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-the complete indefiniteness of its meaning. We can, of course, construct meanings for ourselves which would be definite enough. We can imagine, for example, the dining rooms of the Palace of Westminster being opened during the Recess as a first-class restaurant. That would be eminently business-like. We can imagine the House of Commons appointing a committee of its ablest financiers to conduct some gigantic commercial enterprise for the exclusive benefit of its members. That would be still more in keeping with the business ideas of to-day.

These pretty schemes, however, are only imaginings as yet, and in the meantime we must perhaps seek for an application of the business ideal more compatible with the traditions of a legislative body. Etymologically and historically the business of a Parliament is talking. Therefore we might reasonably suppose that the most business-like Parliament would be the Parliament that talked most. Yet the precise complaint brought against the House of Commons (negative criticism is, be it remembered, always precise) is that it talks too much. There is evidently a contradiction somewhere. Still we have gathered that a business-like House of Commons (and here our mending comes perilously near to ending) is a House of Commons that does not want to talk, or is not allowed to talk, as the case may be.

Talking is generally regarded, most unjustly, as the antithesis of doing. We may then safely go further and say that a business-like House of Commons is a silent body with an enormous capacity for action. We are asked to look at results, not at the process of their attainment. The results presumably are the Acts which are passed and the sums of money which are voted. But are these results the work of the House of Commons as such? They have of course received its sanction, but that

merely means that a majority of the House (that is the men whose function it is to support the Government, not only when they are in positive sympathy with it, but also whenever they are ignorant or indifferent about the point at issue) have voted in the right lobby, and have not through inadvertence or perversity followed the Opposition. Unless they have an unbusiness-like taste for rhetorical displays. that process contents themselves, the Government, and, for the most part. their electors; it is a process which occupies about fifteen minutes. If the sanction of results were the only reason for the House of Commons's existence, there would be no sitting through the dog-days, and no Autumn Sessions.

Further, it is evident that, if to be business-like is to produce a large body of results, the most business-like body in the world is one which is absolutely unanimous. But if we suppose a body of six hundred and seventy men assembled to make laws, the most obvious ob servation is that considerably more than six hundred of them are entirely unnecessary. The large number only increases the possibility of disagreement as new questions arise, and consequently is an infringement of the business ideal. The natural conclusion is that the simplest way to make the House of Commons business-like is to make it smaller. Unfortunately the process must go far before complete unanimity is reached. A Cabinet is a reasonably homogeneous body, but we have heard rumors of dissent even in its sacred consultations. We cannot logically rest until we reach an autocrat. An autocrat can make revolutions with a stroke of the pen; he, therefore, constitutes the most business-like body conceivable.

It is customary to identify aristocracy, or autocracy, with conservatism, or stagnation, and democracy with progress or change. This of course is true;

for an aristocrat may roughly be defined as a man who has got a good thing and knows it, and a democrat as a man who is excluded from a good thing and knows that he wants it. That is why democracy is always extending its basis. Each section of the population in turn wins a good thing and becomes relatively aristocratic and conservative; the next section of the population immediately demands the same good thing and becomes actively democratic and radical. The paradoxical feature of the British democratic assembly is that all its machinery is devised to hinder and hamper change. It votes money by complex processes because it wrested the power of voting money from the hands of business-like kings, who wanted money and intended to get it with the minimum of formality. was the money of the Commons that was wanted, and the Commons showed that they too could be business-like and clung to it tenaciously. They were business-like also in their refusal to give any at all unless the Crown definitely asked for it. The result is that the House of Commons to-day has to spend many weary hours voting the money which is required to carry out its own chosen policy.

It

It is the same with legislation. In the early days of the House of Commons Bills were drafted by the king in response to petitions. The Commons, having asked for the Bill, were naturally ready to pass it, but they had first to go through the details with the utmost minuteness to see whether the king had fulfilled his promises. It was realized that a committee might be packed, and consequently every member assisted at the examination. But it is one thing to go through a Bill, on which all are in substance agreed, to see that it contains no saving clauses to the King's advantage, and a very different to struggle line by line through a complicated measure about which

there is the most acute difference of opinion. The one examination may not unreasonably be performed by a large body; the other is obviously illadapted to an assembly of six hundred and seventy. There is all the differ ence in the world between a body united within itself and defending itself against an extraneous authority, and a body whose very nature it is to be divided into two or more irreconcilable parties. There is all the difference in the world between a House of Commons fighting against the Crown for its own rights, and a House of Commons in which the Executive, backed by a majority, faces the criticism of the minority. They are two different bodies, and the caution of the one becomes the obstruction of the other.

