arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to bring
in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought in. They asked
for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much ripe wisdom from
the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously among the seniors of the
gathering. Thereafter they were baffled men....

But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to an end.
It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its construction
as for the preservation of its accomplished work from the dramatic
instincts of the politician.

The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of the
formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic in
spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of existence a vast,
knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and jealous proprietorships;
it secured by a noble system of institutional precautions, freedom of
inquiry, freedom of criticism, free communications, a common basis of
education and understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. With
that its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an
established security and less and less an active intervention. There is
nothing in our time to correspond with the continual petty making and
entangling of laws in an atmosphere of contention that is perhaps the
most perplexing aspect of constitutional history in the nineteenth
century. In that age they seem to have been perpetually making laws when
we should alter regulations. The work of change which we delegate to
these scientific committees of specific general direction which have
the special knowledge needed, and which are themselves dominated by
the broad intellectual process of the community, was in those days
inextricably mixed up with legislation. They fought over the details; we
should as soon think of fighting over the arrangement of the parts of
a machine. We know nowadays that such things go on best within laws, as
life goes on between earth and sky. And so it is that government gathers
now for a day or so in each year under the sunshine of Brissago when
Saint Bruno's lilies are in flower, and does little more than bless the
work of its committees. And even these committees are less originative
and more expressive of the general thought than they were at first. It
becomes difficult to mark out the particular directive personalities
of the world. Continually we are less personal. Every good thought
cont