John Stuart Mill was one of the first to support revolutionary voting system put forward by Thomas Hare in 1857. Hare's system is now known as Single Transferable Voting. It is district-level proportional representation, where both large and small parties are allocated thier due share of seats in each district., as proportionally as the relatively limited number of seats in a district allows anyway.
His 1861 book Considerations of representative government emphasizes the need for elected governments to reflect votes cast, something not dependably accomplished by First past the post or Block Voting, the electoral systems used to elect British MPs at the time..
Mill was a prominent philosopher and social thinker, but even he only served one term as MP (1865-1868) and then he found it impossible to get a party to nominate him as their candidate.
Those speaking at a high-level meeting of proportionalists a few years later, in 1894, pointed to Mill as an example of the kind of publicly spirited person who cannot even achieve a nomination under first past the post. (Report of meeting on Proportional representation or effective voting, p. 25 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.319510020929922&seq=29)
In 1861 Mill wrote:
Of all modes in which a national representation can possibly be constituted, this one affords the best security for the intellectual qualifications desirable in the representatives. At present, by universal admission, it is becoming more and more difficult for any one who has only talents and character to gain admission into the House of Commons. The only persons who can get elected are those who possess local influence, or make their way by lavish expenditure, or who, on the invitation of three or four tradesmen or attorneys, are sent down by one of the two great parties from their London clubs, as men whose votes the party can depend on under all circumstances. (Mill, Considerations of representative government (Chapter VII))
Unfortunately when he wrote this, he was prescient - it seems that that exact failure of FPTP to promote seats to politicians of quality was seen in the way his own political career was stunted.
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