard to model voting in the
US Congress along the following lines. In anyone policy area (say, protection v.
free trade), there are three voting chambers: the House of Representatives of 435
members; the Senate of 100 members; and the unique President. Each is popularly
elected, but by different voting procedures. Hence we may rank Representatives and
Senators from the most protectionist to the most free-trading, and examine the
position of the 218th most protectionist Representative, the 50th or 51 st most
protectionist Senator, and the President. These three could stand for the entire voting
body as, in this simplified model, they are the voters on whom all depends. This is
not the place to go into details (see, e.g., Cox and McCubbins 1993), but merely to
note the central role of the median voter theorem.
However, the median voter theorem does not always work, as Black himself
was one of the first to fmd out. When there is a cycle, there is no majority winner,
and no median voter. When Black first discovered an example of a cycle,

it seemed to me that this must be due to a mistake in the arithmetic. On finding

that the arithmetic was correct and the intransitivity persisted, my stomach
revolted in something akin to physical sickness. Not only was the problem ...
more complicated than I had supposed, it was of a different kind (Black 1991,
p.262).

Often the reason why the median voter theorem fails is that opinion is structured in
two dimensions at once. Voters may have to take a position not only on free trade v.
protection, but also, at the same time, on high welfare spending v. low taxation.
Voters' positions on one issue may not be related to their positions on the other, and
the median voter on one may not be the median on the other. Black was the first to
explore this systematically (Black and Newing 1951). This line of work led to some
notorious 'chaos theorems' (e.g., McKelvey 1979) which seemed to show that in a
complex society all possible outcomes were in a global cycle. This shows the depth
of Lewis Carroll's cavern.
The theory of majority rule deals with the case where a group of people must
choose the single 'best' candidate, or course of action. The theory of proportional
representation deals with choosing an assembly that is in some sense 'representative'
of those who choose it. 'Representative' has several meanings, with incompatible
theories of representation attached to them. In one sense, an elected official
represents those who elected her in the same way as a lawyer represents a client, or
more generally as an 'agent' represents a 'principal'. The agent can choose only one
course of action, so she must know what the majority of her principals want. This
sense of representation is therefore bound up with the theory of majority rule. A
radically different use of the same word is in the claim that an assembly should be
'representative' of those who elected it. Both the French revolutionary Mirabeau and
the American revolutionary John Adams expounded this view during their country's
Introduction xiii

revolution. For Mirabeau or Adams, an assembly should be some sort of map, or

picture in microcosm, of the electorate (McLean 1991). The two main conceptions
of 'representative' are both widely understood, but they cannot both be applied at the
same time to the same situation. One of them is about the decisions an assembly
reaches. The other is about its composition.
The second conception of representation in itself offers two incompatible
answers to the question: But what sort of map - political or physical? In Europe and
Australia, the theory of proportional representation developed as an analysis of what
was required to ensure that the assembly was politically representative. In the USA,
the concern was to ensure that it was physically representative. An assembly is
politically representative if the parties are represented by the same share of seats as
they each had of votes in the election to the assembly. An assembly is physically
representative if each major subdivision of the population is proportionally
represented. In the explosive history of proportional representation in the USA, this
has mostly been taken as a question about fair representation of ethnic minorities.
One of the issues thrown up by this is the fair apportionment of seats to subdivisions
of a country such as states; another is the fair drawing of district boundaries once the
apportionment has been made. Lewis Carroll's work on PR was mostly about
political proportionality, although it opened with a discussion of physical
proportionality .
There was a surge of interest in PR in Britain, Europe, and Australia in the
second half of the 19th century. This led to a corresponding surge of writing, some of
it by people whose names have become attached to some of the key concepts, such as
Thomas Hare (1859, 1873), H R Droop (1868, 1881), Victor d'Hondt (1885), and A
Ste-Lague (1910). Most of these books and pamphlets contain arithmetical
examples, and some of them contain general arguments. But of the writers who have
given their names to concepts in PR, only Ste-Lague argued in a mathematical way.
Below these (fairly) well-known names lies another tier of writers whose
arguments are better but harder. These include C G Andrae (see Lytton 1864,
Andrae 1926), E J Nanson (1882; see McLean and Urken 1995), James Garth
Marshall (1853), Walter Baily (1869, 1872), and C L Dodgson (Lewis Carroll:
Dodgson 1873, 1874, 1876, 1883, 1884, 1885). These writers may fairly be called
mathematicians of voting. Andrae, Nanson, and Dodgson were professional
mathematicians. (For the others, see Part 2.3 below). Each of them tried to treat the
subject axiomatically, or made some approach to doing so. This approach took them
into deep waters. They are deeper than most of those who write about PR, whether
for it or against it, realise. They are deeper than most politicians realise. The theory
of voting has had a strange history, and this book is itself part of that strange history.

2. Duncan Black and the Study of Theoretical Politics

Duncan Black (1908--91) was a Scottish economist who had a somewhat lonely
career. He devoted his professional life to what he called 'the pure science of
XIV A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Politics'l (Black 1991 p. 260). His fonnal theory of the committee is now the basis
of an astonishingly wide range of work in both theoretical and empirical politics. A
search through the on-line Social Science Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities
Citation Index, covering major journals from 1981 to 1993 inclusive, reveals no
fewer than 335 citations to Black (1958; 2nd impression 1968; facsimile reprint
1987); 86 citations to one or other of the seven papers which led to the 1958 book
(Black 1948a-d; 1949 a-c); and 17 citations to the extremely elusive Black and
Newing (1951). Furthennore, of this total of 438 citations, 43 (9.8%) were in 1993,
which represents one-thirteenth (7.7%) of the time-span of the on-line indices. In
other words, citation of these old works seems to be actually increasing over the
years. If ever there were citation classics in social science, Black's publications from
1948 to 1958 must be among them. Downing and Stafford (1981) in their cross-
sectional survey of social choice citations during 1978--9, found that Black (1958)
ranked fourth with 25 citations, behind Arrow (1951), Sen (1970), and Downs
(I 957). As the obituary of Black in the Journal o/Theoretical Politics 3 (3), 1991, p.
276, concludes, 'Only recently has he been recognised as a founding father of
theoretical politics'.
Black's Theory 0/ Committees and Elections (1958) is thus justly viewed as a
classic. However, here is a very stark contrast between this and Black's later work.
From 1962 until his death, he tried to explicate and evaluate Lewis Carroll's work on
the theory of voting. During his lifetime, he published only four short papers on
Carroll (Black 1953, 1967, 1969, 1970). In contrast to the 438 citations of Black's
main work prior to 1958, there has not been a single citation, in any journal in the
SSCI or AHCI sets, to these four papers. Nor has there been a single citation, in any
fonn that we could trace, to Lewis Carroll's original papers on voting, written in the
1870s and 1880s. Black's papers on Lewis Carroll were early versions of a book to
which Black devoted the last three decades of his life. At his death, copious drafts
and chapter plans existed, but no book. We have reconstructed the book from
Black's papers, as we describe in detail later. But first, we must describe the papers.

3. The Duncan Black Archive at the University of Glasgow

Duncan Black died in January 1991. Sadly but typically, it was some months before
news of his death filtered through to the community which he had helped to found; in
particular, he did not live to see the semi-autobiographical paper Black (I991) in
print. However, in May 1991 we learnt from William H Riker, who, unfortunately,
has also since died, that a clause in Black's will made some provision for the
(re)publication of his work. He had left a substantial academic archive. On the
initiative of a neighbour of the estate agent charged with disposing of Black's

1 Black always distinguished between an activity and its professional study by

capitalising the latter (see, e.g., Black 1958 p. I). We preserve this characteristic
idiosyncrasy.
Introduction xv

property, this archive was offered to the University of Glasgow. Glasgow was
Black's undergraduate alma mater to which he later returned as a Senior Lecturer in
Economics. The University accepted the offer, but as no money was available to
move it, let alone to catalogue it, nothing happened immediately. Black had left no
dependants. (He was a widower without children). His house in Paignton, Devon
was on the market, but found no immediate buyer as it was in poor condition: the
price of its magnificent oceanside setting was a front garden that looked as if it was
about to subside into the sea. One of us (1M) visited the house twice, once with a
representative of Kluwer Academic Publishers and once with a representative of
Glasgow University. Black's academic papers filled four rooms in his house, but,
although he had been a meticulous archivist himself, they had inevitably fallen into
some confusion before we saw them. We found a unique copy of Condorcet's first
publication Memoire sur Ie calcul integral (1767), in a broken cardboard box full of
slippers and sticking-plaster. Shortly afterwards, the archive was hurriedly removed
from Black's house when it was finally sold. Sustained work on cataloguing it began
in May 1993 and is now complete. The catalogue (McMillan 1994) may be obtained
from the Archivist, University of Glasgow, Glasgow Gl2 8QQ, UK. It is hoped that
a copy of all or part of the archive will be made on behalf of the Public Choice
Center at George Mason University and housed there.
The archive is of considerable intrinsic interest. The principal components are:

notebooks and diaries, some going back to Black's days as a Glasgow

undergraduate; Black bought up large quantities of expired page-per-day
desk diaries, and most of the more recent notes are in these;

loose academic notes on various subjects in social choice, especially Lewis

Carroll. Some are on paper issued by the University College of North
Wales for students to write examinations, and it seems likely that Black
wrote up some of his notes while doing the tedious job of invigilating
examinations that falls to all British academics;

drafts of unpublished papers;

collections of offprints. These have proved unexpectedly useful in showing

where Black's interests moved, and what he was researching at a time when
nobody else was;

academic correspondence;

reminiscences and memoirs.

This archive is drawn on in the rest of this introduction. The catalogue is a Paradox
database. All its contents are preceded by the general class mark DC 304, which is
not repeated in the citations below.
xvi A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

4. Black's Struggles for Recognition

Black was born in 1908 in Motherwell, in the industrial belt of central Scotland some
15 miles from Glasgow. His father was one of the thousands of migrants from the
rural Highlands who settled in the area; his mother was a Lowlander. Black
benefited from the rigorous and formal education which was available to (some)
clever working-class children in Scotland at the time. From Dalziel High School,
Motherwell, he proceeded to the local university, Glasgow. There he graduated in
mathematics and physics, which he did not enjoy. As he was drawn to social
science, he re-enrolled for a second MA (= English or American BA) in economics
and politics, from which he graduated with first class honours in 1932. His first
academic job was in the Dundee School of Economics. This had been founded by a
local industrialist in conscious imitation of the London School of Economics. The
school throve as an independent research centre for a while before its (re-)absorption
into the University of St Andrews, which had a campus in Dundee. In the early
1930s the school was a centre of innovative research. The two junior lecturers were
Black and R. H. Coase, who formed a close friendship which lasted the whole of
Black's life. Black was much influenced by his discussions with Coase, and stated
that he sought a theory of the committee to parallel Coase's (1937) theory of the firm .
Coase (1981) acknowledged Black's influence on his work but stated 'that Black's
reciprocal acknowledgement to him was 'over-generous'. But we may be sure that
the interaction between these two strikingly original economists (Coase is the 1993
Nobel Laureate in Economics) was fruitful. (For further biographical detail see
Coase 1981, which was compiled in part from Black Archive 711, and Coase 1993).
Economics in Glasgow in Black's time reflected the breadth of interests of one
of the earlier professors of it, Adam Smith. The drawback of this was that more
breadth meant less depth. Black's Glasgow classmate Sir Alec Cairncross found
going from Glasgow to do graduate work at Cambridge 'was like moving from a
Kindergarten to a University' (Cairncross 1993; for more on Glasgow economics at
the time see Cairncross 1992). Black, Cairncross and Coase all concur that Black's
training as a technical economist occurred on the job in Dundee, not during his
economics course in Glasgow. The compensating advantage was that Black was
exposed to ideas from across the social sciences which were to shape his own work.
In his writings he constantly reiterated the influences on him of A K White, C A
Campbell, and (less frequently) W R Scott. These taught politics, philosophy, and
economics respectively. White taught Black the virtues of Socratic method and
abstraction from current affairs. Specifically, he inspired Black in the search for a
'pure science of politics'. Black found the tentative beginnings of this pure science in
work by Mary Parker Follett, which was later reproduced by White himself (Follett
1918, pp. 24--5; White 1945, p. 95). Another book studied by Black and Cairncross
in their politics class with White was Catlin's (1927) The Science and Method of
Politics (Cairncross 1993). Mitchell (1993) has recently rediscovered Catlin's work.
Introduction xvii

As Mitchell points out, it could have been a foundation work of public choice if
Catlin had had the required intellectual equipment. But instead, Catlin 'packed more
and bigger bags [than other political scientists at the time] but never even went to the
station'. MitcheIl concludes (1993, p.452):

Perhaps, then, it has been a good thing that the founders of public choice
never read Catlin .... A science that cannot forget its founders is in grave
danger.

The truth is that Black did read Catlin, Follett, and White, and carried out the task
that they wished for but could not achieve themselves.
Details about Black's subsequent search for his pure science of politics are
becoming better known (see especially Tullock 1981; Black 1991). He spent most of
his professional career in the University College of North Wales, Bangor, with short
speIls at Belfast and Glasgow. This career pattern, of movement between Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland but never to England, was not uncommon among Scots
academics of Black's generation. The structure of university education in Scotland
and England was so different that Black possibly never considered applying to work
in England. The evidence is that he did not enjoy working in the isolated Bangor
campus. Even at a much larger university, there would have been few colleagues to
share Black's specialist interest; at Bangor, there was only one, the mathematician R
A Newing. The median voter theorem came to Black while he was away from
Bangor, 'in a flash ... in February 1942':

A little before it had been brought to my attention that my main effort

during the preceding years had produced no tangible result. I was
'firewatching' in case of air raids, late at night in the green drawing-room of
Warwick Castle.... Acting apparently at random, I wrote down a single
diagram and saw in a shock of recognition the property of the median
optimum. (Black 1991, p. 260).

His discovery of cycles some months later brought on, as we have seen, 'something
akin to physical sickness' (Black 1991 p. 262). In the late 1940s and early 1950s,
Black wrote a number of papers on majority rule and on proportional representation -
see, e.g., Black 1949a, b. The most noteworthy fmally appeared as Black and
Newing (1951). This, as we have seen, was the first paper in the modem literature
on multidimensional spatial voting (for an evaluation see Grofman 1981 pp. 36--38).
It had a chequered history. Black and Newing submitted it to Econometrica in
November 1949. It was immediately acknowledged. However, in September 1950
the editor's secretary wrote to Black about a change in submission procedure, with no
comment on what had been happening to the paper in the meantime. Not until May
24, 1951 did William B Simpson write on behalf of the journal, accepting the paper
for resubmission on condition that the authors acknowledged Arrow's results. Black
was very angry at what he saw as a denial of priority, withdrew the paper, and
xviii A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

published it separately through a small specialist publisher in the form of a 6O-page

booklet with the intimidating title Committee Decisions with Complementary
Valuation (Archive, 4IECOTII 0--15). Black and Newing's dust-jacket blurb ran:

The decisions reached by a committee must be related in some intelligible way

to the opinions of the members. The authors of this book suppose that the
members' opinions depend on two distinct sets of circumstances, i.e., that their
valuations are complementary. Various mathematical techniques are employed
to show the relationship that exists between the members' opinions and the
decision that the committee takes. Some unexpected results are obtained.
Whatever the merits or demerits of the book, it can safely be said that
there is no other which has attempted to deal with this subject.

As self-promotion, this was characteristically Duncan Black rather than Hollywood.

