Not that the details of the Land Act, or any other measure, are to be forced upon the Legislature without criticism, explanation, or modification. Simply, that these technical parts of every Bill ought to be considered in properly formed committees and not in casual committees of the whole House. To some scheme of committees the House of Commons, like every other chamber, will have to come. Every one is averse from it now, because the very name of Select Committee is now equivalent to siding' or ' shunting.' Select committees are in fact the device by which puzzled Ministers get rid of awkward questions. None of this horror would be felt if the permanent committees were the ordinary means of considering the technical parts of every Bill. A committee of ten or twenty members (not as an adjunct to the passing of a Bill, but as its sole channel, for all that relates to its practical working) would examine a measure with coolness, discrimination, special knowledge, and sustained interest, without the excitement of party cheers and Opposition passion, without the temptations to be eloquent, to be embarrassing, and to talk to one's constituents-all which now make up three-fourths of the so-called 'work' in committee. Let us suppose that the Land Act before the third reading had to satisfy a body of experts as to its practical efficiency. Let us suppose it argued out before the twelve judges. The slowness of law courts is proverbial; but we all know that in a fortnight, at the latest, every clause would have been tested, every argument that the wit of man could discover would have been exhausted, and the matter would be ripe for a decision.

Every business assembly in Europe but one carries on its administrative work and settles the details of drafts in carefully organised committees. The House of Commons persists in the mediaval method of settling the drafts and amending every measure, however intricate and however technical, in floating committees of the whole House; and for no other reason but that such was the practice under the Plantagenet kings, I suppose, by the standing orders of Simon de Montfort. The board of a railway or insurance company, when it has to settle new bye-laws, puts the matter in the hands of a small committee of experts. We all know what committees of the whole House are. A score or two of chance members bang about inside the House; a few score more wander about in and out the lobbies, like ants running in and out the nest; the Minister in charge, with two or three official bottle-holders, fights his clauses, well or ill, using just those kinds of arguments which will silence his antagonists, with the manifest object, not of satisfying the country, but of out-manoeuvring his critics; there is no real criticism; threefourths of the so-called amendments are mere worry, or swagger, or gabble, puffs of the honourable amender for the borough of Little Pedlington, very often now scarcely veiled attempts to stifle or wreck the Bill. Sometimes the Minister fights his way home with

his battered Bill in his arms; often he has to drop out some of its best clauses; not seldom, if he loses his temper, or the whip makes a slip in his calculations, some ex-Minister with a grievance, or a false friend on his own side, snaps a majority with a clause which ruins the Bill as a measure, and neutralises its results in practical working. In any case the so-called committee of a Bill is a casual chance medley, in which enormous labour and patience are required to prevent the most ludicrous mishaps. A complex Act is now a legal document of extreme delicacy and technical nicety. It is hardly possible to contrive a more chaotic way of making it law than to submit it to a mitraille of amendments in a fluid committee of the whole House. One might as well post it in Charing Cross and ask the passers-by to give their opinions and correct it to their liking. A committee of the whole House never is a real committee, and cannot be made such. It is nothing but the House sitting in even looser order than usual. A committee of the whole House is necessarily affected by the same party excitement and passion as a House in ordinary sitting; it is liable to the same interruptions, the same desultory attendance, the same occasions for talkativeness, selfassertion, intrigue, and wanton obstruction. A real committee of a dozen, or a score at most, may possibly give to a technical draft a continuous and dispassionate attention; if the members of it really desire to understand each other, they always will do so in a few hours or a few days; those who desire only to worry or obstruct are easily dealt with when all are sitting round a table, and every man's purpose is accurately known, and can be elicited by cross-examination. Cross-examination and freedom from all idle interruptions are conditions essential to the business-like study of every intricate draft. In a real select committee a Minister in charge of a Bill can be closely interrogated, documents can be searched and compared, experts can be brought in to give evidence from without, and a continuous and quiet study can be secured. None of these can be had in the scratch sittings called committees of the whole House. How would a court of judges determine the meaning of a complicated will, or decide on the provisions of an obscure settlement, if it had to be done in committees of the whole House, with hundreds of members running in and out, bobbing up and down with new bogus suggestions, or making Buncombe speeches to their local leagues by the hour together?

Three-fourths of what is called the business' of the House is work only proper for small committees. It would be done by small committees ten times as well in a third of the time. For note this indirect effect of the present system: since committees differ from sittings of the House only in the absence of the Speaker and a few matters of form, the essential differences between the consideration of principle and the consideration of detail is in practice lost sight of.

Members, who the following day will, in the same place, with the same attendance and with the same publicity, be discussing clauses in committee cannot be prevented from making committee speeches on the second reading. The consequence is that the House of Commons may be said to have lost the very sense of strictly limiting a debate to principle. And this defect has spread to officials as much as private members, to loyal Ministerialists as well as to the most reckless members of Opposition. The House of Lords is singularly free from this fault. The discussion of the Irish Land Act was a real model in this respect. The great orators of the Opposition, if they were right at all, were right in form. The speeches on the second reading contained hardly a word that was proper for committee. The speeches in committee contained hardly a word that belonged to the principle or second reading. The body of the House of Lords are so little overwhelmed with committee work that they have not learned the fatal habit of the House of Commons to make all their sittings a sort of prolonged and desultory committee, and their committees a sort of miscellaneous debating society.

