That Irishman rejected Prime Minister Gladstone’s view that proportional representation was impractible and unintelligible.
It may be a pons asinorum according to the Prime Minister but it is no more a pons asinorum than the vote by ballot was in 1874. I remember very well the difficulty which we had then in making the voter understand the secrecy of the ballot, and how to mark his voting paper, without rendering it null and void in the operation. My recollections of the pons asinorum at school is that of a passage on a scientific frontier, which having once been crossed, the way was smooth and clear ever afterwards … whatever the complications there may be in this system they are not felt by the voter ….
‘The New Reform’, J O’Connor Power, Nineteenth Century, Jan, 1885, 15-24.