, if it were fixed at forty. Yet considering that the current
business, in large assemblies, is carried on by perhaps one-third or
one-fourth of the whole, and that the quorum in the House of Commons is
such as to make it possible for twenty-one votes to carry a decision of
the House, there would be an inconsistency in requiring more than twenty
names to back every bill and every resolution and amendment that churned
to be discussed. Now I can hardly imagine restriction upon the liberty
of individual members more defensible than this. If it were impossible
to find any other access to the minds of individual members than by
speeches in the House, or if all other modes of conversion to new views
were difficult and inefficient in comparison, then we should say that
the time of the House must be taxed for the ventilating process. Nothing
of the kind, however, can be maintained. Moreover, although the House
may be obliged to listen to a speech for a proposal that has merely half
a dozen of known supporters, yet, whenever this is understood to be the
case, scarcely any one will be at the trouble of counter-arguing it, and
the question really makes no way; the mover is looked upon as a bore,
and the House is impatient for the extinguisher of a division. The
securing of twenty names would cost nothing to the Government, or to any
of the parties or sections that make up the House: an individual
standing alone should be made to work privately, until he has secured
his backing of nineteen more names, and the exercise would be most
wholesome as a preparation for convincing a majority of the House.

If I might be allowed to assume such an extension of the device of
seconding motions, I could make a much stronger case for the beneficial
consequences of the operation of printing speeches without delivery.
The House would never be moved by an individual standing alone; every
proposal would be from the first a collective judgment, and the reasons
given in along with it, although composed by one, would be revised and
considered by the supporters collectively. Members would put forth their
strength in one weighty statement to start with; no pains would be
spared to make the argument of the nominal mover exhaustive and
forcible. So with the amendment; there would be more put into the chief
statement, and less left to the succeeding speakers, than at present.
And, although the mover of the resolution and the mover of the amendment
would each