There is no half-way house between the present deadlock and transferring all detail to a complete system of revising committees. The consideration of the enormous mass of clauses and amendments which now choke the session is enough to employ a score of committees working simultaneously and almost continuously. If this were done they might obtain some of that patient study which they need but do not get. The Bills and amendments laid before the House every session, nominally to be considered by it clause by clause in detail, occupy many thousand pages of closely printed folios. These can no more be really considered by the House at large than the tables in the Nautical Almanack could be calculated by the occupants of Eaton Square. The consequence is that not one in ten is ever heard of at all. In a healthy state of things the House would have before it nothing but the principles of measures; it would send a Bill to a committee, and pass resolutions to instruct the committee; it would give or refuse its assent to a measure; support or condemn a Ministry; but it would never directly deal with the drafts themselves, or frame the actual language of clauses, or meddle with trivial matters of local administration, or ask busy-body questions which ought never to be asked, and certainly ought never to be answered.

The House must be relieved of the whole burden of revising mountains of draft Bills; and it must regain its freedom by being able at any time to put an end to debate. But we shall be deceiving ourselves if we suppose that even these changes, great as they are, are enough. Behind all this, and practically as the cause of it, lies a far profounder obstacle to the usefulness of the House of Commons. This is that, in the course of time, insensibly, and under certain

forms, the House has practically usurped executive functions, and really has become itself the executive. It is not the constitutional function, it is not the avowed theory; it may possibly not be recognised by the public. But a little reflection will convince any clear mind that it is so; and a little further reflection will show that it is a system that can only result in failure. It is an experience new in the political history of the world, that the administrative business of a vast empire should be practically carried on by two unwieldy chambers consisting together of about one thousand persons. I shall not waste words to show that an Administration, which is almost a mob, cannot in fact administer at all.

When we look below the surface and put aside names and forms, we see that the House of Commons is now really attempting to administer. A very large proportion of the matter before the House is not legislation, except for the form of it, but administration. This conversion of one of the two legislative chambers into an irresponsible executive has grown up insensibly and gradually out of two main functions into which it may still be conveniently grouped. The first is the time-honoured right of criticising the executive; the other is the modern habit of giving a legislative form to purely executive details. The history of the process is one of the most curious and subtle in our long constitutional development. One sees how the body, which was once the sturdy petitioner of the Plantagenets, the obsequious tool of the Tudors, and the undaunted opponent of Stuart misgovernment, gradually became the Mayor of the Palace to the Hanoverian Fainéants, and now in this century has become a despot more autocratic than any Czar-a despot with an unbounded power of meddling, and an inexhaustible gift of prolixity.

The House of Commons smiles at the charge of being a despot: but that is really what it is; and of all despots the many-headed type is the worst. When I say a despot, I mean that Parliament affects to legislate about ten thousand local and administrative details which, in any system but ours, are left to local authorities of some kind, and administrative experts on the spot. The great good of a despotism, amid its many evils, is that one gets the business done with the concentrated force of personal will and individual judgment, and with a real and social responsibility of some kind, even if there is no legal responsibility. But what are we to think of a despotism which does not get the business done; which robs all other authorities of their due freedom and duties; piles in one great centralised chamber mountains of projects, schemes, and orders in draft; will not allow any project, scheme, or order to issue till it has considered and accepted it in solemn session; and then leaves the whole business undone, because it is physically impossible to consider a twentieth part of the stupendous pile? It is a system worthy of the sublime. Porte and the Pashas.

Nothing is too small, too local, too technical to be the proper subject of an Act of Parliament. The Bills, even of this barren session, occupy many thousand folio pages, not one page in ten of which ought ever to come before a central Legislature. I take a few instances almost at random. Bill No. 178 is a Bill to confer upon teachers of Board schools in Scotland the right of appeal from the decisions of School Boards in cases of removal from office.' Bill No. 189 is a Bill to amend the law relating to the official staff of the Court of Bankruptcy in Ireland.' Bill No. 183 is a Bill to confirm the Provisional Order for the regulation of certain lands known as Shenfield common, situate in the parish of Shenfield, in the county of Essex, in pursuance of a report of the Inclosure Commissioners for England and Wales.' The Tramways Orders Bills are three gigantic Bills to authorise certain orders as to certain tram-lines, sidings, and bye-laws for roads in parts of Warwickshire. Bill No. 1 occupies 180 pages folio of small print. Bill No. 3, 144 such pages. I have not myself seen No. 2; but the 324 pages which I have seen appear to be drawn with elaborate care and distinctness. Only, no human being but a local surveyor with the plans before him could make head or tail of them. These Bills, I am well aware, are scheduled orders made by the practised acumen of the Board of Trade. I dare say they did not delay the House very long, though the printers' bill must be no trifle. But in theory every sentence in these three or four hundred pages was open to discussion in committee, and a member with a genius for mischief might have prolonged the discussion of them for two months.

I am well aware that under our present system Acts of the kind are imperative. But the system itself is breaking down. It is a system which feeds its own vices and germinates afresh with frightful rapidity. Once introduce the practice of making Parliament legislate in minute and verbose directions upon all the petty trivialities of every local service, and you paralyse all other authorities; every change of facts requires more Acts of Parliament; every slip and omission compels the intervention of Jove himself in his parliamentary machine. An old-fashioned Toll Act when it meant animal' used to run-horse, ass, cow, pig, dog, cat, monkey,' and so forth. When difficulties arose about some unnamed animal, the wisdom of the Legislature was appealed to to add fresh descriptive words to the catalogue. A modern Act now, under the scientific method of Sir Henry Thring, says simply animal,' a course which saves us annually hundreds of Acts. But Parliament has not yet got to see that it is physically impossible to tie up in legislative swaddling-clothes the myriad details of administrative work that has to be done in the three kingdoms. The more elaborate the efforts made to anticipate the needs of this throbbing organism of nearly forty millions, the more certain is the process to involve fresh Acts in geometric ratio.