til they have been mixed together and cooked. Those areas of the
globe, coloured red on the maps, may have all the resources requisite
for a great, self-sufficing, economic unit of a new order. Their peoples
may desire that new order. But until it is achieved you must remember
that the British Empire belongs to the region of dream and not to that
of fact.

For many years now, apostles of reconstruction have been hammering out
the details of a scheme that shall unify the Empire on some sort of
Federal basis. For the new organism which they desire to create they
need a brain. Is this to be found in the Westminster Assembly, sometimes
loosely styled the "Imperial Parliament"? As things stand at present
such a suggestion is a mere counter-sense. That body has come to such a
pass as would seem to indicate the final bankruptcy of the governing
genius of England. All the penalties of political gluttony have
accumulated on it. Parliament, to put the truth a little brutally, has
broken down under a long debauch of over-feeding. Every day of every
session it bites off far more in the way of bills and estimates than it
even pretends to have time to chew. Results follow which it would be
indiscreet to express in terms of physiology. Tens of millions are
shovelled out of the Treasury by an offhand, undiscussed, perfunctory
resolution. The attempt to compress infinite issues in a space too
little has altered and, as some critics think, degraded the whole tenor
of public life. Parliament is no longer the Grand Inquest of the Nation,
at least not in the ancient and proper meaning of the words. The
declaration of Edmund Burke to the effect that a member has no right to
sacrifice his "unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened
conscience" to any set of men living may be echoed by the judges in our
day, but to anyone who knows the House of Commons it is a piece of pure
irony. Party discipline cracks every session a more compelling whip; and
our shepherded, regimented, and automatised representatives themselves
realise that, whatever more desirable status they may have attained,
they have certainly lost that of individual freedom. Out of their own
ranks a movement has arisen to put an end altogether to Party
government. This proposal I myself believe to be futile, but its very
futility testifies to the existence of an intolerable situation. All
this turns on the inadequacy of the time of the House of Commons to its
business. B