It is to a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart from our national
life. It becomes more and more so. To go into the House of Commons is to
go aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a
corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialised
Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in
our affairs. There was a period when the debates in the House of Commons
were an integral, almost a dominant, part of our national thought, when
its speeches were read over in tens of thousands of homes, and a large
and sympathetic public followed the details of every contested issue.
Now a newspaper that dared to fill its columns mainly with parliamentary
debates, with a full report of the trivialities the academic points, the
little familiar jokes, and entirely insincere pleadings which occupy
that gathering would court bankruptcy.
This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost
universal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of that
comment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is
associated with any will to change a state of affairs that so largely
stultifies our national purpose. And yet the causes of our present
political ineptitude are fairly manifest, and a radical and effective
reconstruction is well within the wit of man.
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