endance in the House of Commons could be best described
by a member or a regular official. An outsider can represent it only by
the current reports. My purpose does not require great accuracy; it is
enough, that only a very small fraction of the body makes up the average
audience. If an official were posted to record the fluctuating numbers
at intervals of five minutes, the attendance might be recorded and
presented in a curve like the fluctuations of the barometer; but this
would be misleading as to the proportion of effective listeners--those
that sat out entire debates, or at all events the leading speeches of
the debates, or whose intelligence was mainly fed from the speaking in
each instance. The number of this class is next to impossible to get at;
but it will be allowed on all hands to be very small.

Perhaps, in such an inquiry, most can be made of indirect evidences. If
members are to be qualified for an intelligent decision in chief part by
listening to the speeches, why is not the House made large enough to
accommodate them all at once? It would appear strange, on the
spoken-debate theory of enlightenment, that more than one-third should
be permanently excluded by want of space. One might naturally suppose
that, in this fact, there was a breach of privilege of the most
portentous kind. That it is so rarely alluded to as a grievance, even
although amounting to the exclusion of a large number of the members
from some of the grandest displays of eloquence and the most exciting
State communications, is a proof that attendance in the House is not
looked upon as a high privilege, or as the _sine qua non_ of political
schooling.

[EVIDENCE OF THE INUTILITY OF THE MERE SPEAKING.]

If it were necessary to listen to the debates in order to know how to
vote, the messages of the whips would take a different form. The members
on each side would be warned of the time of commencement of each debate,
that they might hear the comprehensive statement of the opener, and
remain at least through the chief speech in reply. They might not attend
all through the inferior and desultory speaking, but they would be ready
to pop in when an able debater was on his legs, and they would hear the
leaders wind up at the close. Such, however, is not the theory acted on
by the whips. They are satisfied if they can procure attendance at the
division, and look upon the many hours spent in the debate as an
insignificant accessory, which could b