Some twenty copies of the book were still in Black's house at his death forty years
later.
This incident was typical of a number throughout Black's career. Through
various combinations of bad luck, editorial incompetence, Black's lack of an invisible
college of colleagues in the UK, his modesty and his caution, hardly any of his work
was published promptly. The Theory of Committees and Elections was rejected by
several publishers, including Oxford University Press, whose reader entirely failed to
understand it (Black to W H Riker, 13.3.61; 4IRIKE/2). A few other examples, from
the Archive, may stand for many. In December 1948, Joseph Goldsen of RAND
wrote to Black expressing interest in his work and asking for offprints which would
be scrutinised by 'a group of American mathematicians and political scientists'.
Black apparently asked the British Consul at San Francisco what sort of organisation
RAND was. On receiving a reply from the British Embassy in Washington that 'the
activities of the Rand Corporation are highly classified.... We understand that the
United States Air Force would much prefer that, if you decided to respond to Mr
Goldsen's enquiry, it should be communicated to the Corporation through
themselves', Black seems to have let the matter drop (4IRANDII--3). He apparently
had no wish to be a cold warrior. The two countries in which Black's work was
recognised were Italy and the USA. Black was welcomed by the emergent Italian
public choice community because of his repeated emphasis on the Italian public
finance ·school as a precursor of public choice (see, e.g., Black 1991 p. 260). At the
end of his life he was much honoured by his election as a fellow of the Accademia
Nazionale dei Lincei (4/ACAD/1--5). However, the publication of his work in Italy
was equally ill-fated. He submitted a paper on Borda Condorcet, and Laplace to the
Giornale degli Economisti in March 1951. It was accepted, but never published, and
Black seems to have received no replies to his letters asking what had happened
(4/GIORl4--7). In a letter to Sir Geoffrey Keynes, asking whether he might be
related to Maynard Keynes through a putative common ancestor, Black described
himself wistfully as 'an economist ... , not a very good one, I admit, and I wondered
Introduction xix

whether I might have some distant connection with your late distinguished brother'
(4IKEYNI1 ; 16.12.74).

5. Black and Lewis Carroll

Perhaps it was these experiences that drew Black to those other lonely and
misunderstood people in his field, the Marquis de Condorcet and Lewis Carroll. The
original drafts of The Pure Science of Politics comprised only what became Part I of
The theory of Committees and Elections. As Black states, (1958, p. xi), the historical
section on Condorcet, Borda, Laplace, Galton, Carroll and Nanson was added in the
1950s. He first discovered Condorcet (1785) in August 1948 (Black to A. de Pietri-
Tonelli, 19.11.50; 4IPIETI1). This letter implies that in 1950 he had not yet
discovered Carroll, whom he would have mentioned if he had. However, in the
following year he made notes on Carroll's activities on the Governing Body of Christ
Church, Oxford (2/1/1311). In 1953 he published an account of his discoveries
(Black 1953). Along with Robin Farquharson (see Farquharson 1969, p. 17)2, who
had discovered Carroll's pamphlets on social choice at Princeton, Black was
responsible for rescuing Carroll's lost work. He also established (1958, p. 193) that
Carroll's work was original, owing nothing to Condorcet or Borda. In The Theory of
Committees and Elections Black presents a full account of Carroll's work of the
1870s on social choice, giving the political and (Black's interpretation of) the
psychological context (Black 1958, pp. 189--213). But he ignores Carroll's other
mathematical work on voting, namely his Principles of Parliamentary
Representation (Dodgson 1884) and his 'Lawn Tennis Tournaments' (Dodgson 1883,
to be found in Woollcott 1939). Black regarded them as unimportant, and the latter
as 'quite trivial' (Black 1958 pp. 191 , 213).
Quite soon after 1958, Black changed his mind. By at least 1962, he had settled
on the view, which he held for the rest of his life, that Carroll's Principles was a very
important work in social choice. In three papers explaining it and putting it in
context, he made such extravagant claims as that it was 'the only work in Politics
worthy of being placed no more than a single notch below that of Thomas Hobbes'
(Black 1970, p. 1). Black had come to see that Carroll's work on proportional
representation (PR) relied implicitly on game-theoretical arguments of Nash
equilibrium. As game theory had not been invented and Nash not born, it was not
surprising that Carroll's pamphlet had not been understood. Black devoted much of
the rest of his life to this book, which was designed to explicate it. In the three
papers and his drafts for this book, Black also advanced his psychological theories,
linking Carroll's bouts of mathematical originality with emotional crises regarding

2 Farquharson's work also suffered long delays between writing and publication.
His 1969 book was completed in 1958. His life was lonelier and more tragic than
Black's or Carroll's: he became a schizophrenic drifter, and died in a fire on waste
ground.
xx A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

his child-friends. Thus in Black's view, the social choice pamphlets of the 1870s
were linked with Carroll's feelings about the loss of Alice Liddell ('the' Alice), and
his pamphlet of 1884 with the loss of Edith Denman, another child-friend whom
Carroll visited in September 1884 to give a talk in the Derbyshire parish of her
husband, a clergyman. In December 1884, in between the first and second editions
of Carroll's Principles, Edith Denman died of complications arising from childbirth
(Goodacre 1984). Other Lewis Carroll scholars did not share Black's view of the
relationship between Carroll's mathematics and his emotions: Roger Lancelyn Green
wrote, '[F]rankly I think you are barking up a Tum Tum tree' (Green to Black
18.2.69; 4/GREEI2)
Fortunately, however, Black was more interested in the intellect of C L
Dodgson than in the psyche of Lewis Carroll. We discuss Black on Carroll on voting
systems in the next section of this introduction. But, first, a word about Black's
annotations of Alice. Martin Gardner's justly celebrated annotations of the Alice
books and of The Hunting of the Snark (Gardner 1960, 1962, 1975, 1990) will be
familiar to most readers. Gardner is a mathematician with a long-standing interest in
the theory of voting and in quirky logicians. As theorists of voting have often been
quirky logicians, these sets intersect. (On Carroll's equally eccentric predecessor
Ramon Lull see Gardner 1983; McLean and London 1990; McLean and Urken
1995). Gardner expertly disentangles the logical and mathematical issues behind the
jokes and puzzles in Carroll's children's books. He also gives entertaining and
informative details about the national and local context. However, he missed two
points which Duncan Black makes in this book: frogs in coal, and the characters in
the Snark. On both points, we feel that Black makes a highly plausible case.
One of the fruits of Black's research in the papers of the Senior Common Room
of Christ Church is reported in Part I below. In an envelope of press cuttings
covering the years 1855 to 1862, he found three letters to The Times about frogs in
coal written in September 1862, while Carroll was expanding his original tale of
Alice's adventures for publication. Although the letters have nothing to do with
proportional representation, Black included them in his book draft. They are a
marvellous urban myth, to correspond with today's 'baby in a microwave' and 'block
of ice from an aircraft toilet' versions. As with modem urban myths, each writer
testifies solemnly that he knows somebody of unimpeachable honesty who actually
saw a live frog (or toad) jump out of a slab of coal (or marble) when it was cut.
Further authenticity is given by the deadpan authority of the letter-writers' addresses.
Who could argue with a man writing from Lilleshall Coal Depots, Great Western
Railway, Paddington? As Black says, the correspondence between the frogs in these
three letters, and the Frog Footman in the 'Pig and Pepper' chapter of Alice in
Wonderland is remarkably close. We hope that the letters about frogs in coal will
find their way into the next edition of The Annotated Alice.
More directly connected with the theme of this book is Black's conjecture about
the Bellman and the Beaver in The Hunting of the Snark Lewis Carroll frequently
repeated that
Introduction xxi

periodically I have received courteous letters from strangers, begging to

know whether 'The Hunting of the Snark' is an allegory, or contains some
hidden moral, or is a political satire: and for all such questions I have but
one answer, 'I don't know' (written in 1887; quoted by Gardner 1962, p. 17,
and by Black in Part I below).

However, at the end of his life Carroll conceded that there might be a subconscious
allegory in the story: 'the [meaning] I like best (which I think is partly my own) is
that it may be taken as an allegory for the pursuit of happiness' (written in 1897;
quoted by Gardner (1962), p. 18). Numerous writers have taken this as their cue to
identify the people Carroll was thinking about when he drew the characters in the
Snark. Both Martin Gardner and the psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre thought that
Carroll subconsciously drew himself in the tragic hero, the Baker, who forgets who
he is and who softly and suddenly vanishes away (for the Snark was a Boojum, you
see: Gardner 1962, pp. 55, 72). In Part I below Black argues for another
interpretation: Lewis Carroll is not the Baker, but the Beaver.

There was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck,

Or would sat making lace in the bow:
And had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck,
Though none of the sailors knew how.

Black's conjecture about the Beaver hangs together with his conjecture about the
Bellman, which rings true. As Black baldly says, the Bellman is H G Liddell, the
Dean (Le., president) of Christ Church, Alice's father. The persuasive subconscious
connection between Liddell and bells is that while Carroll was writing Snark, Dean
Liddell was pressing a new design for a belfry on the college. The controversy over
the belfry gave rise to Carroll's fIrst two pamphlets (Dodgson 1873, 1874) on the
theory of voting, which represented the fIrst axiomatic writing in English on the
subject. Black suggests that by proposing voting procedures which helped the
college out of its impasse over the belfry, Carroll had indeed saved them from wreck,
though few of the sailors knew how. As for the Bellman, if Black's conjecture is
right, the verses he quotes are a truly savage picture of Dean Liddell as an unctuous
authoritarian ('What I tell you three times is true'), who had no idea where he was
going ('they shortly found out! That the Captain they trusted so weill Had only one
notion for crossing the ocean,! And that was to tingle his bell'). As Black points out,
such savagery is consistent with Carroll's other Oxford pamphlets of the same period.

6. Carroll's Principles of Parliamentary Representation

In Carroll's day, the widening of the franchise in the United Kingdom was highly
topical. Conservatives might concede that it was hard to resist the principle, yet
feared that they would lose out substantially. The franchise was reformed in 1832
xxii A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

and 1867. The 1867 Refonn Act was noteworthy for a provision that some of the
large cities should each fonn a three-member district, with voters having only two
votes each. This was known as the 'limited vote', and it was introduced to the bill by
a hostile Conservative amendment in the House of Lords which the Prime Minister,
Benjamin Disraeli, unexpectedly accepted. The impact of the limited' vote on
Carroll's thinking is discussed below.
The British General Election of 1880 saw the closest approach since 1841 to
a straight two-party contest in England, Scotland, and Wales (Cox 1987, especially
Tables 9.4 and 9.5; McLean 1992). It was therefore the best illustration for forty
years of the exaggerative effect of the relative majority (first-past-the-post) electoral
system. For some years since its rediscovery by Kendall and Stuart {I 950), this has
been known as the cube law, because in the circumstances that obtained in 1880, the
ratio of seats won by the two largest parties can be expected to be the cube of the
ratio of their votes. (For a more general fonnula giving estimates to cover a wider
range of circumstances see Taagepera and Shugart (l989), chaps. 14 and 16). The
Marquess of Salisbury, leader of the Conservatives, noted this effect for the general
election of 1880, saw that the Liberal lead in votes had produced an exaggerated lead
in seats, and claimed that unless the 1884 extension of the franchise was
accompanied by a redistribution of seats the result could be the destruction of the
Conservatives in parliament even if their share of the vote was reduced only slightly
or not at all by the franchise extension. He showed that if the electorate of a
seventeen-seat legislature with single-member districts was split between imaginary
parties which he named 'Catholics' and 'Liberals' in the proportion eight to nine, there
were two circumstances in which the 'Liberals' would win all seventeen seats: where
the population was exactly evenly mixed, and where it was completely segregated
(say into a 'Liberal' city surrounded by 'Catholic' countryside), but constituencies
were drawn in such a way (in this case, radia\1y from the city centre) that each
constituency contained the same ratio of 'Catholics' to 'Liberals' as the population
(Salisbury 1884).
Ireland was even more threatening. Since 1874 and especia\1y since 1880,
seats in Catholic Ireland had been falling to militant supporters of Home Rule, who
used every procedural means open to them to disrupt Parliament. The franchise
refonn of 1884 proposed to extend the franchise in Ireland, as in the rest of the
country, to rural householders. Would this not mean a great boost to Pame\1, the
Home Rule leader, with consequent threats to public order and the unity of the UK?
The uncomfortable truth was best pointed out by Sir John Lubbock, one of the saner
advocates ofPR, in the autumn of 1884:

At the general election of 1880, 86 seats were contested. Of these the

Home-rulers secured 52, the Liberal[s] and Conservatives together only 34.
Yet the Home-rule electors were only 48,000, while the Liberals and
Conservatives together were no less than 105,000 . . . . we are told .. . that
under the new Redistribution Act the Home-Rulers will secure 90 seats out
of 100, leaving only a dozen to the Liberals and Conservatives together. ...
Introduction xxiii

out of Ulster it is probable that scarcely a single Liberal or Conservative

member will be returned. The result of this system, then, will be that
Ireland will be entirely misrepresented, and that we shall have gratuitously
created serious and unnecessary difficulties for ourselves. To adopt, indeed,
a system of representation by which we shall exclude from the
representation of Ireland one-third of the electors, and give almost the
whole power to two-thirds, would, under any circumstances, be unjust; but
to do so when the one-third comprise those who are moderate and loyal,
while the two-thirds are led by men not only opposed to the Union, but in
many cases animated by a bitter and extraordinary hatred of this country,
seems to be an act of political madness. (Lubbock 1885, pp. 20--21).

Lubbock went on to draw an analogy from the US Presidential election of 1860, in

which Abraham Lincoln won an absolute majority of the Electoral College on less
than 40 per cent of the vote. Lubbock's prediction was exactly correct. The Home
Rulers won eighty-five seats in the ensuing General Election and continued to do so
at every election until 1910. Anglo-Irish war was about to break out in 1914 but was
delayed for the First World War to take place. The Irish war lasted from 1919 to
1922, and some would say it has not yet ended (although 1994 has seen a truce, and
possibly peace). Thus electoral systems have important consequences.
This then is the anxious context in which Carroll wrote his PrinCiples.
Carroll was a political Conservative as well as a temperamental conservative. He
met Salisbury and his family in 1870, for once (uncharacteristically) using his fame
as the author of Alice to obtain an introduction to Salisbury's wife and daughters
(Cohen 1979, p. 211). Despite the gulfs of class and temperament, Carroll was
welcomed by the Salisbury family and spent the New Year at their great house,
Hatfield, several times in the 1870s and 1880s. Carroll seems to have thought about
PR for the first time in 1882, in connection with college politics (see his diary entry
for 17 May 1882 in Green 1953, pp. 405--6), but it was the reform crisis of 1884 that
brought him into print. He wrote several letters on it to the St James's Gazette, his
ideas evolving continuously. In June he hit on the most distinctive feature of his
scheme, 'the giving to each candidate the power of transferring to any other candidate
the votes given for him' (Diary for 3 June 1884 in Green 1953, p. 426). In July he
sent it to Salisbury saying 'How I wish the enclosed could have appeared as your
scheme. . .. That some such scheme is needed, and much more needed than any
scheme for mere redistribution of electoral districts, I feel sure.' Salisbury replied
immediately, acknowledging the need for electoral reform but stressing the difficulty
of getting a hearing for 'anything. .. absolutely new. .. however Conservative.'
Carroll replied the next day. After congratulating Salisbury for a speech in the
House of Lords in which he had insisted that the Conservatives would not accept
franchise reform unless it was linked with redistribution, Carroll went on 'please
don't call my scheme for Proportionate Representation a 'Conservative' one.... all I
aim at is to secure that, whatever be the proportions of opinion among the Electors,
the same shall exist among the Members' (the three letters are partly quoted and
xxiv A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

partly paraphrased in Cohen 1979, pp. 544--5). The House of Lords did indeed
return the franchise bill to the Commons with an added clause insisting that it must
be 'accompanied by provisions for so apportioning the right to return members of
parliament as to insure a true and fair representation of the people' (quoted by Hart
1992, p. 107). This amendment was moved by Earl Cairns, the same peer who had
inserted the limited vote provision into the 1867 Reform Act. We do not know how
far the Lords' motives - those of the majority Conservative peers, in particular -
reflected self-interest and how far a desire for fair representation. It may be pointless
to try to separate the two, as fair representation was expected to mean, in Britain,
protecting the Conservatives from being wiped out in terms of seats in a General
Election where they came narrowly second in terms of votes. Salisbury may have
wished to preserve the limited vote (Hart 1992, p. 111), but in the end went down a
different road.
Like Sir John Lubbock, Carroll saw that Salisbury had failed to accept the
implications of his own argument. No redistribution that retained single-member
districts with the plurality voting rule could be guaranteed to save the Conservatives
in Britain or either of the British parties in Ireland. As Salisbury (1884) himself
pointed out and as Carroll repeated in his Principles of Parliamentary
Representation, single-member districts combined with an even distribution of
supporters of two parties around the country could lead to the larger of the two
wiping out the smaller in terms of seats. It seems that Salisbury could not shift his
perspective from majoritarian to proportional in order to see the true implications of
his own argument. At this point, the concepts of political and physical
proportionality interact with one another. Conservative supporters were fairly evenly
spread around Great Britain; Irish Nationalists were heavily concentrated in Ireland.
Salisbury's mind turned to a scheme which achieved physical proportionality in
Britain (although not in Ireland). He masterminded the scheme of single-member
districts 'according to the occupation of the people' that was embodied in the
Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. This scheme, the outcome of bipartisan
negotiations in the autumn of 1884, has frequently been hailed as Salisbury's stroke
of genius (e.g., by Comford 1963). It constructed suburban seats where the new
concentration of Conservative voters was to be found in what contemporaries called
the 'villa vote'. However, we cannot say whether it would have saved the
Conservatives if the debacle Salisbury feared had come about. For in 1886 the
Liberals were tom apart over Irish Home Rule, leading to a twenty-year Conservative
hegemony not foreseen by Salisbury or anybody else in 1884. Thus no
Conservative, in the end, had to take Carroll's arguments seriously out of self-
interest.
It is unfortunate that points that Carroll took for granted and passed over
quickly were exactly the ones that mainstream politicians could not accept, even
when it was in their own interest. Carroll takes for granted both that guaranteeing
the survival of minorities in parliament requires multi-member districts and some
form of minority representation (which the politicians should have accepted but did
not) and that the number of electors per MP should be equal (which almost no
Introduction xxv

parliamentarian in the 1884 debates did). This was probably enough on its own to
blind contemporaries to the more striking features of The Principles and may have
misled Black into his initial dismissal of them
The Principles is the earliest known work to discuss both the assignment of
seats to each of a number of multi-member districts (the apportionment problem) and
the assignment of seats within each district to the parties (the PR problem). Not until
Balinski and Young (1982) was the formal similarity between the two problems fully
understood. Carroll largely understood, although he makes one mistaken statement
in his section on apportionment, saying that electoral equality requires

