At that time almost all the business of the House, even to its most minute details of legislation, was done in the debating-chamber itself. The scheme which was adopted a great many years later, and by means of which the shaping of the details of legislative measures is commonly relegated to Grand Committees, as the Parliamentary phrase goes, had not then found any favor with statesmen. The daily work of the House was left, for the most part, in the hands of the members of the Administration and the leading members of the Opposition, or, in cases where the interests of a particular class, or trade, or district were concerned, to the men who had special knowledge of each subject of legislation. It was therefore argued, and with much plausibility, that to construct a chamber large enough to hold seats for all the members would be to impose an insupportable, and at the same time a quite unnecessary, strain upon the energies and the lungs of the comparatively small number of men by whom the actual business of the House had to be carried on. This argument was used with much effect, not many years before his death, by Mr. Gladstone himself, and there can be no doubt that it maintained itself against the many successive proposals which have been made from time to time for the enlargement of the representative chamber. In most other legislative halls, on the Continent or in the United States or in Canada, each member has his own seat, and finds it ready for his occupation at any time; but in the House of Commons on great occasions the ordinary member has to come to the House at the earliest moment when its doors are open, hours and hours before the business begins, in order to have even a chance of obtaining a seat during the debate, and a large number of members are fated, whatever their energy and their early rising, to sigh for a seat in vain. The question has been raised again and again in the House of Commons, and all manner of propositions have been brought forward and plans suggested for the {272} enlargement of the debating-chamber, but up to the present the condition of things remains just as it was when the new Houses of Parliament were opened in the reign of Queen Victoria. [Sidenote: 1840--Ladies in the House of Commons]