he Post Office and the
Public Works Department--should, I suggest, be excluded from the
Cabinet, and their departments should be separately organised in such a
way as not to involve a change of personnel when one party succeeded
another in power. These departments have no direct concern with the
determination of national policy.

On such a scheme we should have a Cabinet of nine or ten members,
representing among them all the departments which are concerned with
regulative or purely governmental work. And I suggest that a
rearrangement of this kind would not only restore efficiency to the
Cabinet, but would lead to very great administrative reforms, better
co-ordination between closely related departments, and in many respects
economy. But valuable as such changes may be, they would not in
themselves be sufficient to restore complete health to our governmental
system. In the last resort this depends upon the organisation of an
efficient and unresting system of criticism and control.

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

In any modern State the control of the action of Government is largely
wielded by organs not formally recognised by law--by the general
movement of public opinion; by the influence of what is vaguely called
"the city"; by the resolutions of such powerful bodies as trade union
congresses, federations of employers, religious organisations, and
propagandist bodies of many kinds; and, above all, by the Press. No
review of our system would be complete without some discussion of these
extremely powerful and in some cases dangerous influences. We cannot,
however, touch upon them here. We must confine ourselves to the formal,
constitutional machinery of national control over the actions of
Government, that is, to Parliament, as the spokesman of the nation.

An essential part of any full discussion of this subject would be a
treatment of the Second Chamber problem. But that would demand a whole
hour to itself; and I propose to pass it over for the present, and to
ask you to consider the perturbing fact that the House of Commons, which
is the very heart of our system, has largely lost the confidence and
belief which it once commanded.

Why has the House of Commons lost the confidence of the nation? There
are two main reasons, which we must investigate in turn. In the first
place, in spite of the now completely democratic character of the
electorate, the House is felt to be very imperfectly representative of
the national