Within their limits the utility of the standing committees in legislation cannot be doubted. On the average about one seventh of the public bills enacted year by year have passed through their hands, and the proportion has shown a slight tendency to increase.[271:3] Moreover, the pressure for time in the House of Commons has become so great that a bill has a better chance of getting through if referred to a standing committee than if it has to undergo the ordeal of a long debate in Committee of the Whole. Every year the government is obliged by lack of time to drop something like one third of the bills it has introduced, but those of its bills that are referred to the standing committees rarely fail to be enacted. In the case of bills brought in by private members the contrast is even more striking; for while scarcely one tenth of all such bills become law, more than one half of those among them fortunate enough to reach a standing committee are enacted.[271:4] In fact these committees furnish by far the best chance of passing private members' bills through the House of Commons.[272:1] [Sidenote: Standing Committee for Scotland.] When the two great committees were revived in 1888, motions were made to create others to consider bills relating to Scotland and Wales. The motions were all rejected at the time; but in 1894 the Liberal government took the matter up in the case of Scotland, and in that year and the next carried resolutions establishing such a committee for the session. It consisted of all the members for Scotch constituencies, seventy-two in number, and of fifteen or twenty others appointed by the committee of selection. On each occasion the plan was vigorously opposed,[272:2] the chief objections being; that it tended toward legislative dismemberment of the United Kingdom; that such a committee would not, like the other standing committees, reflect fairly the proportion of the parties in the House, because two thirds of the Scotch members were Liberals;[272:3] and that the bills referred to it would not be exclusively of a non-contentious nature. When the Conservatives came to power they quietly dropped this committee. Even had they felt no other reason for doing so, it would, no doubt, have been enough that, in spite of considerable losses at the general election of 1895, the Liberals were still in a majority among the Scotch members. The creation of such a body illustrates, however, the exceptional position of Scotland in the British Parliament; and any one who has followed a debate on an ordinary Scotch bill, and observed how largely it is confined to Scotch members, will realise that practically the resolution of 1894 did little more than sanction formally by means of a standing committee the kind of discussion that habitually takes place in the Committee of the Whole. [Sidenote: The Four Standing Committees of 1907.]