e, objects were plain, and quick action generally led
to desirable ends: if A kills B before B kills A, then A survives, and
the human race is a race of A's. But the issues of life are plain no
longer: to act rightly in modern society requires a great deal of
previous study, a great deal of assimilated information, a great deal of
sharpened imagination; and these prerequisites of sound action require
much time, and I was going to say much "lying in the sun," a long period
of "mere passiveness."

[Argument to show that the same vice of impatience damages war,
philanthropy, commerce, and even speculation.]

But it will be said, What has government by discussion to do with these
things? will it prevent them, or even mitigate them? It can and does do
both, in the very plainest way. If you want to stop instant and
immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not
begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it and have
agreed on it. If those persons be people of different temperaments,
different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible
security that nothing or almost nothing will be done with excessive
rapidity. Each kind of persons will have their spokesman; each spokesman
will have his characteristic objection and each his characteristic
counter-proposition: and so in the end nothing will probably be done, or
at least only the minimum which is plainly urgent. In many cases this
delay may be dangerous, in many cases quick action will be preferable; a
campaign, as Macaulay well says, cannot be directed by a "debating
society," and many other kinds of action also require a single and
absolute general: but for the purpose now in hand--that of preventing
hasty action and insuring elaborate consideration--there is no device
like a polity of discussion.

The enemies of this object--the people who want to act quickly--see this
very distinctly: they are forever explaining that the present is "an age
of committees," that the committees do nothing, that all evaporates in
talk. Their great enemy is parliamentary government: they call it, after
Mr. Carlyle, the "national palaver"; they add up the hours that are
consumed in it and the speeches which are made in it, and they sigh for
a time when England might again be ruled, as it once was, by a
Cromwell,--that is, when an eager absolute man might do exactly what
other eager men wished, and do it immediately. All these invectiv