Great Britain is in urgent need of competent representative government, and the extent to which the Mother of Parliaments proves herself to be a recuperative phœnix or an incurable old goose in this affair is a matter of vital importance not only to the British Empire, but to the whole world. Nowadays we have fairly clear ideas of the nature of the supreme governing body that is needed for a great and various modern State. A single body seems to be all that is required; that a nation should squint at its problems with two divergent bodies does not seem to be imperative at all--though possibly a secondary body representing function, and not locality, may be a desirable auxiliary to the supreme assembly. About that supreme assembly we are now able to stipulate certain necessary conditions. It must not be too large a body, because that means an excess of inert and undistinguished members too numerous and obscure to be properly watched, such as we find encumbering affairs at Washington and Westminster, and at the same time it must be large enough to staff all its necessary committees, and to represent the chief varieties of opinion in the country. Something between two hundred and three hundred members seems to be the proper assembly; less may be unrepresentative, and more will develop crowd mentality. And the members must be elected by the method of proportional representation, and be sent up from twenty or thirty large constituencies--largely to eliminate mere local leaders--each constituency returning a dozen members or more. Only by this method of election can we kill that gag upon honest democracy, the party system, and replace the professional politician by a various gathering of typical and well-known men and women. Such a body would change only slowly in its character from election to election, and it would sustain a Government more real, steadfast, representative, assured and consistent than any the world has ever seen before. Throughout the world a great and gathering body of opinion is moving steadily towards such a conception of a modern Government. And because of its present needs it is Great Britain which is likely to be for a time the battleground between modern and eighteenth-century conceptions of a legislative assembly.