362 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



which has been gravely compromised by the events and changes 

 of recent years, are now strenuously advocating the extension 

 of the Franchise and the reform of our Electoral System, but 

 these tardy concessions to popular sentiment are powerless, 

 to-day, to satisfy a public which is at last awakening to a 

 perception of the real nature of the disease which afflicts the 

 body politic. 



Public attention has been focused upon the real cause of 

 much of the trouble by an incident which occurred within the 

 last few weeks. Speaking in the House of Commons on 

 October 31, a member of Mr. Asquith's Cabinet had the 

 audacity to address that assembly in the following terms : 



" We must carry on the government of the country, 

 badly I agree, but as well as we can do it ; and we cannot 

 share that responsibility with the House of Commons or 

 with anybody else — not during the war." 



As the late Prime Minister, when subsequently invited to 

 dissociate himself from this astonishing pronouncement, replied, 

 " I do not repudiate it in the least," it must be assumed that 

 this utterance represented the view of his Cabinet as a whole. 

 It is the acquiescence of the House of Commons — dating from 

 a period long prior to the outbreak of the war — in the usurpa- 

 tion of its powers by the Cabinet and in the gradual extinction, 

 in favour of the Government, of the rights of private members 

 that is chiefly responsible for the contempt into which the 

 House has fallen in recent years. Just as the incredible folly 

 of the House of Lords in rejecting a Budget afforded the long- 

 awaited opportunity for destroying its powers, so the syste- 

 matic obstruction practised by certain members of the House 

 of Commons, in the early years of the Home Rule Controversy, 

 justified, and indeed necessitated, the introduction of the 

 Closure which, applied as time went on with ever-increasing 

 stringency and ingenuity, now enables any Government with 

 a sufficiently numerous and docile majority to silence incon- 

 venient criticism and stifle debate. While such alterations as 

 have been made in Parliamentary procedure have resulted in a 

 progressive curtailment of the rights of private members, 

 successive leaders of the House have affected a pedantic 

 attachment to ancient tradition which has excused them from 