That each Elector, who is represented at all, should be represented by the

same fraction of a Member. Or (which is the same thing) that each Member
should represent the same number of Electors (Dodgson 1884, p. 3).

But minimising variance in fractions of a seat per elector is not the same as
minimising variance in electors per seat. To minimise the frrst, an arithmetic-mean
divisor rule is needed; to minimise the second, a harmonic-mean divisor rule is
needed (for explanations, see Balinski and Young 1982; McLean and Mortimore
1992). Apportionment, like social choice, is a subject that has been periodically
discovered, lost, and rediscovered. It seems likely from Black's collection of
offprints that he was on the trail of this lost literature. For during the 1960s he had
collected papers by the Harvard mathematician E V Huntington, who in the 1920s
had produced what was then thought to be the optimal scheme for apportionment of
seats in the House of Representatives to the states. Huntington was the founder of
the modem study of apportionment, and also a little-recognised precursor of Black's
great rival Kenneth Arrow. Huntington proposed (what is now known as Arrow's
axiom of) Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives as a criterion for aggregation rules
(Huntington 1938; McLean 1995). Black was also reading Sawyer and MacRae
(1962) and possessed a copy of other papers on voting procedures in Illinois,
including Moore (1920) (c.f. also Black Archive 5/2IBLAUI; 5/2IHYNEIl). These
papers discuss the cumulative voting scheme introduced in Illinois by its 1870
Constitutional Convention. Black, in his annotations, notes the similarity between
the Illinois scheme and Carroll's proposals. These schemes have not been generally
studied by social choice writers. 3
For the assignment of seats to parties, Carroll recommends the standard
('Droop') quota Qd = V/(S + I), rounded up to the next integer, where V = total votes
cast and S = number of seats to fill, though he does not cite H R Droop and there is
no reason to suppose he read him. He parts company with the Proportional

3 Goldburg (1994) has rediscovered Sawyer and MacRae (1962) and notes how
that paper is a pioneer of game-theoretic analysis of a voting procedure. Her paper
follows similar lines to Black's exposition of Lewis Carroll in the main part of this
book. She cites a few other writers who have used Sawyer and MacRae's data, but
not either Carroll or Black.
xxvi A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Representation Society, whose literature he does cite, because he shows that its rules
(still the standard rules for Single Transferable Vote) could lead to the defeat of a
candidate who had obtained a Droop quota. This cannot happen at the fIrst stages of
an STY election, but Carroll shows that it can happen at subsequent stages. Indeed,
though Carroll is not at all in a Condorcetian mood in The Principles, he could have
pointed out that in his example STY elects the Condorcet loser among the last three
candidates. He briskly concludes that he has 'suffIciently proved the fallacy of its
method for disposing of surplus votes.... Clearly somebody must have authority to
dispose of them: it cannot be the Elector (as we have proved); it will never do to refer
it to a Committee. There remains the Candidate himself, for whom the votes have
been given.' Some may fmd this reasoning too much like Lewis Carroll's rather than
Charles L Dodgson's, but if it seems bizarre, note that it flows from an assumption
that Carroll shared with the STY school and that precluded Carroll from seeing the
problem in a way in which either the Borda winner or the Condorcet winner would
have been relevant. From a social choice perspective, the root problem of STY and
all other elimination systems is that they use information about voters' preferences
other than their frrst in an arbitrary way. The n + ph preference of a voter whose nth
preference has been eliminated is counted. The n + I th preference of a voter whose
nth preference has been elected with a surplus is counted with reduced weight, and
the n + I th preference of a voter whose nth preference is elected with nothing to spare
is not counted. Thus preference orderings are not treated equally. When writing
about majority rule, Carroll had shown himself well aware about this; when writing
about PR, he did not consider it.
Having, as he sees it, disposed of the conventional case for PR, Carroll goes on
to his constructive argument, which is both compressed and elliptical. As Black was
the frrst to see, it is essentially an argument to establish the Nash equilibrium strategy
for two parties. Carroll considers the class of methods in which voters may each cast
v unranked ballots in an m-member district (v:;; m). This was topical because of the
'limited vote' which operated in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool etc. with v = 2
and m = 3, and in the City of London with v = 3 and m = 4. In Birmingham, the
Liberals had manipulated the limited vote by dividing the city into three zones, and
asking their supporters in each zone to vote for a different pair of the Liberal
candidates. They thus won all three seats in each of the general elections in the
period. In 1874 the Conservatives did not run at all. In 1868 the Liberals controlled
73.1% of the votes cast, and in 1880 they controlled 67.2%.4
Were the Birmingham parties rational strategists? This may be answered
directly from Carroll's pamphlet, once his reasoning is understood. Carroll was
aware (but unfortunately failed to make explicit) that, given perfect information and

4 Source: Craig 1977. In 1868 and 1880 the Liberals put up three candidates and
the Conservatives two. The number of Liberal voters was calculated by dividing the
sum of the votes for the three candidates by two; the number of Conservative voters
was taken as the number of votes for the more successful of the two Conservative
candidates.
Introduction xxvii

common knowledge about party strengths, the maximin (and Nash equilibrium)
strategy for each party is to put up exactly as many candidates as it can fill seats if it
instructs its supporters to divide their ballots among its candidates as evenly as
possible. Carroll aims to fmd the voting procedure which leaves the fewest voters
'unrepresented', that is, whose votes do not contribute to the outcome. Carroll took
this idea from the PR literature of his day which, then as now, sought to minimise the
number of votes which a procedure 'wasted'. His conclusion is that, for the class of
voting procedures he considers, the fairest - in the sense that, ex ante, it leaves the
fewest voters 'unrepresented' - is that where v = 1 for any m, and that the fairness of
the system increases with m. The limited vote had been introduced by the anti-
democrat Lord Cairns, but Carroll had found a democratic justification for it. In
other words, the fairest of this class of systems is that which divides the country into
multi-member constituencies in which each voter has only one vote. This is the
system used in Japan for national elections from the end of the Second World War
until 1993, and generally labelled Single Non-Iransferable Yote. SNTV is also used
in Taiwan and formerly in Korea (Cox and Niou 1994); a limited vote system is used
for the Spanish Senate (Lijphart, Lopez Pintor and Sone 1986). Note that Carroll's
concept of 'fairness' is an important one, which is not liable to the criticism levelled
by, e.g.,Dummett (1984, pp. 214--5, 278--80) and Barry (1986, pp. 88--128) against
the proponents of STY. As used in controversy about the merits of proportional
representation, the concept of a 'wasted vote' is undefmed because, as Dummett and
Barry point out, ex post it cannot be determined which votes were wasted. Carroll's
stochastic ex ante defmition is important and should be dusted off.
If we look up Carroll's table (see p. 160 below), we find that for v = 2 and
m = 3, aparty with at least 61 % of the vote can guarantee to win all three seats. Thus
in Birmingham the Liberal strategy was optimal. Conservative strategy was optimal
in 1874, and suboptimal in 1868 and 1880, at any rate in the narrow perspective of
Carroll's game. If it was common knowledge that the Liberals controlled over 60%
of the probable voters, there was no point in the Conservatives' running candidates,
unless for the purpose of forcing an election and putting the Liberals to some
expense.
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass .are based on games, the
latter being explicitly a game of chess. Black was the first to see that Carroll's
writings about voting were also about games. Carroll's life was devoted to being
serious about games and gamelike about serious things. Occasionally Carroll
actually refers to a 'game' (see., e g. ., Black 1958, pp 232--3). But his more
remarkable achievement is to have written about voting in game-theoretic terms,
before game theory had been invented. One important paper, 'Lawn Tennis
Tournaments', is about games in both senses. It shows how the conventional knock-
out competition 5 is a dreadful way to rank players, as all players beyond the first-

5 Also known in sporting parlance as 'single elimination tournaments', such

competitions are quite familiar. Contestants are paired and eliminated after their first
xxviii A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

place winner may achieve their places more through a fortunate draw than through
skill or good play. Carroll's discussion anticipated concepts that appeared much later
in the literature on social welfare functions and choice from tournaments (Miller
1980; Moulin 1988; on 'Lawn Tennis Tournaments' itself see Knuth 1973, pp. 209--
11).
Carroll's result on SNTV has been independently rediscovered in a series of
papers by Gary Cox and collaborators (Cox 1991, 1993; Cox and Niou 1994; Cox
and Rosenbluth 1993, 1994). Under- and over-nomination in the limited vote in
Japan and Spain are discussed by Lijphart, Lopez Pintor and Sone (1986). Cox's
approach differs from Carroll's in that he postulates rational voters rather than
rational parties (although in Cox and Niou 1994 the focus is on rational parties, in
exactly the same way as in our and Carroll's discussions of Birmingham). But the
outcomes of a procedure in which voters seek to avoid wasting their votes and of one
in which parties seek to minimise waste of 'their' votes are essentially the same.

7. The Making of This Book

As stated above, Duncan Black originally believed that Lewis Carroll's work on PR
was much less important than his work on majority rule. Within a short time of
publishing The Theory of Committees and Elections in 1958, however, Black had
changed his mind. He started to collect material for papers and a book on Lewis
Carroll's theory of proportional representation. Three of the papers were published,
attracting no attention at all (Black 1967, 1969, 1970). However, the book was never
fmished. Indeed, it became a kind of Penelope's web, occupying the last 30 years of
Black's life. He described it as almost fmished in the late 1960s. But he conducted a
20-year argument with himself on what to leave out and what to put in. He wrote
down plans and sections as they occurred to him, usually dating them as he wrote in
the out-of-date page-per-day desk diaries that he used as notebooks. Several times
we have transcribed documents with care, only to come across a dispiriting message
at the end such as 'This is all rubbish'.
Nevertheless, the outline of the intended book was always clear. In the fIrst
search of Black's house after his death, one of us (lMcL) and Black's editor at
Kluwer Academic Publishers came across a chapter plan for the book. Discovering
the chapters themselves took much longer, but from that day we were sure that there
was a book in the four roomfuls of material that was removed from Black's house - if
only we could fmd the component parts. Later, the problem turned from shortage to
glut. There were many, many different versions of most of the parts, and we were
faced with the tricky task of selecting the best. A common device in this situation is
to look for the latest in each case, as representing the author's fInal thoughts. This
was always too neat for our problem, and we suspect it is too neat in many other

loss. First-round winners are paired and again losers are eliminated. This continues
until a single contestant remains as the unbeaten winner.
Introduction XXIX

cases as well. An author does not usually know exactly when he is going to die.
Which of us, in returning to revise our work, steadily improves it at every revision
until the arbitrary day we die? Certainly not Duncan Black, on his own admission.
He went through spells of physical illness and mental depression when he felt certain
that he was not working at his best - and we agree with him. On the other hand,
consistently choosing the earliest version of each part does not work either. During
his many years of work on Lewis Carroll, Black made clear discoveries and
improvements.
Therefore, no mechanical rule for selecting versions was available for us. We
have had to use our editorial judgment to select what seems to us the best - most
coherent, most concise, most comprehensive, as circumstances seemed to demand -
version of each section. Anybody who wishes to re-examine our editorial judgments
has the same primary material as we had. All the versions we have found of every
chapter - from substantial typescripts to short notes on tom pieces of paper - are in
the Duncan Black Archive, and catalogued in McMillan (1994). We have also tried
to be as unobtrusive as possible. Everything in Parts I--III below is by Duncan
Black, except where we have marked essential additions by square brackets []. We
do not always agree with Black's interpretations. Some of our disagreements are in
this Introduction. In other cases, we have left it up to the reader to evaluate Black's
interpretation. A statement that we disagreed with it would merely be setting the
opinions of three people who know something about the subject of the book against
those of the one person who knew more about it than anybody else.
All of Black's chapter plans made it clear that the book was to be in three parts
written by himself, followed by a reprint of Carroll's Principles of Parliamentary
Representation and its main sources, as Black saw them. Part I is biographical,
introducing Lewis Carroll and giving relevant details of his life. It includes a few
things, such as the cuttings about frogs in coal, which are nothing to do with
proportional representation. But to have cut them out would have been puritanical.
Black intended this part to be made up from lectures he had given at various
American campuses, including the University of Virginia and Tulane University, and
from the biographical material he had already put into The Theory of Committees and
Elections. We had to include some of the latter for the sake of the flow of Black's
argument, and to make this book free-standing, but we have tried to minimise
material duplicated from the earlier book. Part I also contains Black's exploration of
Lewis Carroll's logical mind through the records he kept as Curator of the Senior
Common Room at Christ Church. Because of its origin as lectures, some of Black's
presentation in this part is quite informal, but we have not attempted to change this.
The core of Part II is Black's already published work on Lewis Carroll (Black
1967, 1969, 1970). We have edited it to bring in Black's later thoughts, put the three
papers together in what seemed to be the most logical order, and eliminated
repetition as far as possible.
Part III presented our greatest challenge. It comprises the more detailed
arguments about Carroll's reasoning, and his relationships with earlier writers on PR,
that Black intended to use to supplement Part II. There are many plans in the Black
xxx A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

papers for the intended arrangement of the sections within this part. They are not all
the same, and we have not been able to follow any of them slavishly, partly because
of missing material. Again, we have done our best to produce a coherent and
flowing argument, taking the best version of each piece that we could find.
Part IV will, we hope, be useful independently of the rest of the book. The
texts we reproduce are extremely scarce. None of them had seen the light of day this
century until McLean and Urken (1995), which reprints PPR but not the others.
They may be read along with Jenifer Hart's Proportional Representation: critics of
the British electoral systems 1820--1945 (Hart 1992).
We hope that we have shown that Duncan Black, who was educated in the
department where Adam Smith once taught, was as broad in his interests as his great
predecessor. (There are no surviving Smith materials in the University of Glasgow
Archives, and the staff there have been exceptionally helpful in ensuring that Black
does not meet the same fate) . Some of the contents of the archive are drawn on in
this book; others, we hope, will appear in a new edition of The Theory of
Committees and Elections and perhaps in another volume of Black's unpublished
papers. But there is much which will be in none of the books but has been preserved
in the archive. We hope that other users will fmd it as fascinating as we have.
Black obviously had deep empathy with Lewis Carroll. His own attitude to sex
was as puritanical as Carroll's (and he worried greatly whether Carroll ever did
anything improper with his child friends despite the lack of any evidence that he
did). He occasionally criticises Carroll - for the savagery of his attacks on Dean
Liddell in Part I below, and for his failure to acknowledge James Garth Marshall and
Walter Baily in Parts II and III. But there is more extravagant praise than criticism in
the pages that follow . This book is the second of Black's sustained efforts to restore
the reputation of Lewis Carroll as a serious logician. It complements the work of
others who currently aim to rescue Carroll's reputation in other branches of his
mathematical work (especially Seneta 1984, 1993; Abeles 1993; Knuth 1973, pp.
209--11). But it is more than that. It is the tribute of one misunderstood and lonely
scholar to another.
Many Carroll scholars have commented on the poignant tone of Carroll's
comments on the grown-up Alice in Through the Looking-Glass (published when she
was nineteen). Carroll now saw himself as 'half a life asunder' from Alice in the
dedicatory poem6 and, parodying himself as the White Knight, took his farewell
from her in chapter VIII:

6 Did A E Housman have this line of Carroll's in mind when he wrote of his own
wrenching separation from Moses Jackson in 1898?:

He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?

