familiar with the scene, when, after a debate, carried on before nearly empty benches, the division bell rings, and the members stream in to decide the issue. There is a moment of uncertainty. The questions 'Which side are we?' 'What is it about?' may be heard again and again. Then the Speaker rises, and with one magical sentence clears the situation. It is the sentence in which he announces that the tellers for the Ayes or Noes, as the case may be, are the Government whips. It is not argument, it is not eloquence, it is this single sentence which in countless cases determines the result and moulds the legislation of the country. Many members, it is true, are not present in the division lobby, but they are usually paired--that is to say, they have taken their sides before the discussion began; perhaps without even knowing what subject is to be discussed, perhaps for all the many foreseen and unforeseen questions that may arise during long periods of the session. It is a strange process, and to a new member who has been endeavouring through his life to weigh arguments and evidence with scrupulous care, and treat the formation and expression of opinions as a matter of serious duty, it is at first very painful. He finds that he is required again and again to give an effective voice in the great council of the nation, on questions of grave importance, with a levity of conviction upon which he would not act in the most trivial affairs of private life. No doctor would prescribe for the slightest malady; no lawyer would advise in the easiest case; no wise man would act in the simplest transactions of private business, or would even give an opinion to his neighbour at a dinner party without more knowledge of the subject than that on which a member of Parliament is often obliged to vote. But he soon finds that for good or evil this system is absolutely indispensable to the working of the machine. If no one voted except on matters he really understood and cared for, four-fifths of the questions that are determined by the House of Commons would be determined by mere fractions of its members, and in that case parliamentary government under the party system would be impossible. The stable, disciplined majorities without which it can never be efficiently conducted would be at an end. Those who refuse to accept the conditions of parliamentary life should abstain from entering into it.