may yet perform other very important functions in facilitating the action of voters, saving the expense and labour of travelling, and affording the means of receiving the votes of electors unable to attend personally. On these points, and others which are not necessarily connected with the scheme of representation which it is the chief purpose of the present treatise to submit, something will be said in a subsequent page.
Some portion of the duties of the registrars, in respect of this system of forming the representative assembly, has been necessarily mentioned elsewhere. They are to superintend all the local and other registers of electors, ascertain and certify the quota of voters at general elections,[1] and conduct the occasional elections.[2] They are to receive the names of the candidates, and the payments suggested, which will form a fund to be called the "Registrars' Fund," applicable to the support of the establishment, and the expense of performing its various duties;[3] and they are to publish the lists of the candidates in the respective Gazettes, and transmit copies to the various constituencies.[4]
The registrars, in their duties of sorting and appropriating the votes which are forwarded to them from the various constituencies, will be strictly governed by prescribed rules, calculated most perfectly to give effect to the will of every individual elector, as expressed on his voting paper.
The returning officers at the general election which is now supposed to be in progress will in many of the larger consti-
- ↑ Clauses I. and III.
- ↑ Clauses XXIX., XXX., and XXXI.
- ↑ Clause VII.
- ↑ Clauses VIII. and IX.
reforms, the advantages of book-postage and registered letters, the perfected system for the registration of deaths, and a hundred other like improvements, were unknown when the 'Registration Clauses' were under discussion. All these may be brought to bear practically upon the business of registration, and tend to its perfection." (P. 61.) That the registration of electors should be allowed to remain in its present state is a lamentable proof of the utter insincerity of public men on Parliamentary Reform.