He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.
Introduction xxxi

So she went on talking to herself, as she watched the horse walking leisurely
along the road, and the Knight tumbled off first on one side and then on the
other. After the fourth or fifth tumble he reached the tum, and then she waved
her handkerchief to him, and waited till he was out of sight. 'I hope it
encouraged him,' she said, as she turned to run down the hill ....

Duncan Black felt for Lewis Carroll what Alice felt for the White Knight.
But the fate of Black's work to date raises broader questions. How could so
original a thinker be so scandalously neglected in his lifetime? Admittedly, Black's
work has been given something like its due in the U.S.A. and in Italy, but it remains
almost unknown in his native land. Academe is not always kind to innovators. Just
as James Watson (who was supposed to be researching polio) and Francis Crick
(who was supposed to be a physicist) were warned off working on DNA in the early
1950s, so Black reports that in 1942 'it had been brought to my attention that my
main effort during the preceding years had produced no tangible result' (see above).
The theory of voting is marked by repeated inventions, losses, and rediscoveries. For
instance, strategic voting was discussed by Pliny the Younger in AD 105. A matrix
method for pairwise comparison among more than two options was proposed by
Ramon Lull in 1299 (McLean and London 1990). The Borda count was invented by
Nicholas of Cusa, ca. 1435. The fundamentals of the theory of voting were laid by
Borda, Condorcet, and a few others in late 18th-century France, only to be lost
completely until Black rediscovered them. The same is true for Carroll's writings of
the 1870s and 1880s. (McLean and Urken 1995 collects all these texts together). In
modem times, economists have neglected the theory of voting as it is only barely part
of economics, while political scientists have neglected it mostly out of sheer
ignorance. At least Black's own bad luck seems to have made him sympathise with
his equally unlucky predecessors Condorcet and Carroll. For that we should be
grateful, as it led to Black's fine work in the history of social choice.

References for the Introduction

Abeles, F. (ed.) (1994) The Mathematical Pamphlets o/Charles L. Dodgson Charlottesville,

VA :University of Virginia Press.

Andrae, P. (1926) Andrae and his Invention, The PR Method (Translated by V. Meisling)
Copenhagen: P. Andrae.

Arrow, K. 1. (1951) Social Choice and Individual Values New York: Wiley.

Housman, Additional Poems VII; see Page (1983), pp. 86,184--5.

xxxii A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Baily, W. (1869) A Scheme/or Proportional Representation London: Ridgway.

Baily, W. (1872) Proportional Representation in Large Constituencies London: Ridgway.

Balinski, M. L. and Young, H . P. (1982) Fair Representation New Haven: Yale University
Press.

Barry, B. (1986) 'Wasted votes and other mares' nests: a view of electoral reform'. Pasadena,
CA: Caltech Social Science Working Paper 612.

Barry, B. and Hardin, R. (eds.) (1982) Rational Man and Irrational Society? an introduction
and sourcebook London: Sage.

Black, D. (1948a) 'On the rationale of group decision-making', Journal 0/ Political Economy
56: 23--34.

Black, D. (1948b) 'Un approcio alia teoria delle decisioni di comitato', Giornale degli
Economisti May--Iune: 1--23 .

Black, D. (l948c) 'The decisions of a committee using a special majority', Econometrica 16:
245--61.

Black, D. (1948d) 'The elasticity of committee decisions with an altering size of majority',
Econometrica 16: 262--70.

Black, D. (1949a) 'The theory of elections in single-member constituencies', Canadian

Journal o/Economics and Political Science 15: 158--75.

Black, D. (l949b) 'Some theoretical schemes of proportional representation', Canadian

Journal o/Economics and Political Science 15: 334--43.

Black, D. (l949c) 'The elasticity of committee decisions with alterations in the members'
preference schedules', South A/rican Journal 0/ Economics 17: 88--102.

Black, D. (1953) 'Discovery of Lewis Carroll documents', Notes and Queries 198 (2): 77--9.

Black, D. (1958) The Theory o/Committees and Elections Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Black, D. (1967) 'The central argument in Lewis Carroll's The Principles 0/ parliamentary
representation', Papers in Non-market Decision-making 3: 1--17.
Introduction xxxiii

Black, D. (1969) 'Lewis Carroll and the theory of games', American Economic Review.
Proceedings May: 206--10.

Black, D. (1970) 'Lewis Carroll and the Cambridge mathematical school of P.R.; Arthur
Cohen and Edith Denman', Public Choice 8: 1--28.

Black, D. (1991) 'Arrow's work and the normative theory of committees', Journal of
Theoretical Politics 3: 259--76.

Black, D. and Newing, R. A. (1951) Committee Decisions with Complementary Valuation

Glasgow: William Hodge.

Caimcross, (Sir) A. (1992) 'From theory to policy-making - economics as a profession',

Banco Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review 180: 3--20.

Caimcross, (Sir) A. (1993) Transcript of interview with I. McLean and A. McMillan, Oxford,
22.7.93.

Catlin, G. E. G. (1927) The Science and Method of Politics London: Kegan Paul.

Coase, R. H. (1937) The nature of the firm', Economica (new series) 4: 386--405.

Coase, R. H. (1981) 'Duncan Black: a biographical sketch'. In: G. Tullock (ed.), Toward a
Science of Politics: Papers in honor of Duncan Black Blacksburg, VA :VPI Public Choice
Center.

Coase, R. H. (1993) 'Duncan Black 1908--1991', Proceedings of the British Academy 82:
353--65.

Cohen, M. N. (ed.) (1979) The Letters of Lewis Carroll (2 vols continuously paginated)
London: Macmillan.

Condorcet, M.1. A. N. de Caritat, marquis de (1785) Essai sur I'application de I'analyse Ii fa

probabilite des decisions rendues Ii la pluralite des vou Paris: Imprimerie Royale.

Comford, 1. (1963) 'The transformation of Conservatism in the late nineteenth century',

Victorian Studies 7: 35--66.

Cox, G. (1987) The EffiCient Secret: the Cabinet and the Development of Political Parties in
Victorian England Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cox, G. (1991) 'SNTV and d'Hondt are "equivalent"', Electoral Studies \0: 118--32.
xxxiv A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Cox, G. (1993) 'Strategic voting equilibria under the single non-transferable vote', paper for
APSA, Washington, DC, September.

Cox, G. and McCubbins, M. (1993) Legislative Leviathan: party government in the House
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Cox, G. and Niou, E. (1994) 'Seat bonuses under the Single Nontransferable Vote system:
evidence from Japan and Taiwan', Comparative Politics 26: 221--36.

Cox, G. and Rosenbluth. F. (1993) 'The electoral fortunes of legislative factions in Japan',
American Political Science Review 87: 577--89.

Cox, G. and Rosenbluth, F . (1994) 'Reducing nomination errors: factional competition and
party strategy in Japan', Electoral Studies 13 : 4--16.

Craig, F. W. S. (ed.) (1977) British Parliamentary Election Results 1832-1885 London:

Macmillan.

D'Hondt, V. (1885) Expose du systeme pratique de representation proportionelle adopte par

Ie comire de l'Association Reformiste Beige Ghent: Association Reformiste Beige.

Dodgson, C. L. (1873) 'A discussion of the various methods of procedure in conducting

elections' (Oxford: privately printed). In Black (1958), pp. 214--22.

Dodgson, C. L. (1874) 'Suggestions as to the best method of taking votes, where more than
two issues are to be voted on' (Oxford: privately printed). In Black (1958) pp. 222--4.

Dodgson, C. L. (1876) 'A method of taking votes on more than two issues' (Oxford: privately
printed). In Black (1958) pp. 224--34.

Dodgson, C. L. (1883) 'Lawn Tennis tournaments', letters to the St James' Gazette, reprinted
in A. Woollcott (1939).

Dodgson, C.L. (1884) The Principles of Parliamentary Representation London: Harrison &
Sons.

Dodgson, C. L. (1885) 'Supplement' and 'Postscript to Supplement' to The Principles of

Parliamentary Representation London: Harrison & Sons.

Downing, P. B., and Stafford, E. A. (1981) 'Citations as an indicator of classic works and
major contributions in social choice', Public Choice 37: 219--30.

Downs, A. (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy New York: Harper & Row.
Introduction xxxv

Droop, H. R. (1869) On the political and social effects of different methods of electing
representatives, Papers Read before the Juridical Society 3: 469--507.

Droop. H. R. (1881) 'On methods of electing representatives', Journal of the Statistical

Society44: 141--202.

Dummett, M. (1984) Voting Procedures Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Farquharson, R. (1969) Theory of Voting Oxford: Blackwell.

Follett, M. P. (1918) The New State: Group Organisation the Solution of PopUlar
Government New York: Longmans Green & Co.

Gardner, M. (1960) The Annotated Alice London: Anthony Blond.

Gardner, M. (1962) The Annotated Snark New York: Simon & Schuster.

Gardner, M. (1975) The Annotated Alice (2nd edn.) London: Nelson.

Gardner, M. (1983) Logic Machines and Diagrams (2nd edn.) Brighton: Harvester Press.

Gardner, M. (1990) More Annotated Alice New York: Random House.

Goldburg, C. B. (1994) 'The accuracy of game theory predictions for political behavior:
cumulative voting in Illinois revisited', Journal of Politics 56: 885--900.

Goodacre, S. H. (1984) Feeding the Mind: a Centenary Celebration of Lewis Carrol/'s visit to
Aljreton in 1884 Burton on Trent: Parker & Son for the author.

Green, R. L. ed. (1953) The Diaries of Lewis Carroll (2 vols. continuously paginated)
London: Cassell.

Grofman, B. (1981). 'The theory of committees and elections: the legacy of Duncan Black' in
Tullock, G. (ed.) Toward a Science of Politics: Papers in honor of Duncan Black
(Blacksburg, VA: VPI Public Choice Center), pp. 11--57.

Hare, T. (1859) The Election of Representatives, Parliamentary and Municipal: A Treatise

London: Longmans Green.

Hare, T. (1873) The Election of Representatives, Parliamentary and Municipal: A Treatise

(4th ed.) London: Longmans Green.

Huntington, E.V. (1938) 'A paradox in the scoring of competing teams', Science 88 : 287--8.
xxxvi A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Kendall, M. G., and Stuart, A. (1950) 'The law of cubic proportion in election results', British
Journal ofSociology I: 183--97.

Knuth, D. E. (1973) The Art of Computer Programming Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, vol.
3.

Lijphart, A. and Gibberd, R. (1977) 'Thresholds and payoffs in list systems of proportional
representation', European Journal of Political Research 5: 219--44.

Lijphart, A., Lopez Pintor, R., and Sone, Y (1986) 'The Limited Vote and the Single
Nontransferable Vote: lessons from the Japanese and Spanish examples' in B. Grofman and
A. Lijphart (eds.) Electoral laws and their political consequences (New York: Agathon
Press) pp. 154--69.

Lubbock, Sir 1. (1885) Representation London: Swan Sonnenschein.

Lytton, R. (1864) 'Report on the election of representatives for the Rigsraad' in Great Britain:
Parliamentary Papers 1864 vol. LXI pp. 596--9.

McKelvey, R. D. (1979) 'General conditions for global intransitivities in formal voting

models', Econometrica 47 : 1085--111.

McLean, I. (1991) 'Forms of representation and systems of voting' in D. Held (ed.) Political
Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press) pp. 172--96.

McLean, I. (1992) 'Rational choice and the Victorian voter', Political Studies 40: 496--515.

McLean, I. (1995) 'Independence of irrelevant alternatives before Arrow', forthcoming in

Mathematical Social Sciences.

McLean, I. and London, J. (1990) 'The Borda and Condorcet principles: three medieval
applications', Social Choice and Welfare 7: 99--108.

McLean, I. and Mortimore, R. (1992) 'Apportionment and the Boundary Commission for
England', Electoral Studies II: 293--309.

McLean, I. and Urken, A. B.(ed. and trans.) (1995) Classics of Social Choice Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.

[McMillan, A.] (1994) Catalogue of the Duncan Black Archive at Glasgow University
Glasgow: Uiniversity Archives and Business Records Centre.

Marshall, J. G. (1853) Minorities and Majorities: their relative rights. A letter to the Lord
John Russell, MP on parliamentary reform London: James Ridgway.
Introduction xxxvii

May, K. O. (1952) 'A set of independent, necessary, and sufficient conditions for simple
majority decision', Econometrica 20: 680--4.

Miller, N. R. (1980) 'A new solution set for tournaments and majority voting: further graph-
theoretical approaches to the theory of voting', American Journal of Political Science 24: 68--
96.

Mitchell, W. C. (1993) 'Prolegomenon to public choice: the aborted work of George E. G.

Catlin', Public Choice 77: 445--53.

Moore, H. F. [1920] The History of Cumulative Voting and Minority Representation in

Illinois, 1870-1919 (revised edition) Urbana: University of 1llinois.

Moulin, H. (1988) Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Mueller, D. C.(1989) Public Choice II Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nanson, E. 1. [1882] (1907) Methods of election. Paper read to Royal Society of Victoria on
12 October 1882. Printed in Reports . . . respecting the application of the principle of
proportional representation to public elections, Cd. 3501, pp. 123--41. London : HMSO.

Page, N. (1983) A. E. Housman: acritical biography London: Macmillan.

Saari, D. G. (1994) Geometry of Voting Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.

Sainte-Lagut!, A. (1910) 'La representation et la methode des moindres carrees', Comptes-

rendus hebdomadaires de l'Academie des sciences [de Paris] 151: 377--8. English translation
in Lijphart and Gibberd (1977).

Salisbury, 3rd Marquess of (1884) 'The value of redistribution: a note on electoral statistics',
National Review 4: 145--62.

Sawyer, 1. and MacRae, D. (1962), 'Game theory and cumulative voting in 1llinois: 1902-
1954,' American Political Science Review 61 : 936--46.

Sen, A. K. (1970) Collective Choice and Social Welfare Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd.

Seneta. E. (1984) 'Lewis Carroll as a probabilist and mathematician', Mathematical Scientist

9: 79--94.

Seneta, E. (1993) 'Lewis Carroll's "Pillow Problems": on the 1993 centenary', Statistical
Science 8: 180--6.
xxxviii A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Taagepera, R., and Shugart, M. S. (1989) Seats and Votes: the effects and determinants of
electoral systems New Haven: Yale University Press.

Tullock, G. (ed.) (1981) Toward a Science of Politics: Papers in honor of Duncan Black
Blacksburg, VA: VPI Public Choice Center.

White, A. K. (1945) The Character of British Democracy Glasgow : Craig & Wilson.