Yet the whole trouble is that they are the same body, and that the later House of Commons guards with intense jealousy the powers won by its predecessor, even though the methods of exercising these powers be disadvantageous to the majority. For the paradoxical result of Constitutional development has been that the executive powers, which the original House endeavored to thwart and control, are now concentrated on the Treasury Bench and lead the majority into the lobby. The recurring opportunities for discussion are of value only to the Opposition, who occupy the position of the old House of Commons.

Now, since an unofficial member's Bill has practically no chance of becoming law unless it be fathered by the Government, the results of a Session are the work of the Cabinet. If the Government could act without a House of Commons, the results would probably be the same in kind, though possibly greater in bulk. Once more we come back to the position that the only use of a Parliament is its use as a talkingmachine; and since the Opposition does the talking, it follows that the only val

uable part of the House of Commons is its minority, whose function it is to criticize. Criticism takes time, and if you limit the time by closure, you may certainly prevent a great deal of useless and infinitely dreary criticism; but, on the other hand, you also prevent the House from producing the one thing which justifies its existence,-good criticism. Every member of the House is divided between two interests-his interest as an actual or potential ministerialist, and his interest as a potential or actual member of the Opposition. The first interest tends to make him subordinate every thing to the speedy carrying out of the will of the Government; the second makes him yearn for endless opportunities of debate and obstruction. If he wants the House of Commons business-like to-day, he will probably want it unbusiness-like to-morrow. Pure-bred democracy only lives in opposition, for democracy is always aspiration and never attainment. It is plain that any attempt to increase the amount of legislation means an increase of the powers of the Government at the expense of the valuable critical element in the House of Commons; it means the prohibition of good criticism as well as of bad; it means a step away from democracy and towards bureaucracy.

That a large amount of time is wasted, and even wilfully wasted, in futile talk, no one would deny. Yet if the duty of an Opposition is to oppose. it is their duty to talk not less, but more than is absolutely necessary. At any rate it is the plain truth that no Opposition will willingly give way on to-day's Bill in order that the Government may proceed with an equally obnoxious measure to-morrow. There is at present no choice between plentiful rhetoric and an unfettered Government, responsible only once in seven years. Make what rules you will, so long as there is an articulate Opposition, so

long will there be obstruction. But in so far as you muzzle the Opposition. you kill the House of Commons.

But

There may be differences of opinion as to the amount of legislation which is necessary or desirable. With that question we are not now concerned. The interest of a Session is almost always concentrated on one big Bill, on which the Government stakes its existence. That Bill is sure to be guillotined. The application of the guillotine is always the signal for an outery of the outraged minority, and the shorter the time given to unfettered discussion the more effective is the outcry. Hence we have the phenomenon which we may call vicarious obstruction, that is the obstruction of less important and less contentious Bills, in order to prevent the progress of the larger measure. Herein lies the true problem for the reformers, for vicarious obstruction means the wreck of many small Departmental Bills which offend nobody and probably are urgently needed by the few whom they concern. here again no rules can be of the slightest avail. These Bills must either not require the sanction of the House of Commons, or they must be open to criticism. We must either boldly institute something more than Droit Administratif or we must confront the possibility of a waste of time. Such Bills may indeed go up to Standing Committees, but the report-stage has still to be reckoned with, and if the report-stage be curtailed, the House is deprived of all right of detailed criticism. The remedy, if there is one, must lie with the Government. It is perhaps too much to hope for a Session devoted to small measures, urgently needed but not clamorously demanded,-for a King's Speech in which there is no echo of the hustings. But no Government can justly excuse itself for omitting to pass a really uncontentious measure. Such a measure only acquires a fictitious conten

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it comes on when there is a certainty that no other business will be taken, it retains its true character. The suspension of the eleven o'clock rule, or better still of the five o'clock rule on Friday, would have the desired effect without hampering more important business and without unduly taxing the energies of the House. Suspensions are on general principles undesirable, but they are a convenient mode of announcing the Government's decision to pass a measure at all costs. That announcement, if accompanied by the necessary pledge that no other business will be Macmillan's Magazine.

taken would probably suffice. Members of Parliament have no desire to sit up all night, or to miss their train to the country, for the sake of opposing a colorless Bill. The main hindrance to the passage of Departmental Bills is not obstruction, but the fact that no political capital is to be made out of them. In any case it is absurd to talk of gagging the House of Commons, and so depriving it of its chief function, to avoid adding one weary day to a weary session. Such reform, and it is the reform which seems to be implied in the word business-like, is no reform at all; it is destruction.

