eat
and open council of considerable men cannot be placed in the middle of
a society without altering that society. It ought to alter it for the
better. It ought to teach the nation what it does not know. How far the
House of Commons can so teach, and how far it does so teach, are
matters for subsequent discussion.

Fourthly, the House of Commons has what may be called an informing
function--a function which though in its present form quite modern is
singularly analogous to a mediaeval function. In old times one office
of the House of Commons was to inform the sovereign what was wrong. It
laid before the Crown the grievances and complaints of particular
interests. Since the publication of the Parliamentary debates a
corresponding office of Parliament is to lay these same grievances,
these same complaints, before the nation, which is the present
sovereign. The nation needs it quite as much as the king ever needed
it. A free people is indeed mostly fair, liberty practises men in a
give-and-take, which is the rough essence of justice. The English
people, possibly even above other free nations, is fair. But a free
nation rarely can be--and the English nation is not--quick of
apprehension. It only comprehends what is familiar to it--what comes
into its own experience, what squares with its own thoughts. "I never
heard of such a thing in my life," the middle-class Englishman says,
and he thinks he so refutes an argument. The common disputant cannot
say in reply that his experience is but limited, and that the assertion
may be true, though he had never met with anything at all like it. But
a great debate in Parliament does bring home something of this feeling.
Any notion, any creed, any feeling, any grievance which can get a
decent number of English members to stand up for it, is felt by almost
all Englishmen to be perhaps a false and pernicious opinion, but at any
rate possible--an opinion within the intellectual sphere, an opinion to
be reckoned with. And it is an immense achievement. Practical
diplomatists say that a free Government is harder to deal with than a
despotic Government; you may be able to get the despot to hear the
other side; his Ministers, men of trained intelligence, will be sure to
know what makes against them; and they MAY tell him. But a free nation
never hears any side save its own. The newspapers only repeat the side
their purchasers like: the favourable arguments are set out,
elaborated, illustrated;