Woollcott, A. (ed.) (1939) The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll London: Nonesuch Press.
The life and logic of Lewis Carroll

Part 1, The Life and Logic of Lewis Carroll

The external events of Lewis Carroll's life were simple. His real name was Charles
Lutwidge Dodgson, and he was a third child, being the eldest son, in a family of
seven girls and four boys. On both sides, the family was well-connected and long
settled in Northumberland, where they had scores of cousins. His father, a Church of
England clergyman, had had a distinguished career at Christ Church, Oxford, and,
when Carroll was twelve years old, accepted a living at Croft in Yorkshire, where the
family circumstances were those of comparative opUlence. To begin with Carroll
had been educated at home by his father. With the change of residence he was sent
to a private school ten miles away, which, in the preceding generation, had produced
a number of notable scholars l ; and, living within reach of his parents and sisters,
Carroll was fairly happy. The first report of his 'kind old headmaster', as he was
afterwards to call him, was so perspicuous that it deserves the quotation it has often
been given.

He possesses, along with other and excellent endowments, a very

uncommon share of genius. Gentle and cheerful in his intercourse with
others, playful and ready in conversation, he is capable of acquirements and
knowledge far beyond his years, while his reason is so clear and so jealous
of error, that he will not rest satisfied without a most exact solution of
whatever appears to him obscure. He has passed an excellent examination
just now in mathematics, exhibiting at times an illustration of that love of
precise argument, which seems to him natural.
I must not omit to set off against these great advantages one or two
faults, of which the removal as soon as possible is desirable, tho' 1 am
prepared to find it a work of time. As you are well aware, our young friend,
while jealous of error, as 1 said above, where important faith or principles
are concerned, is exceedingly lenient towards lesser frailties - and, whether
in reading aloud or metrical composition, frequently sets at nought the
notions of Vergil or Ovid as to syllabic quantity. He is moreover

Cf. Sophia E De Morgan, Memoir ofAugustus de Morgan, (London,

Longman, Green, 1882), p. 139.
2 A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

marvellously ingenious in replacing the ordinary inflexions of nouns and

verbs, as detailed in our grammars, by more exact analogies, or convenient
forms of his own devising. This source of fault will in due time exhaust
itself, though flowing freely at present ... You may fairly anticipate for him
a bright career.2

From this school he went up to Rugby for three years, but although he made
good progress in his studies, he was so unhappy in the unduly male atmosphere, out
of reach of his sisters, that he was allowed to return home; and at this stage he edited
and wrote the family magazines.
His career at Christ Church was no better than sound, until he reached the
final examination in Mathematics, when he was placed at the top of the list. He
became Mathematical Lecturer at the age of twenty-three, and a few years afterward
a Student, that is, a Fellow of his College; and his entire life, from the age of
nineteen, apart from short holidays at favourite sea-side resorts and one trip abroad,
was spent within the walls of Christ Church.
His sisters frequently visited him at Christ Church and two of his brothers
followed him there in their studies. He had a deep love for his sisters and found all
girl children likeable, provided they were pretty and socially acceptable: he had,
from childhood, a distaste for his brothers which he concealed fairly successfully, a
child who was a boy could gain his interest only if he had some redeeming feature
such as being the son of a famous poet or painter. They were an exceedingly
compact family, and none of them married until both parents had died. When the
unmarried sisters went to live at Guildford, Carroll helped them to find a house and
he always spent part of his vacations with them.
Carroll had a great affection for his College. He had been fostered in the
ambition that, like his father, he would make his mark there; and this affection for
Christ Church survived whatever trials it met.
He was totally unsuccessful as a tutor. Partly this was because he was a
poor mathematician [by conventional standards]. The subjects he taught were
Euclid, algebra, and arithmetic, at the level of a first-year undergraduate course
today; and his attempts to do serious Mathematics were feeble. His book on
Determinants, published quite early, a sort of apprentice piece, showed an interest in
Logic rather than Mathematics, though admittedly the two are difficult to separate.
His work, at a later date, on Euclid's parallel, appears to have been unimportant, and
he was not aware of the existing developments in Geometry being made by writers
on the Continent and even in England. On the side of analysis, he failed to master
the Calculus. He read much in general literature, and little else; when he knew that
others had worked on a problem, in Mathematics or Logic, his interest flagged: he
preferred to take up some new problem, and, working at it in bouts of intense
concentration, arrive where his own thought would lead him. Considering that

Stuart Dodgson Collingwood, The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (Rev. C
L Dodgson) (London, T F Unwin, 1899), p. 25.
The life and logic of Lewis Carroll 3

Carroll was a poor mathematician, without an interest in his students, we can give
some credence to the story, that on one occasion the members of his class signed a
round robin and presented it to the Dean, asking that they be given another tutor in
Mathematics.
When Carroll gave up the struggle to teach Mathematics and resigned from
his Mathematical Lectureship at the age of fifty, however, he immediately sought the
opportunity to teach Logic in the girl's high schools near Oxford. He liked his
students, he enjoyed the work, and some of the girls afterwards spoke with
enthusiasm of his teaching.
He was scarcely the man to be a success in his own college. In the early
years he had a few close friends, but by the time he attained middle age, the number
of his friends had dwindled almost to vanishing point.

But I was thinking of a plan

To dye one's whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen. 3

Carroll was different from others and difficult to know: we cannot be sure
that, had they known him better, his colleagues would have esteemed him more
highly.
In middle age his child friends became more and more numerous. They
visited him at Oxford and he found lodgings for them just outside the college gates
and entertained them in his Christ Church rooms, giving rise to some concern among
his colleagues. He would borrow a child from her parents and take her down to his
boarding house at the sea-side: the company of children or of young girls had
become a necessity to his peace of mind. As he got older he continued these
friendships until the girls had got well into their teens, and took a pride in 'defying
Mrs. Grundy', as he saw it, and indulged himself in kissing them.
But this was long afterwards, so let us return to Carroll at the time when he
was a young Mathematics don, with, to all appearance, a good orthodox career ahead
of him. A new Dean, H G Liddell, had just been appointed and had brought to
Christ Church his handsome wife, Spanish in appearance, and his growing family of
beautiful children.
Carroll was captivated by them. In his own home he had devoted himself to
amusing his sisters, telling stories, acting plays with his marionettes, devising puzzles
and writing verses. He was the perfect companion for a child and he was able to love
the Liddell children directly and with an absence of concern. Then came the time of
excursions to the river, croquet in the Deanery garden; games and puzzles and chess
on wet afternoons, and always the story-telling.

From 'Through the Looking-glass', reprinted in A Woollcott (ed.) The

Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (London, Nonesuch Press, 1939), p. 225.
4 A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Isa Bowman, one of his child-friends, said in her biography 'He had a
curiously womanish face ... there seemed to be little strength in it.,4 The earliest
photograph that we have of him, at the age of twenty-three, has 'a tinge of
melancholy' in it, says Walter De la Mares. To me these photographs are of a man of
delicate feelings racked with cares and anxieties which are not of his own creation
and from which he cannot escape. He had become foster parent to the numerous
group at home, before he reached the years when he could have accepted these duties
as normal and matter-of-fact. One side of his fate was the glory of telling stories,
playing with marionettes, performing tricks of sleight of hand, devising puzzles,
inventing games, writing verses: the other was a consuming concern for each of a
number of individuals. The nexus of love and responsibility, joy and fear in which
he had been caught, could not be shorn by an appointment at Christ Church and a
betterment in his own affairs alone. He could gain freedom, if at all, only with
isolation and with time.
The Liddell children he was able to love directly and with an absence of
concern. With them came the time of excursions on the river, croquet in the deanery
garden, games and puzzles and chess on wet afternoons, and always the story-telling:
Carroll had served his apprenticeship at Croft and was the perfect companion.
On the fourth of July, 1862, there was the famous party on the river, with
the three Liddell children, Carroll and his friend Canon Duckworth. Beginning with
the white rabbit going down the hole, the stories were better than ever and Alice
Liddell asked him to write them out, which Carroll promised to do. On the following
day, travelling by train to London, he jotted down headings, and by October or
November had completed the fIrst draft of the story which he printed out neatly by
hand, illustrated with his own drawings and presented to Alice Liddell. A facsimile
edition of this fIrst draft was later published under the title he had originally chosen,
Alice's Adventures Underground. He added further episodes extending the story to
almost twice the original length, had the illustrations done by Tenniel, the most
famous of the artists working for Punch, and, three years to the day after the trip on
the river, Alice 's Adventures in Wonderland was published.
How the immortal story ever came to be written - apart from the external
events leading up to it - is something of a mystery. Bishop Strong, who was a friend
of Carroll's, spoke of him as 'an eccentric genius,6. It is difficult enough to know
what goes on in the mind of the genius or the eccentric, and if we combine the two
the task is well-nigh impossible - unless the genius relents and keeps a diary,7 as
Carroll did, from which we may get the occasional clue. He liked to have a record of
everything that he was connected with, visits to theatres, the names of people that he

4
Isa Bowman, The Story ofLewis Carroll (London, J M Dent, 1899), p. 9.
[Walter De la Mare, Lewis Carroll (London, Faber and Faber, 1932), p. 27.]
6
[Quoted in Robert Phillips (ed.) Aspects ofAlice, (London, Victor Gollancz,
1972), p. 46.]
7 Roger Lancelyn Green, The Diaries ofLewis Carroll, vols. iand ii (London,
Cassell, 1953).
The life and logic of Lewis Carroll 5

dined with, the titles of the pamphlets he was working at, and so forth. The
notebooks in which he kept his diary in the years just before the writing of
Wonderland have been lost, though fortunately we have the record for the period
during which he wrote Wonderlane!.
Some years ago further documents became available, relating to this period
in Carroll's life. I was interested in Carroll's writings on committees and went up to
the Christ Church Library in the hope that it might yield some MS material; and
when no MSS were available, I went along to the college Treasury, to consult the
minutes of some of the meetings of the Governing Body. Occasionally I chatted with
the Clerk of Accounts, and after a while, when we got talking about him, he
mentioned that there were three letter books in an old cupboard, with copies of the
letters that Carroll had written when he was Curator of the Common Room. Would I
like to see them?9
The upshot of the matter was that a considerable number of documents
came to light, most of them connected with Carroll's curatorship of the Common
Room, with two notable exceptions. One was a quire of sheets forming a Letter
Register, which gave a record of his correspondence, mainly with members of his
own family, during the two years preceding the writing of Wonderland. This Letter
Register had been of sentimental value to Carroll.
The other fmd was a large envelope containing cuttings from Punch and
The Times and a number of reading lists he had made of articles from newspapers
and journals. It gave some clue to his reading during the years 1855--62, just
overlapping the period when he had begun to write Wonderland.
The item with a direct bearing on the Alice stories was the cutting of three
letters to The Times of September 1862. At the International Exhibition in London, a
frog had been put on display which was supposed to have been embedded in a block
of coal, and a correspondent to The Times had suggested that this was impossible.
Carron's cuttings JO take up the story from this point.
They are not particularly clever letters, but they came into Carron's hands
just when he may have fmished the first draft of Alice - Alice's Adventures Under
Ground - and was looking for further material to extend the story to publishable
length.

8
We have the information for those years, 1859--1861, which Collingwood
had incorporated in his Life and Letters ofLewis Carroll.
9 [For more details of these papers see Duncan Black, 'Discovery of Lewis
Carroll Documents', Notes and Queries, Feb. 1953.]
10 The cuttings are in immaculate condition and could not have been displayed
either at the Deanery or in the Common Room.
6 A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

FROGS in COAL

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir, - Your corespondent ... , in last Friday's paper, demands the expulsion from the
International Exhibition of a frog said to have been found alive embedded in coal.
He also accuses the exhibition of being an impostor, and attributes either credulity or
inattention to the Commissioners, among whom he specially names Lord Granville.
The only ground given for his conclusion is his own simple opinion that a frog could
not have lived thousands of years so low down in the earth and having over it such
an enormous weight as it must have had if what is said of it be true. It is in my
power, however, to show that your correspondent's opinion is wrong, and I shall be
obliged if you will allow me to do so.
I. My wife is prepared to state that she herself, may years ago, saw one of
her father's workmen split open a piece of coal, and discover in the middle of it a
moderate-sized frog or toad (she is not sure which) alive, and able to move, and she
remembers distinctly the oval shape and smooth surface of the hollow where the
animal had lain.
2. Samuel Goodwin, a stonemason, whom I myself have known these five-
and-twenty years, and who is very trustworthy, states as follows: 'When I worked in
the quarry at Kettlebrook, with Charles Aldridge, we sawed a stone through, about
four feet thick, quite solid, and in the middle was a toad as big as my fist, and a
whole about twice the size. We took it out, and it lived about half an hour, and then
it died. We worked the stone, and it was used as a plinth stone in Birmingham
Town-hall.'
I trust this will induce 'P.' to apologize to the exhibitor of the frog, as well as
to the Commissioners.

Yours Respectfully,
JOHNSCOTI

Lilleshall Coal Depots, Great Western Railway,

Paddington, Sept. 17.

THE BATILE OF THE FROGS

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir, - I am surprised and grieved to fmd that any person still exists who is so sceptical
as to doubt to possibility of the occurrence of living toads and frogs in solid blocks of
coal or stone. Such a disbeliever would assuredly not be entitled to Christian burial,
at least not in consecrated ground.
The life and logic ofLewis Carroll 7

Permit me now to record in your widely-circulated columns two remarkable

instances, which I doubt not, will immediately, and for ever, put an end to scepticism
on this interesting subject.
Many years ago my grandmother, who was a most veracious and
respectable old lady, informed me that one evening, as she was dozing in an armchair
before the fire, she was startled by a loud noise. She instantly rose, and was
somewhat terrified to observe a fine fat frog drop from her lap. A short time
previously the servant had put a large lump of coal on the fire, and the sudden
splitting of this into two or more pieces had produced the sound in question. She was
perfectly convinced that the frog had been embedded in the lump of coal, though a
coal-scuttle was close by her, from which it is just possible the reptile had escaped.
However, I feel quite confident that my grandmother was right.
The second instance I present on the authority of Mr. Timothy Gosling, a
highly respectable quarryman, and accurate observer of nature, whom I have known
intimately during the last 30 years. Mr. Gosling was employed on the 1st of April, a
few years ago, in blasting the rock which occurs near Birmingham, and is known as
"Rowley rag". It was extensively used in paving the streets of that town. A shot
fired a few minutes before noon brought down several large fragments of rock, and
on breaking one of these with a sledge-hammer a toad suddenly appeared. Mr.
Gosling was perfectly satisfied, and so am I, that the animal had been entombed in
the solid stone, and liberated by the blow of the hammer. At first it seemed dull and
stupid, having probably been stunned by the concussion. However, these symptoms
did not last long; the creature became a great pet and survived several years. I should
state that toads of precisely the same character had not infrequently been seen in this
quarry. Now, Sir, geologists have the presumption to maintain that the 'Rowley rag'
was formed by the agency of intense heat and ejected in a red or white-hot molten
stream. But the fact of a toad having emerged from a solid block of this rock, in
which not a crevice was detected, utterly disproves their absurd theory.
I should be sorry to expose myself to the charge of toadying any man on
account of his noble birth, nevertheless, I cannot help expressing my opinion that the
author of the scoffmg letter in The Times concerning the "Frog in the Coal", at the
Exhibition, deserves to be severely rebuked from presuming either to question the
fact or sneer at the illustrious nobleman who presides over the Department of Science
and Art.

I remain, Sir, yours respectfully,

Q.

London, Sept. 23.

8 A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

TOAD IN COAL

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES

Sir, - The controversy in your columns on the above subject reminds me of what I
heard in Northumberland, as having occurred at Chillingham Castle, the seat of the
Earl of Tankerville.
A slab of marble, forming one side of the chimneypiece, in either the
dining-room or the drawing room, was observed to be always damp and somewhat
discoloured, and partly from curiosity, and partly because the chimney was injured in
appearance at that part, it was determined to examine the piece carefully. The slab
was removed, and, I believe, was cut by a saw near the part where the unusual
appearance existed, and a toad was discovered, alive, in the marble at this spot, and
in the marble was found a recess of the size of the toad, and in which it exactly fitted.
I give you the story exactly as I heard it in the immediate neighbourhood of
Chillingham Castle, and a single line from the Earl of Tankerville would confirm or
disprove the statement, as its truth or want of foundation must be known to his
Lordship, and to those resident thereabouts.
If the story is substantially true, I suppose that it is not more astonishing that
a toad should be found in coal than in marble.

