moment, and will make its enactment impossible unless a term is set to the deliberations of committee of the whole house. Whether the time granted by the Government be long or short makes no difference: it is impossible to pass any serious and complex bill except by the closure. In other words, the Government (which practically means the Civil Service officials and parliamentary draftsmen employed by the particular department concerned with the bill--the Home Office, the Local Government Board Office, the Exchequer, or what not) must triumph. Even the suggestions of individual supporters of the administration in power must be ignored, unless there is a cave which might turn out the ministry altogether. In detail, therefore, we are governed, not by Parliament, but by the permanent officials, so far as really important Government measures are concerned: and it is quite evident that bills introduced by private members will very soon not be considered at all. The private member is rapidly being reduced to nothingness by the force of parliamentary development. Meantime, the waste of public time by the introduction and debating of bills which the Opposition eventually succeeds in destroying, is appalling, and of course it is aggravated by the idiotic rule which destroys at the end of each session all the work which has been begun and not completed. The system, not less imbecile, in which opinion is ascertained in Parliament is another great time-waster. It is only necessary to ask for a single moment what our grandsons, or even the younger of our children, will think of a Parliament in which a vote was taken by solemnly walking through lobbies, with elaborate arrangements for counting and checking the members (when it might all be done by the simple use of an electric signal in front of each seat in the chamber) in order to perceive the miserable inadequacy of even the mechanical arrangements of all the parliaments of the world. And if even all the crass follies and mediæval stupidities of modern parliamentary arrangements were reformed, as nine-tenths of them could be by any competent board composed of a few engineers, electricians and architects, we should still be in possession of a legislative machine such as the intelligence of a hundred years hence would laugh to scorn if its restoration were suggested.