and might give effect
to their agreement by the familiar statistical device of 'weighting.'

The answer would perhaps provide fourteen square feet on the floor in a
room twenty-six feet high for each of three hundred and seventeen
members. There would, when the answer was settled, be a 'marginal' man
in point of hearing (representing, perhaps, an average healthy man of
seventy-four), who would be unable or just able to hear the 'marginal'
man in point of clearness of speech--who might represent (on a polygon
specially drawn up by the Oxford Professor of Biology) the least audible
but two of the tutors at Balliol. The marginal point on the curve of the
decreasing utility of successive increments of members from the point of
view of committee work might show, perhaps, that such work must either
be reduced to a point far below that which is usual in national
parliaments, or must be done very largely by persons not members of the
assembly itself. The aesthetic curve of dignity might be cut at the
point where the President of the Society of British Architects could
just be induced not to write to the _Times_.

Any discussion which took place on such lines, even although the curves
were mere forms of speech, would be real and practical. Instead of one
man reiterating that the Parliament Hall of a great empire ought to
represent the dignity of its task, and another man answering that a
debating assembly which cannot debate is of no use, both would be forced
to ask 'How much dignity'? and 'How much debating convenience'? As it
is, this particular question seems often to be settled by the architect,
who is deeply concerned with aesthetic effect, and not at all concerned
with debating convenience. The reasons that he gives in his reports seem
convincing, because the other considerations are not in the minds of
the Building Committee, who think of one element only of the problem at
a time and make no attempt to co-ordinate all the elements. Otherwise it
would be impossible to explain the fact that the Debating Hall, for
instance, of the House of Representatives at Washington is no more
fitted for debates carried on by human beings than would a spoon ten
feet broad be fitted for the eating of soup. The able leaders of the
National Congress movement in India made the same mistake in 1907, when
they arranged, with their minds set only on the need of an impressive
display, that difficult and exciting questions of tactics should be
d