Your obedient servant,

GODFREY SINCLAIR

Ormsary, Lochgilphead, North Britain, Sept. 18.

When Carroll was extending the first draft of Alice's Adventures Under
Ground so as to make it of publishable length, the only long insertion that he made
was the episode of the Frog footman - and practically every feature of these letters to
The Times got incorporated in Alice in Wonderland.
The frogs in the marble had waited for millennia and the Frog-Footman was
prepared to wait indefmitely, 'for days and days'.
Furthermore Tenniel's illustration, done after Carroll's instruction, shows
the Frog-Footman standing by a solid marble pillar and under a marble canopy.
There is no doubt that the provenance of the Frog-Footman is the letter to
The Times.
His other 'Alice' book, Through the Looking-glass appeared half a dozen
years later and collected up other stories Carroll had told to the Liddell children. We
cannot open either of the Alice books and read for more than a page or two, without
coming on some logical puzzle. We meet Logic dressed up in a bizarre and fantastic
garb - Logic extending from the elements of the subject to the higher reaches, and
even into parts of the subject where the solutions have not yet been found. The
Logic of Lewis Carroll was just the Logic of anyone else, only a good deal sharper
The life and logic of Lewis Carroll 9

and applied in spheres to which most of us are strangers, ranging from Wonderland
to wines.
Wonderland and Looking-glass are both dream stories: one episode slides
into another in the manner we expect in dreams. If Alice is unable to cope with a
situation she meets, she will wake up. She can continue the dream only by taking
seriously the strange creatures she meets and only in she can follow their
conversation sufficiently to keep them in play. They offer views she would not hear
in ordinary conversation; she must gather some of the import of what they say, or
they will disappear and her dream be snuffed out.
Invaluable to her in all this is her impeccable manner and her ability not to
be startled, for the creatures in Wonder/and and Looking-glass take up some
unexpected topics.
Humpty-Dumpty, the most expert logician of them all, explains to Alice the
nature of what has become known as the prescriptive or nominalist defmition. And
this is one of the most quoted passages in Carroll.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it
means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many
different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'11

Another instance in which Carroll takes up easily recognizable logical

principle is in the exposition of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy given by Tweedledum
and Tweedledee. Berkeley had argued that although we can be sure of the ideas in
our own minds, we cannot argue from these ideas or images, to real objects lying
behind them. The only things we can know are the ideas in our minds: the ideas are
real, and that is all. I am entitled to say that my idea of an object exists: I am not
entitled to say that the object exists. Berkeley gets rid of substance altogether, and a
thing's being, consists in its being perceived or known. If we say that a thing exists,
we mean that it is being perceived or thought by a mind.
Carroll develops this argument. Tweedledum and Tweedledee lead Alice to
where the Red King was asleep under a tree.

'He's dreaming now,' said Tweedledee: 'and what do you think he's
dreaming about?'
Alice said 'Nobody can guess that.'
'Why, about you!' Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly.
'And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?'
'Where I am now, of course,' said Alice.
'Not you!' Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. 'You'd be nowhere. Why,
you're only a sort of thing in his dream!'

11
[From 'Through the Looking-glass', Complete Works, p. 196.]
lO A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

'If that there King was to wake,' added Tweedledum, 'you'd go out - bang! -
just like a candle!'
'I shouldn't!' Alice exclaimed indignantly. 'Besides, if I'm only a sort of
thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?'
'Ditto,' said Tweedledum.
'Ditto, ditto!' cried Tweedledee.
He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying, 'Hush! You'll be
waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.'
'Well, it is no use your talking about waking him,' said Tweedledum, 'when
you are only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not
real.'
'I am reall' said Alice and began to cry.
'You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,' Tweedledee remarked:
'there's nothing to cry about.'
'If! wasn't real,' Alice said - half-laughing through her tears, it all seemed so
ridiculous - 'I shouldn't be able to cry.'
'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a
tone of great contempt.,12

Grant the premise that Alice exists only as a thing in the King's mind, and she can
laugh or cry, but it won't make her any more real. Bishop Berkeley is not to be
refuted in that way.
At other times the principle of Logic that Carroll has in mind is difficult to
identify. Take this example where the White King waits with Alice for the arrival of
one of the messengers.

'Just look along the road,' (says the White King), 'and tell me if you can see
either of them.'
'I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.
'I only wish 1 had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able
to see Nobody! And at that distance too!'

When the messenger arrives the King asks:

'Who did you pass on the road?' the King went on, holding out his hand to
the Messenger for some hay.
'Nobody,' said the Messenger.
'Quite right,' said the King 'This young lady saw him too. Nobody walks
slower than you.'
'I do my best,' the Messenger said in a sullen tone. 'I'm sure nobody walks
much faster than I do!'
'He ca'n't do that,' said the King, 'or else he'd have been here first.'13

12
[From 'Through the Looking-glass', Complete Works, pp. 173--4.]
The life and logic ofLewis Carroll II

Here Carroll is concerned with the theory of universals. If there is yellow in

my tie and yellow in the walls of the room, are they both instances of the same
universal yellow? Does the universal yellow exist?
Or, take the problem in another form. If we can speak meaningfully of the
numbers 3 and 7, does this imply that the numbers 3 and 7 must have some kind of
existence? Bertrand Russell at one time believed that numbers must exist in some
sphere or other.
For those who hold this view, Carroll puts the problem in the most difficult
way: Ifwe can speak meaningfully about Nobody, does this imply that Nobody must
exist in some sphere? And if we say Yes, what do we mean by Nobody existing?
Carroll pushes the view to the logical extreme.
There is repeated amusement over the meanings of words and over
idiomatic phrases. When Alice speaks of answering the door, the Frog gardener
enquires 'What's it been asking of?' She cannot explain herself, because she is not
herself today. When she asks why she must do something at once, the reply is
because she cannot do it at twice. The White Knight explains that his helmet had got
stuck fast, 'as fast as lightning', though Alice knows that this is a different kind of
fastness, and so on.
And so we might continue with these examples, but we have said enough
already, I think, to show how vitally important Logic and Philosophy were for
Carroll. Logical puzzles and logical principles were so much part of his mind, that
he toyed with them and played with them even when telling stories to children. He
had a mind which could not help being logical and he loathed inexactness of any
kind.
Let me try to sum up in some way or other the position we have reached
after this brief glance at his early life and at the Alice stories. Carroll was a person of
extraordinary delicacy offeeling and even as a schoolboy, he had shown a passionate
need for exact reasoning: in fact any kind of mistake in reasoning hurt him almost
physically.
As an undergraduate at Christ Church he had studied Mathematics and
Philosophy; and the principles of Logic and Philosophy continued to interest him so
deeply that he incorporated them in his stories to the Liddell children and in Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland. For Carroll a logical principle was more real than a table
or a chair.
This was the man who, in his early 40's, during the years 1873--6, wrote
three pamphlets on the Theory of Committees and Elections, but did not publish
them: he intended to write a book on the subject at some later date. These pamphlets
rank as one of the two most distinguished contributions to the Theory of Committees
and Elections that have ever been made. They have come into prominence recently
since a Theory of Elections and Committees - worked out in the exact terms of

13
[From 'Through the Looking-glass', Complete Works, pp. 205--7.]
12 A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation

Mathematics and Symbolic Logic - has been made the basis for a new type of
Political Science from which much may be hoped l4 •

1.1. Government by Logic

The political arrangements of the post-war world seem to many of us topsy-turvy,

when we have to run faster and faster to remain in the same place, and we often
invoke the name of Lewis Carroll. Yet it is not commonly known that at two stages
in his life, Carroll did seriously concern himself with political theory, describing as
he saw it, the way things ought to be. In both these contributions he was working at
the roots of things, carrying out fundamental research, and, oddly enough, in dealing
with the field of government - a province where, so to speak, he has no business to
be - he is, without doubt, most conspicuously successful.
In 1876 he set out in a short pamphlet a theory of the committee; and the
committee is our basic instrument of government, whether we are dealing with the
government of the church, or the university, or the tennis club. He pointed out ways
in which the ordinary committee procedure is defective; and he suggested that where
important decisions are concerned, a different type of procedure should be employed,
to make sure that the members arrive at the right decision.
This is one aspect of the matter. More important, in this pamphlet Carroll
presents, in terms of symbolic logic, the theory of the committee which stands at the
basis of a new and significant type of political theory which has come into existence
during the last ten years [i.e., since 1958].
The suggestion he made about committee procedure enabled Carroll's own
college of Christ Church to arrive at an important decision about the architectural
design of its new belfry; and that is of some interest by way of an historical event.
But the real importance of his pamphlet, as we view it today, is that Carroll is the
forerunner of a new school of Political Science.
A decade after he had written his pamphlee s on committees, Carroll
published his Principles of Parliamentary Representation. In this he took up the
problem, which electoral arrangements will make parliament most truly
representative of the voters? What is the best size of constituency, a single-member,

14
The reader, particularly the English reader, who thinks this an exaggeration
- for admittedly the English literature on Politics is almost unaffected by the new
trend - should consult William H Riker, 'Voting and the Summation of Preferences,
an Interpretative Bibliographical Review of Selected Developments during the Last
Decade', The American Political Science Review, vol. IV, No.4, December 1961, pp.
900--11.
IS
For a complete list of Carroll's publications on Politics, see Duncan Black,
Theory of Committees and Elections (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1958), pp. 189--92. In this book I have reprinted (pp. 214--34) three of Carroll's
pamphlets.
The life and logic ofLewis Carroll 13