Wilfred Johnston.

A MILANESE MYSTERY. CHAPTER III.

Douglas passed the rest of the day in a state of increasing restlessness and conviction: the former because he did not know what to do to substantiate his belief that Bassano the cobbler had very much to do with the tragedies which were still an unelucidated marvel to Milan, and the latter inevitably the more he sought other interpretations of the conduct and words of the cobbler and his daughter.

At one time he was for calling upon the Cavaliere di Barese and telling him all he knew and surmised. But scruples withheld him. It was very repugnant to him to think that he might be a wrecker of Bassano's home. He could not do it, indeed. How, for instance, would that poor, pretty girl look at him, if he were thus proclaimed as a spy? Look at him, forsooth! Why, she would perhaps seek to tear the eyes from his head. Moreover, a certain feeling of pride supported his natural inclination in the matter. He had undertaken this charge alone. If the worst befell, and Bassano were really a

dastard of the kind indicated by the press, whom to lay by the heels were the manifest duty of the first righteous man who discovered the cobbler's infamy, then he would share his triumph with no one.

He hoped, and quarrelled with his hopes.

In this confusion of mind he wandered about the city. He spent a silent hour in the beautiful Duomo, apparently lost in pious meditation, but most of the time thinking of those three or four souls whose fate might chance to depend upon him: Bassano and his daughter, the worthy Marco, and that abbreviated human devil of a Bolla, with the ears which declared him more brute-beast than man. There was besieds the Count, for whom he felt a dislike as great as that inspired by the dwarf. He also could not be disassociated from any exposure of the casa Bassano.

But throughout the reflection there was all the time this one baffling and quite important detail. Though he had

it in plain black and white before him that Bassano and Bolla were Mafia fiends, he could see no key to the manner of their operations. Of all men, Bassano, the shrinking pink-eyed piece of timidity! How could he be made responsible for such magnificent chemistry? There was no trace in him of audacity, whether of mind or body. And from what Maria had told him, her father was little better than an anchorite, shut up all day and all night with his leather and his tools, save when as a rare enterprise he stole out for a glass of vermouth at the "Nazione." Maria had said it was but once a week or so that he thus dissipated, and then he was back again in a few minutes. No; there was nothing villainous or masterful in the composition of Bassano the cobbler, so far as the common eye could see.

It was late when Douglas returned to the Via Corta. He felt a little anxious about his reception. In his hand, moreover, was another evening paper with comments on the Gazzetta's article about the five mysteries. But he would keep that to himself, go to bed, and perhaps awake with some wise ideas.

To his satisfaction, however, Maria Bassano opened the door to him with welcoming eyes.

"It contents me to see you, caro signore," she said with gentle friendliness. "I was not myself this afternoon. I fear I behaved with some asperity. The signore will, I hope, not remember it." She proffered her hand in the dimly lighted passage.

"I have quite forgotten it, little one," said Douglas cordially. "I sympathized. You believe that?"

He could hear the tap-tapping of the cobbler's hammer upstairs. Bassano did not often work so late, though the sound was always the first that came to him when he opened his eyes in the morning.

"Yes," replied the girl. "I believe everything that is good of the signore. But there is something I wish to say. It is about Masuccio."

"What about the fellow?" asked Douglas.

"I have arranged it with myself, signorino. It was a foolishness from the first, that intimacy. I perceive it now. One has one's looks, to be sure, and it seems a pity not to make a little money innocently with one's face as well as with one's hands, if God gives one the precious gift of beauty; but, yes, I reproach myself for Marco's sake. I have done with him. When he returns to-morrow I shall give him his boot and tell him the truth. He may take his boots to another cobbler in future, and if he requires it of me his presents shall all be returned to him. Ah! but it will be a sorrow, signorino, to surrender them. Especially the ear-rings of gold and crystal, and the bracelet with the corals! But I tire your amiability, caro signorino. Here is the lamp, and good-night."

Douglas was not eager for the lamp. "This is fine news, little one," he said. "I congratulate you."

"The signore is very kind to say so." continued the girl. "But there may be trouble, nevertheless. The Count is of a haughty nature. One must trust in God even more than one's self. There is one other thing to say; but I do not like to perhaps vex you, caro signorino. by saying it to-night after my wicked passion of”

"Never mind that, Maria," Douglas interrupted, scenting a reference to Bolla. "Whatever it is, tell it to me now."

"Truly?" She put the question with arched eyebrows and a very sweet gravity in her blue eyes.

"Yes, I request it," he said. She gave him his candle first.

"It hurts to say it, caro signorino; but

I have persuaded my father to leave

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