of public life. Parliament is no longer the Grand Inquest of the Nation,
at least not in the ancient and proper meaning of the words. The
declaration of Edmund Burke to the effect that a member has no right to
sacrifice his "unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened
conscience" to any set of men living may be echoed by the judges in our
day, but to anyone who knows the House of Commons it is a piece of pure
irony. Party discipline cracks every session a more compelling whip; and
our shepherded, regimented, and automatised representatives themselves
realise that, whatever more desirable status they may have attained,
they have certainly lost that of individual freedom. Out of their own
ranks a movement has arisen to put an end altogether to Party
government. This proposal I myself believe to be futile, but its very
futility testifies to the existence of an intolerable situation. All
this turns on the inadequacy of the time of the House of Commons to its
business. But the distribution of such time as there is, is a revel of
ineptitudes. It resembles the drawing of a schoolboy who has not yet
learned perspective. A stranger dropping into the Chamber will find it
spending two hours in helping to determine whether Russia is to have a
Czar, and the next four hours helping to determine whether Rathmines is
to have, let us say, a new sewer. The affairs of India, involving the
political welfare of three hundred millions of human beings, get one
day; Egypt, that test case in international ethics, has to be content
with a few scattered hours. And, despite all this, local questions are
not considered at sufficient length or with sufficient knowledge. The
parish pump is close enough to spoil St Stephen's as an Imperial
Council, and yet so far away as to destroy its effectiveness as an organ
of local government.

Such an assembly is clearly unfitted to function as the cerebrum of
Empire. It must be relieved of burdens which in the complexity of modern