or a two-member, or a three-member constituency, and so on? And if we have a

multi-member constituency, with, say, three seats, should we give the voter three
votes or two votes or only one? In his booklet he dealt with the classic problem of
getting your legislature to be the best possible reflection of the views of the voters.
As with his theory of the committee, he developed his theory of
parliamentary representation by means of formal logic or simple algebra and
arithmetic. [Here] I will try to convey something of the flavour of his theories and
give some account of how it was that Carroll come to concern himself with the
problems of politics.
If we were approaching any writer other than Carroll it would be fairly safe
to take it that his views on Politics arose out of the electoral system of the time. It
was a great period of political theorizing in England and saw the appearance of the
works of Walter Bagehot, and John Stuart Mill. The Great Reform Bill of 1832
cleared away the rotten boroughs and extended the vote beyond the landed gentry to
the merchant classes, But an abundance of anomalies remained and it was known
that reform would continue. For the next half century, 'reform', unless the word were
qualified and given specific reference, meant reform of the franchise. Disraeli's Act
of 1867 gave the vote to workers in the towns; but discussion went on up and down
the country until Gladstone completed the process in 1884 and 1885, giving the vote
to the agricultural workers and redistributing seats.
At the time when Bagehot, Mill and Carroll were writing, the English
political scene was varied and exciting. Sometimes 1,000 voters would elect a
member to parliament, sometimes 50,000. Many of the workers had no vote. The
bulk of the members in parliament were elected by two- and three-member
constituencies. In the three-member constituencies, to add to the apparent anomalies,
the electors were given only two votes and not three, and they usually felt that they
were being robbed of their vote. The English political system was ideal in only one
way: nothing could have been better calculated to stimulate political discussion and
to stir up the beginnings of a Political Science.
It was in this era of intense interest in politics that Carroll wrote his
pamphlet on committees and his booklet on parliamentary representation. He was
himself deeply conservative, in politics as in all other matters, always with a
hankering after the world that had been and was passing away. He abhorred change
in his personal life and would go for a dozen years to the same room at the same
boarding house at the same seaside resort. His religious views at the end of his life
were those of his boyhood. He rallied to the defence of Euclid against the threat to
alter some of the proofs and change the order of the propositions. He always wore
the same style of dark suit and, in summer or winter, wore grey or black cotton
gloves. Was it not therefore perfectly natural that Carroll, perplexed by the thought
of political change, should write on Politics?
On the face of it this might be so. Yet a feature telling against this view is
that for an educated Englishman living at these times, Carroll seems to have shown
comparatively little interest in the national scene. And this at any rate leaves open
Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
an offer of $5,000,000 was declined by Russia. Robert J. Walker,
who assisted in drawing up the legal documents of transfer when we
did finally buy the territory, stated once that during Polk’s
administration the Czar offered Russian America to the United States
for the mere payment of government incumbrances and cost of
transfer. Wily old Prince Gortschakoff had to tell it, too, when his
envoy made such a shrewd sale for him, that his master was for
years anxious to get rid of this distant and unprotected colony at any
sacrifice, provided, always, that it did not fall into the hands of the
English, who wanted it so badly.
In 1861 Russia and the United States held council in regard to
establishing a telegraph line from this country to Europe, via Russian
America, Behring Straits, and Siberia. Four years later an expedition
was sent out by the Western Union Telegraph Company, and several
ships and a large corps of engineers, surveyors, and scientists, were
engaged in exploring the coast from the United States boundary line
northward to the Yukon country, and along the Asiatic coast to the
mouth of the Amoor River. Over $3,000,000 were expended in these
surveys, and a telegraph line was erected for some hundred miles up
the British Columbia coast, reaching to a point near the mouth of the
Skeena River, that brought Sitka within three hundred miles of
telegraphic communication instead of eight hundred and fifty miles,
as has been its condition since the scheme was given up. After two
years’ work, the company abandoned the undertaking and recalled
its surveying parties. The demonstrated success of the Atlantic
cable, and the difficulty of maintaining the line through the dense
forest regions of the coast and the uninhabited moors of the North,
induced the company to give up the plan. Prof. Dall, of the
Smithsonian Institute; Whymper, the great English mountain
climber; Prof. Rothrocker, the botanist, and Col. Thomas W. Knox,
who accompanied different parties of the Western Union Telegraph
Company expedition, have written interesting books of their life and
travels while connected with this great enterprise.
As the time approached for the expiration of the lease by which
the Hudson Bay Company held the franchise of the Russian-
American Fur Company, great desire was manifested by citizens on
the Pacific coast that the United States should purchase the colony.
The legislature of Washington Territory sent a memorial to Congress
in January, 1866, urging the purchase of the Russian possessions,
and it was followed by earnest petitions from all parts of the Pacific
coast. A syndicate of fur traders even proposed to buy the country of
Russia on their private account, and sent a representative to
Washington to consult with Secretary Seward in regard to having the
United States establish a protectorate over their domain in that case.
The Hudson Bay Company’s lease was to expire in June, 1867, and
in the spring of that year the plan of purchase by the United States
government assumed definite shape. Negotiations were entered into
by Secretary Seward and Baron Stoeckl, the Russian minister, and,
though conducted with great secrecy, were soon rumored about. At
that time President Johnson was plunging into the most stormy part
of his career, threats of impeachment were in the air, and the articles
had even been discussed by the House of Representatives before its
adjournment, March 4, 1867. All of the preceding winter Washington
had been full of rumors of great schemes, looking to a drain on the
Treasury, and the House had grown wary and vigilant. Mexican
patriots, from three different camps, were beseeching the aid of
Congress and the State Department. The Juarez and Ortega factions
were imploring loans of from $50,000,000 to $80,000,000, and
Maximilian’s emissaries were doing their best in the way of
diplomacy to aid the fortunes of their imperial master, who had just
taken the field against the insurgents. With such discords at home,
Secretary Seward projected a brilliant stroke of foreign policy, and
counted upon drawing off some of the hostile fires, and thrilling
patriotic breasts by this purchase of Russian America, which should
carry the stars and stripes to the uttermost limits of the north, and
extend our dominion 3,000 miles west of the Golden Gate of
California to that last island of Attu in the Aleutian chain, “o’er which
the earliest morn of Asia smiles.”
On the evening of the 29th of March, Baron Stoeckl went to
Secretary Seward’s residence on Lafayette Square, joyfully waving
the cable message that gave the Czar’s approval to the plan, as then
outlined. Baron Stoeckl proposed that they should draw up the
treaty on the following day, but the Secretary said, “No! we will do it
now, and send it to the Senate to-morrow.”
There were no telephones at the capitol then, and messengers
were sent in every direction to summon Secretary Seward’s
assistants, and open and light the building at Fourteenth and S
Streets, then occupied by the State Department. Baron Stoeckl
hunted up his secretaries and chancellor, and at midnight the
company assembled, including Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of
the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Leutze has preserved
the scene in a painting owned by Hon. Frederick W. Seward, of
Montrose, N. Y. Secretary Seward and his assistants, Messrs. Hunter
and Chew, and M. Bodisco, Secretary of the Russian Legation, form
a central group. Baron Stoeckl stands beside the large globe of the
world, and the lights of the chandelier overhead fall full upon
Russian America, to which Baron Stoeckl is pointing his hand.
Senator Sumner and Mr. Frederick Seward occupy a sofa in a corner
back of this group, holding a school atlas before them.
The signatures were affixed to the treaty at four o’clock on the
morning of March 30. The illumination of the State Department at
that unusual hour attracted suspicious attention, and it was known
that something of import was going on. It was intended to keep the
matter wholly secret until the Senate had ratified the treaty, but
journalistic enterprise ran high, and a New York reporter shadowed
the Secretary of State, and, hanging on to the back of his carriage
as he drove home with Baron Stoeckl that night, caught an inkling of
the terms of the treaty and gave them to the world.
On the same day the treaty was sent to the Senate, then
convened in extra session, and, discussed in secret conclaves, was
confirmed on the 10th of April, chiefly through the agency of Charles
Sumner, who, although not favorable to the measure at first, arose
on the tenth day and delivered a speech, which was one of the
finest efforts of his life, and an epitome of all that was known and
had been written up to date concerning Russian America. Every
chart, every narrative of the old discoverers, every scientific work
and special report, was consulted by that great scholar, and his
speech “on the cession of Russian America” is still a work of
authority and reference to those who would study the question.
There was great surprise when the terms of the treaty were made
known. The wits went to work with their jokes on the “Esquimaux
Acquisition Treaty,” and Sir Frederick Bruce, the British Minister, was
so chagrined at the news, that he telegraphed to the Earl of Derby
for instructions to protest against the acceptance of the treaty. It
was ratified by the Senate by a vote of thirty yeas and two nays, the
opposing twain being Senators Fessenden and Ferry.
While the matter was pending there were many conclaves and
dinner councils at the residence of the Secretary of State. The “polar
bear treaty” and the “Esquimaux senators” were common names at
the capital, and of the Secretary’s dinner parties one scribe wrote:
“There was roast treaty, boiled treaty, treaty in bottles, treaty in
decanters, treaty garnished with appointments to office, treaty in
statistics, treaty in military point of view, treaty in territorial grandeur
view, treaty clad in furs, ornamented with walrus teeth, fringed with
timber, and flopping with fish.” Other menus gave “icebergs on
toast,” “seal flippers frappee,” and “blubber au naturel.”
It was a great puzzle for a while to know what name should he
given to the new territory, as Russian America would no longer do.
The wits suggested “Walrussia,” “American Siberia,” “Zero Islands,”
and “Polaria,” but at Charles Sumner’s suggestion it was called
“Alaska,” the name by which the natives designated to Captain Cook
the great peninsula on the south coast, and which, translated,
means “the great land.” The articles were exchanged and the treaty
proclaimed by the President, June 20, 1867. Secretary Seward was
more than delighted with the success of his efforts, and the day
after the proclamation said: “The farm is sold and belongs to us.” He
felt sure that he had the advantage of his enemies this time, and
had gone far enough north to counteract any leaning or sentiment
toward the South, that he had been accused of harboring. He
proposed to make General Garfield, then fresh in his military honors,
a first Governor of the Territory, and later he intended to divide the
country into six territorial governments.
 The President and his premier lost no time in clinching the
bargain, and immediately set about to receive and occupy the
Territory, without waiting for the House of Representatives to
appropriate the $7,200,000 of gold coin to pay for it with. Brigadier-
General Lovell H. Rousseau was furnished with a handsome silk flag
and many instructions by Secretary Seward, and left New York the
same August in company with Captain Alexis Pestchouroff and
Captain Koskul, who acted as Commissioners on the part of Russia.
Gen. Jefferson C. Davis, in command of 250 men, was ordered to
meet him at San Francisco, and left there at the same time as the
Commissioners, on September 27. Gen. Rousseau and his colleagues
were taken on board the man-of-war Ossipee, then in command of
Captain Emmons, and when they reached Sitka, on the morning of
October 18, 1867, found the troop ships already at anchor there.
Three United States ships, the Ossipee under Captain Emmons, the
Jamestown under command of Captain McDougall, and the Resaca
under Captain Bradford, were flying their colors in the harbor that
gay October morning, and the Russian flag fluttered from every staff
and roof-top. At half past three o’clock in the afternoon the United
States troops, a company of Russian soldiers, the group of officials,
some citizens and Indians, assembled on the terrace in front of the
castle. The ceremony of transfer was very simple, the battery of the
Ossipee starting the national salute to the Russian flag, when the
order was given to lower it, and the Russian water battery on the
wharf returning, in alternation of shots, the national salute to the
United States flag, as it was raised. The Russian flag caught in the
ropes coming down, wrapped itself round and round the flagstaff,
and although the border was torn off, the body clung to the staff of
native pine. The Russian soldiers could not reach it until a
boatswain’s chair was rigged to the halyards, and then one of them
untwisting the flag, and not hearing Captain Pestchouroff’s order to
bring it down, flung it off, and it fell like a canopy over the bayonets
of the Russian soldiers.
The rain began then, and the beautiful Princess Maksoutoff wept
when the Russian colors finally fell. The superstitious affected to find
an omen in this incident, but the American flag ran up gayly, and
when the bombardment of national salutes was over, Captain
Pestchouroff said: “By authority of his Majesty the Emperor of
Russia, I transfer to the United States the Territory of Alaska!” Prince
Maksoutoff handed over the insignia of his office as governor, and
the thing was done. There was a dinner and a ball at the castle, an
illumination and fireworks that night, and the bald eagle screamed
on all the hill tops. The Russian citizens began to leave straightway,
and in a few months fifty ships and four hundred people had sailed
away from Sitka, and the desolation of American ownership began.
Only three families of the educated class and of pure Russian blood
now live there, to remember and relate the tales of better days.
After this formal transfer, garrisons of United States troops were
established at Fort Tongass, near the southern boundary line, at Fort
Wrangell, at Sitka and Kodiak, under orders of the Department of
the Columbia; but the ship carrying the troops to establish a fort on
Cook’s Inlet struck a rock and went to pieces when near its
destination. All the lives were saved, and the project of a fort at that
point was then abandoned.
Immense sums were paid by the government for the
transportation of troops and freight in the few months after the
occupancy, and, by the time Congress met, the United States had a
firm hold on the new possession. There were exciting times at Sitka
for a few months, and the first rush of enterprising and
unscrupulous Americans quite astonished the departing Russians,
who were unused to the tricks of the adventurers, who always hurry
to a new country.
Professor George Davidson was sent with eight assistants to make
a report on the general features and resources of the country, and
from July to November he cruised along the coast on the revenue
cutter Lincoln. He was mercilessly cross-examined by the special
committee of Congress during the exciting winter that followed at
Washington.
Secretary Seward trod a thorny pathway, and he and his newly-
acquired Territory were the theme of every wit and joker in the
public prints. Congress was in an ugly frame of mind, and even the
party leaders in the House of Representatives felt dubious about
getting an appropriation to pay for Alaska. The wildest reports of the
country and its resources were current, and while one sage
represented it as a garden of wild roses, and a place for linen
dusters, the next one said the only products were icebergs and furs,
and the future settlers would cultivate their fields with snow-
ploughs.
The irrepressible Nasby wrote: “The dreary relic of diplomacy to
the south of the North Pole is a land reservation for the Blair family,”
and he advised President Johnson to “swing around the circle,” and
visit “this land of valuable snow and merchantable ice.”
In a less humorous vein a Democratic editor said: “Congress is not
willing to take $10,000,000 from the Treasury to pay for the
Secretary of State’s questionable distinction of buying a vast
uninhabitable desert with which to cover the thousand mortifications
and defeats which have punished his pilotage of Andrew Johnson
through his shipwrecked policy of reconstruction. The treaty has a
clause binding us to exercise jurisdiction over the Territory and give
government to forty thousand inhabitants now crawling over it in
snow-shoes. Without a cent of revenue to be derived from it, we will
have to keep regiments of soldiers and six men-of-war up there, and
institute a Territorial government. No energy of the American people
will be sufficient to make mining speculation profitable in 60° north
latitude. Ninety-nine one-hundredths of the territory is absolutely
worthless.”
In this spirit the thing went on through all of that stormy winter.
The impeachment trial was held, and President Johnson acquitted
May 17, 1867. On the following day General N. P. Banks introduced a
bill appropriating $7,200,000 to pay for Alaska, and as it hung
uncertain for weeks, it was determined to get the appropriation
through in a deficiency bill, if the Banks bill failed. At a night session
on the 30th of June, with the House in committee of the whole, and
General Garfield in the chair, General Banks made a most eloquent
speech, painting Alaska in glowing colors and luxuriant phrase, and
winning the suffrages of the disaffected ones on his own side by the
audacity of his genius. Judge Loughbridge, of Iowa, opposed the bill,
and three Democrats (Boyer of Pennsylvania, Pruyn of New York,
and Johnson of California), made ringing speeches in its favor. The
next day C. C. Washburn made a severe speech against it, and
Maynard, of Tennessee, spoke for it. Then the grand “old
commoner,” Thaddeus Stevens, made an oration in its favor, ending
up with a fish story of the skipper who ran his ship aground on the
herring in Behring Sea, and ran it so high and so dry on the
wriggling fish, that it broke in two. On the 14th of July the bill
passed by ninety-eight yeas, forty-nine nays. Fifty-three members
not voting, endangered its success, but the House showed its
temper by a clause insisting that hereafter it should take part in the
consideration of treaties, as well as the Senate. Two weeks later the
Czar was chinking his bags of American gold, when dust again rose
from the State Department. The cost of the cable messages sent by
the two governments, in regard to the negotiations and the transfer,
amounted to nearly $30,000. When their share of the bill was
presented to the Russian government, they refused to pay it,
claiming that the treaty provided that the United States should pay
$7,200,000 and all the expenses of transfer. There were polite
messages between the diplomats, but at last the cable company
reduced the bill, and our State Department paid for all of it.
In the end many statements and prophecies concerning the
Territory have been disproved, but we received a country of 580,107
square miles, equal in area to one sixth of the whole United States,
and for this great empire we paid at the rate of one and nineteen-
twentieths of a cent per acre. The Alexander archipelago itself,
comprising 1,100 islands, and an area of 14,142 geographical square
miles, will soon prove itself worth the purchase-money alone, when
it is explored, developed, and settled. Of the strip of main land,
thirty miles wide and three hundred miles long, off which the islands
are anchored, Sir George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of the Hudson
Bay Company, once said that all the British possessions in the
interior, adjacent to it, were useless, if this coast strip were not
leased to them. For years Great Britain made overtures to buy this
strip, and hordes of its mining adventurers made threats to drive the
Russians away; yet, by the hooks and crooks of diplomacy, it came
into the possession of the United States, while the southern border
of this strip is distant six hundred and forty miles from our once
northern boundary, the forty-ninth parallel. By leasing those tiny Seal
Islands, in Behring Sea, to the Alaska Commercial Company, the
government has derived a revenue of over $300,000 per annum,
and the Territory has, in this way, paid a fair percentage of interest
on the purchase-money, since it has been virtually at no expense to
protect it, or keep up a form of government. In view of the later
mineral discoveries, it is said that Douglass Island alone is worth all
that the United States gave for the Territory, and events are slowly
proving the foresight and wisdom of Mr. Seward in acquiring it.
The Russians knew almost nothing of the topography or resources
of the country when they passed it over to us, as the directors of the
fur company, having absolute control, had made everything
subservient to their interests and trade. A clause in their lease
provided that the government should have the right to all mineral
lands discovered, so that they took good care to discourage
explorers and prospectors. Baranoff is even said to have given thirty
lashes to a man who brought in a specimen of gold-bearing quartz,
and warned him of worse punishment if he found any more ore. All
the records and papers of the fur company were turned over to the
United States, and the archives at St. Petersburg were searched for
any documents or reports pertaining to Russian America. Two
shelves in the State Department Library at Washington are filled with
these manuscript records of early Alaskan events. They are written
in clear Russian text, as even as print, and forty of the volumes are
archive reports of the directors and agents of the fur company. Fifty
of them are office records and journals, and one bulky volume
contains the ships’ logs that were of sufficient value and interest to
warrant their preservation. None of them have been translated,
except as students and specialists have made notes from them for
their own use. Mr. Ivan Petroff gave these archives a thorough
inspection in gathering the materials for his valuable Census Report
of 1880.
 CHAPTER XV.
SITKA.—HISTORY SUCCEEDING THE TRANSFER.

A great event in the history of Sitka after the transfer was the visit
of Ex-Secretary Seward and his party, and their stay was the
occasion of the last gala season that the place has known. Mr.
Seward and his son had gone out to San Francisco by the newly-
completed lines of the Union and Central Pacific Railroad, intending
to continue their travels into Mexico. He casually mentioned before
Mr. W. C. Ralston, the banker, that he hoped some time to go to his
territory of Alaska. Within a few hours after that Mr. Ralston wrote
him that there were two steamers at his service, if he would accept
one for a trip to Alaska. The fur company offered their steamer, the
Fideliter, and Mr. Ben Holladay put the steamer Active at the disposal
of Mr. Seward and his party. Mr. Holladay’s offer was accepted, and
his best and favorite commander, Captain C. C. Dall, was given
charge of the Active, and everything provided for a long yachting
trip. The others invited by Mr. Seward to partake of this magnificent
hospitality were his son Frederick W. Seward and his wife, Judge
Hastings, of San Francisco, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, of St. Louis, Hon. W.
S. Dodge, revenue collector and mayor of Sitka, Hon. John H.
Kinkead, postmaster and post trader at Sitka, and Captain Franklin
of the British Navy, a nephew of the lamented Sir John Franklin.
They left San Francisco on the 13th of July, 1869, and, touching at
Victoria, reached Sitka July 30. The Ex-Secretary was received with a
military salute on landing, and went to the house of Mayor Dodge.
He kept the Russian Sabbath by attending service in the Greek
church on our Saturday, and the American Sabbath, by listening to
the post chaplain in the Lutheran church on the following day. Like
many visitors since then, Mr. Seward said, at the end of his second
day, that he had met every inhabitant, and knew all about them and
their affairs. On another day General Davis gave a state reception at
the castle, and Mr. Seward being dissuaded from his original plan of
going up to Mount St. Elias, lest, after the voyage across a rough
sea, he should find the monarch of the continent hidden in clouds,
made up a party for the Chilkat country instead. General Davis and
his family, two staff officers, and a few citizens, were invited to join
them, and they went in by Peril Straits to Kootznahoo, and then up
to the mouth of the Chilkat River. The incidents of their visit to Kloh-
Kutz in his village have been related in a preceding chapter. Adding
Professor Davidson and his assistants to their party, the Active
returned to Kootznahoo, and visited the coal mine near Chief Andres
village, and spent another day on a fishing frolic in Clam Bay. On his
return to Sitka Mr. Seward was the guest of General Davis at the
castle, and on the evening before his departure he addressed the
assembled citizens in the Lutheran church. He took leave with
regret, and sailed away with a military salute on a clear and radiant
day. They touched at the Takou glacier and Fort Wrangell, went up
the Stikine River to the mining camps on the bars near the boundary
line, and last visited Fort Tongass. The adjoining village of Tongass
Indians, with its many fine totem poles and curious houses, was very
interesting to them, and the old chief Ebbitts paid great honors to
the Tyee of all the Tyees. Mr. Seward carried away a large collection
of Alaska curios and souvenirs, and his lavish purchases quite shook
the curio markets of those days. By the etiquette of the country the
fur robes laid for him to sit on in the chief’s lodges were his forever
after, and the exchange of gifts consequent upon such hospitalities
made his visits memorable to the chiefs by the potlatches left them.
Mr. Seward carried home a dance cloak covered with Chinese coins,
that the Russians had probably gotten during the days of their large
trade with China, and sold to the Indians for furs. When the Chinese
embassy visited Mr. Seward at Auburn, they gave him the names of
the coins, and some of them dated back to the twelfth and fifth
centuries, and to the first years of the Christian era. A quantity of
Alaska cedar was taken east, and, in combination with California
laurel, was used in the panellings and furnishings of the Seward
mansion at Auburn.
A year later Lady Franklin went to Sitka on the troop-ship
Newbern, and for three weeks was entertained at the castle, and
occupied the same corner guest-chamber already made historic by
Mr. Seward. At that time, 1870, she was nearly eighty years of age,
but she was a most active and wonderful woman. She was
accompanied by her niece, Miss Cracroft, who was her private
secretary, and her object in visiting Alaska was to trace rumors that
she had heard of the finding of relics of her husband. It was a
fruitless search, and the widow of Sir John Franklin only lived for five
years after this second trip to the Pacific coast in quest of tidings of
the lost explorer.
With the exception of these incidents, Sitka grew duller and more
lifeless by a slow-descending scale, with every year that succeeded
the transfer of the territory to the United States. The officers of the
garrison chafed under the isolation from even the remote frontiers of
Washington Territory and Oregon, and the soldiers kept tumult rising
in the Indian village. After ten years’ occupation the military sailed
away one day in 1877, and as no civil government was established
to succeed their rule, the inhabitants were in despair. In a short time
the Indians began to presume upon their immunity from
punishment, and distilling their hoochinoo openly and without
hindrance, soon had pandemonium raging in the rancherie and
overflowing into the town. They burned the deserted quarters and
buildings on the parade ground, killed and mutilated cattle, and the
Russian priest was powerless to prevent the defilement of his church
by crowds of lazy, indolent Indians, who lay on the church steps and
gambled on any and every day. Trouble was precipitated by the
Indians murdering a white man in November, 1878. The murderers
were arrested by some friendly Indians and put in the guard-house,
and immediately the whole village was in arms. The white citizens,
who had been appealing for the protection of their own government
before this, were virtually in a state of siege and at the mercy of the
enraged Siwashes. The murderers were sent to Oregon for trial, but
still their people raged. The three hundred white people were
outnumbered two and three times by the Indians, and all winter
they were in momentary dread of a final uprising and a massacre.
The Russians arranged to gather at the priest’s house at any sign of
disturbance, and the collector of customs prepared to send his family
below.
When all hope of help from their own government was gone, the
citizens made a last, desperate appeal for protection to the British
admiral at Victoria. Without waiting for diplomatic fol-de-rol, Captain
A’Court, of H. M. S. Osprey, made all haste to Sitka on his humane
errand. He reached there in March, 1879, and quiet was immediately
restored. Three weeks later the little revenue cutter Oliver Wolcott
came in, and anchored under the protecting guns of the big British
war ship. The Indians laughed in scorn, and the British captain
himself felt that it would be wrong to leave the people with such
small means of defence at hand. Early in April the United States
steamer Alaska came, and then the Osprey left. The captain of the
Alaska declared his presence unnecessary, the Indian scare
groundless, and, cruising off down the coast and back to more
attractive regions, left the people again at the mercy of the Indians.
The naval authorities, after receiving the report and
recommendations of Captain A’Court, had the grace to order the
Alaska back, and it remained in the harbor of Sitka until relieved by
the sailing ship Jamestown, June 14.
The Jamestown was commanded by Captain Lester A. Beardslee,
who instituted many reforms, cruised through all parts of the
archipelago, kept the Indians under control, and finally made an
official report, which is one of the most valuable contributions to the
recent history of Alaska. He was succeeded in command of the
Jamestown by Captain Glass, an officer who displayed marked
abilities in his management of the charge entrusted to him. He
exhibited a firmness that kept the natives in check, and exercised
justice and humanity in a way to win the approval of those cunning
readers of character. He made the Indians clean up their rancherie,
straighten out the straggling double line of houses along shore, and
then he had each house numbered, and its occupants counted and
recorded. By his census of Sitka, taken Feb. 1, 1881, there were
1,234 inhabitants; 840 of these were in the Indian village, and only
394 souls composed the white settlement. He had a “round-up” of
the native children one day, and each little redskin was provided with
a tin medal, with a number on it, and forthwith ordered to attend
the school, at peril of his parents being fined a blanket for each
day’s absence. Aside from this benevolent and paternal work, the big
Tyee of the Jamestown used to terrify the natives by his sudden
raids upon the moonshiners, who made the fiery and forbidden
hoochinoo with illicit stills.
He supervised treaties of peace between the Stikine and
Kootznahoo tribes, between the Stikine and Sitka tribes, and kept a
naval protectorate over the infant mining camp at Juneau, until he
was relieved by Commander Lull, with the steamer Wachusett, in
1881. The fascination of the north country brought Captain Glass
back, in command of the Wachusett, in three months’ time, and he
remained at the head of Alaskan affairs for another year.
In October, 1882, Captain Merriman was detailed for the Alaska
station, in command of the Adams, and for a year he and his ship
played an important part in local history. He visited all the points in
the archipelago, fought the great naval battle of Kootznahoo, and
cruised off to the settlements on the Aleutian Islands. Peace and
order reigned in the rancherie at Sitka, the Indians and miners of
Juneau were chastised when they deserved it, and protected in what
few rights they or any one had in the abandoned territory, and
crooked traders and distillers of hoochinoo had an unfortunate time
of it.
The Adams was the only visible sign of the nation’s power for
which the Indians had any great respect, and the nation’s
importance was advanced tenfold when the “big Tyee” silenced the
unruly Kootznahoos. He was called upon to act as umpire, referee,
probate and appellate judge, and arbiter in all vexed questions, in
addition to his general duties as protector and preserver of the
peace. With the Naval Register and the United States Statutes for
code and reference, Captain Merriman exercised a general police
duty about the territory. He maintained a paternal government and
protectorate over the Indians, and the judgment of Solomon had
often to be paralleled in deciding the issues of internecine and
domestic wars. He had often to put asunder those whom Siwash
ceremonies or the missionaries had joined together, to protect the
young men who refused to marry their great-uncles’ widows, to
interfere and save the lives of those doomed to torture and death for
witchcraft, to prevent the killing of slaves at the great funerals and
potlatches, and to look after the widows’ and orphans’ shares in the
blankets of some great estate. For these delicate and diplomatic
duties Captain Merriman was well fitted. The dignity and ceremony
that marked all his intercourse with the natives raised him in their
esteem, and his firm and impartial judgment, his kindness and
consideration, so won them, that there were wailing groups on the
wharf when he sailed away from Sitka, and they still chant the
praises of this good Tyee, who will always be a figure in history to
them.
Captain J. B. Coghlan succeeded him in command of the Adams,
and the Indians having been in the main peaceful, and the mining
camp all quiet, Captain Coghlan gave a great deal of time to careful
surveying of the more frequented channels of the inside passage. He
marked off with buoys the channel through Wrangell Narrows,
marked the more dangerous rocks and the channel in Peril Straits,
corrected the erroneous position of several bays and coves,
examined and reported new anchorages, and designated unknown
rocks and ledges in Saginaw Channel and Neva Strait. In addition to
this practical part of his profession, Captain Coghlan looked to the
other interests confided to him. He visited all the Indian settlements,
looked up their abandoned villages, encouraged prospectors and
kept a keen eye on all mineral discoveries. An especial want in
Alaska is a good coal mine, and although there are seams of it all
through the islands, none of it is valuable for steaming purposes,
and the Nanaimo coal has to be relied upon. Early voyagers
discovered coal a half century ago, and a vein on Admiralty Island
has been regularly discovered and announced to the world by every
skipper who has touched there since. Captain Coghlan was keenly
alive to the importance of finding good coal in this favored end of
the territory, and he told the story of the latest discovery in a way to
make his listeners weep from laughter.
While out on a survey trip one day, an Indian came to him
mysteriously and said: “Heap coal up stream here,” at the same time
stealthily showing a lump of the genuine article. Quietly, and so as to
attract as little attention as possible, the captain, two sporting
friends, and the Indian started off, ostensibly duck-hunting. After
they left the harbor of Sitka the Indian led the way up a narrow
channel, and turned into St. John the Baptist’s Bay, where careful
and extensive surveys had been conducted but a short time before.
The officers began to look amazed, but the Indian led on until he
beached his canoe and triumphantly showed them a pile of
anthracite coal stored under the roots of the tree. The coal-hunters
recognized it as some of the anthracite coal that had been sent from
Philadelphia, and this lot had been stored there for the convenience
of the steam launches, on their trips between the ship and points
where they were surveying in Peril Straits. Securing the quiet of the
Indian, the officers went back to the ship, and after a few days gave
specimens of coal to different experts on board. Tons of the same
article lay in the bunkers under them, but the experts went seriously
to work with their clay pipes and careful tests. None of them agreed
about it. One of them declared it good coal, of good steaming
quality and pure ash. Another one said it was lignite, and of no
value, and never could be used for steaming. Rumors of the
discovery of a coal mine soon spread through Sitka, and one man
started out to follow up what he supposed had been the course of
the coal-hunters, with the evil intent of jumping that mine. The ship
was just starting off on a cruise, so followed the jumper, and
overtaking him in his lone canoe at Killisnoo, the coal-hunter turned
pale and nearly died with fright lest he should be punished with
naval severity for his wicked designs. The joke on the coal-hunters,
the coal experts, and the would-be jumper of the coal mine made
the ship ring when it was told.
In August, 1884, the Adams sailed away from Sitka, and its place
was taken by the Pinta, under the command of Captain H. E.
Nichols, who for several years did most valuable work in the
southern part of the archipelago while in command of the coast-
survey steamer Hassler. His surveys were the basis for many of the
new charts of that region that accompanied the Alaska Coast Pilot of
1883, compiled by Prof. W. H. Dall, and his return with the Pinta
allows him to continue his surveys.
The Pinta is one of fifteen tugs or despatch boats built during the
war for use at the different navy yards. It did service for many years
at the Brooklyn yard, but became notorious about two years ago
while undergoing repairs at the Norfolk yard. An unconscionable sum
was spent in repairing; a local election was helped on, or rather off,
by this means, and the board of officers called to survey and report
upon the Pinta when the work was completed unhesitatingly
condemned it, and declared it unseaworthy. A second survey was
called in this awkward dilemma, and on the trial trip the much-
tinkered ship made about four knots an hour. It went up to Boston,
ran into the brig Tally-Ho that lay at anchor there, and more of its
officers were brought up before a court of inquiry. A daring officer
was at last found willing to peril his life in taking the Pinta around
the Horn, and to attempt this hazardous exploit the armament was
dispensed with until it should reach the Mare Island navy yard in
California. It started the latter part of November, and reached San
Francisco at the end of May, where more repairs were made, its
guns mounted, and it then cleared for its new station. Its detail
comprises seven officers and forty men, and a detachment of thirty
marines quartered at Sitka for shore duty.
These naval officers connected with Alaska affairs have received
great commendation for the course pursued by them in the Territory,
and the history of the naval protectorate is in bright contrast to the
less creditable operations of military rule. As the character of the
country has become known, the uselessness of a land force has
been appreciated, and it is most probable that a man-of-war will
always be stationed in this growing section of the territory. Several
naval officers, enjoying and appreciating the beautiful country, have
made special requests to be returned to the Alaska station, and are
enthusiastic over the region that knows neither newspapers nor high
hats. They have many compensations for the larger social life they
are deprived of, and are envied by all the tourists who meet them.
For the sportsmen there are endless chances for shooting everything
from humming-birds to ducks, eagles, deer, and bear. The anglers
tell fish stories that turn the scales of all the tales that were ever
told, and the lovers of nature feast on scenes that ordinary travellers
cannot reach, and but dimly dream of in this hurried touch-and-go of
an Alaskan cruise. In the curio line they have the whole Territory
wherefrom to choose, and the stone, the copper, and the modern
age yield up their choicest bits for their collections. A practical man
has told me that there is the place where the officers can save their
money, wear out their old clothes, and learn patience and other
Christian virtues by grace of the slow monthly mail. Some few
amuse themselves with a study of the country and its people; and
the origin, tribal relations, family distinctions, and mythology of the
Indians open a boundless field to an inquiring mind. They come
across many odd characters and strange incidents among the queer,
mixed population, and gather up most astonishing legends. One
frivolous government officer, stationed for a long time in the
Territory, once electrified some Alaska enthusiasts in a far-away city
by putting out his elbows, and drawling with Cockney accent: “Ya-as!
Alaska is all very well for climate, and scenery, and Indians, and that
sort of thing, but a man loses his grip on society, you know, if he
stays there long!”
It took seventeen years to date from the signing of the treaty until
the Congress of the United States grudgingly granted a skeleton
form of government to this one Territory that has proved itself a
paying investment from the start. Every year the President called the
attention of Congress to the matter, and once the commander of a
Russian man-of-war on the Pacific coast announced his intention of
going up to Sitka to examine into the defenceless and deplorable
condition of the Russian residents, to whom the United States had
not given the protection and civil rights guaranteed in the treaty. He
never carried out his intentions, however, and the neglected citizens
had to wait.
After innumerable petitions and the presentation in Congress of
some thirty bills to grant a civil government to Alaska, the
inhabitants were on the point of having the Russian residents of the
Territory unite in a petition to the Czar, asking him to secure for
them the protection and the rights guaranteed in the treaty of 1869.
The Russian government would doubtless have enjoyed
memorializing the United States in such a cause, after the way the
republic has taken foreign governments to task for the persecutions
of Jews, peasants, and subjects within European borders.
Senator Harrison’s bill to provide a civil government for Alaska was
introduced on the 4th of December, 1883, and, with amendments,
passed the Senate on the 24th of January, 1884. It was approved by
the House of Representatives on the 13th of May, and, receiving
President Arthur’s signature, Alaska at last became a Territory, but
not a land district of the United States, anomalous as that may
seem.
Hon. John H. Kinkead, ex-Governor of Nevada, and who had once
resided at Sitka as postmaster and post trader, was made the first
executive. The other officers of this first government were: John G.
Brady, Commissioner at Sitka; Henry States, Commissioner at
Juneau; George P. Ihrie, Commissioner at Fort Wrangell; Chester
Seeber, Commissioner at Ounalaska; Ward MacAllister, jr., United
States District Judge; E. W. Haskell, United States District Attorney;
M. C. Hillyer, United States Marshal for the District of Alaska; and
Andrew T. Lewis, Clerk of Court. These officers reached their stations
in September, 1884, and the rule of civil law followed the long
interregnum of military, man-of-war, and revenue government in the
country that was not a Territory, but only a customs district, and an
Indian reservation without an agent.
The most sanguine do not expect to see Alaska enter the
sisterhood of States during this century, but they claim with reason
that southeastern Alaska will develop so rapidly that it will become
necessary to make it a separate Territory with full and complete form
of government, and skeleton rule be confined to the dreary and
inhospitable regions of the Yukon mainland.
The citizens who have struggled against such tremendous odds for
so many years were rather bitter in their comments upon the tardy
and ungracious action of Congress in giving them only a skeleton
government; and the Russians and Creoles are more loyal to the
Czar at heart, after experiencing these seventeen years in a free
country. To a lady who tried to buy some illusion or tulle in a store at
Sitka, the trader blurted out, “No, ma’am, there’s no illusion in
Alaska. It’s all reality here, and pretty hard at that, the way the
government treats us.”
The dim ideas that the outside world had of the condition of
Alaska was evinced by the stories Major Morris used to tell of dozens
of letters that were addressed to “The United States Consul at Sitka.”
Governors of States and more favored Territories regularly sent their
Thanksgiving Proclamations to “The Governor of Alaska Territory,”
long before the neglected country had any such an official as a
governor, or any right to such a courteous appellation as “Territory.”
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com