An arrangement which would give to all the members a share of work, and to all the work a share of appropriate agency.

All the committees should be governed by the same general standing orders, and should have the aid of an appropriate official executive force, acting under the general direction and superintendence of the general official executive force of the House at large.

The offices of the House being well organized, would lead to a like good organization of the offices of government; and the members of the House, having been accustomed to do their parliamentary business by ordinary official means, would not be so raw, incompetent, and impracticable as they often are now when they go into office.

The House would then be in a condition to meet the Minister of State, and to hold him to his responsibility. He would find it worth while, as indeed it would be necessary, to be prepared for a good combat, and what men expect from party would be obtained.

The only use in party is organization-the organization of Government and the organization of the people; the organization of her Majesty's opposition, and the organization of her Majesty's independent supporters, and the organization of the independents proper. By thus gathering up the fragments of individual effort, the time and labours of the whole body are economized; and by economy concentrated and made efficacious. But more than party or organization of the parliamentary forces is necessary; we first of all need a Ministry of State duly organized-a minister specially responsible for the general policy of Government; the Ministers of Departments being specially responsible for the subordinate policy of their departments. We need less organization of party, than a system of undivided, or at least well-defined, responsibility, and moreover, responsibility with power to meet and support it. Power without responsibility, and responsibility without power, are equally obnoxious; the one produces a timorous, vacillating, mean-spirited government, and the other an arbitrary or reckless

one.

Formerly every State had its Minister of State; but when

monarchs became weak, and the first minister disproportionately powerful, his power was broken down into fragments. Now that the minister has to breast the whole nation in the persons of the representatives of the people in Parliament assembled, there need not be that fear of the great Bugaboo. On the contrary, we should concentrate in him the power and the responsibility, and make it impossible to have a feeble man for First Minister. With concentrated power and responsibility in the minister, would come a bold grappling with difficulties on his part, and the rallying of a vigilant and powerful party, not of opposition, but of observation. We must not indulge in vain aspirations, or as vain talk, of the need of party; we must make what party can be made by judicious action, and by forcing on the Government a proper organization of its body, and by adopting in Parliament a corresponding organization, assigned to meet the claims of the great divisions of public business.

The Minister of State ought to represent the Administration, or, as it called, the Cabinet.

The President of the Council should be the Minister of Public Instruction, representing all matters of public record, information, inquiry, advice, and instruction, by whatever

means.

The Lord Chancellor might represent the administration of justice and law, and the judicial tribunals of the country. The Chancellor of the Exchequer might represent finance, ways and means, supply, debt, and expenditure.

And the Secretaries of State would represent all executive affairs not falling within the scope of the other departments.

Each of the above ministers might preside over a corresponding committee of the Privy Council; while for vicepresidents these committees should have the presidents of the secondary executive departments,-as, for instance, the president of the Board of Health, the president of the Poor Law Board, the president of the Board of Works, and so on; making fifteen ministers in all, but no new places, and giving to every minister the opportunity of dealing with detail and of dealing with policy,-two conditions absolutely necessary to make a

good minister of practical purpose and statesmanlike determination.

With such forces the Government might grapple with every question, and with the giants in the House, who would also be enabled to grapple with it. The House would be relieved of much drudgery-the drudgery of executive detail, and the drudgery of detailed inquiry; while, by having their information brought together by a proper digest of matters relating to their own counties, they would be neither too general nor too detailed, but would have a wholesome combination of both requisites.

Should this state of things be brought about, we should revive the order of statesmen; our ministers and representatives would alike be statesmen. The interest that would be awakened in public affairs, by the dealing with them in a higher fashion, would create a spirit of patriotism among the people, that would counteract the tendency to regard freedom, not as the equality of the subject with the sovereign under a wise law equally regardful of public authority and public freedom, but (as is too often the case) an immunity from the trouble of participating in public affairs, and the right of criticising everything without contributing to the labour and responsibility of conducting wisely our common transactions.

The want of this common condition of patriotism it is which deprives much of our law and public administration of the beneficial operation of a pervading principle. The rights of individuals as individuals are fully recognized; but not the rights of individuals as members of the great community of the State, or of the other communities which compose it; and by consequence, our duties in these capacities are lost sight of. Hence, too, the apathy that is almost universally felt in all public affairs which do not by their immediate pressure

concern us.

It is to this circumstance especially that is due the difficulty of gaining the general attention to matters of law reform. Its want is not felt: "We can but die once," is the saying, forgetting that we may die prematurely or wretchedly, and that our fortunes may be affected by the untimely death of many others. So of

VOL. II. NO, III.

lawsuits, they are of rare occurrence to many of us, but when they come, it is as the hurricane, destroying us all together.

Now a State organization, by its traditionary methods, collects all the instances of misfortune that happen at long intervals of time and among large classes of the people, and the general truth becomes so much illustrated by a cloud of individual instances, that to the well-informed it has all the character of a personal matter vitally affecting us.

Our Parliament ought to be a most effective instrument of legislation. Its members are intimately acquainted with all the transactions of life, as private and public persons, as men of property, as men of business, as officers and professional persons, and as judicial persons, jurymen, grand-jurymen, suitors, witnesses, judges, advocates, and solicitors; and we can only attribute their inefficiency as a body to the want of a methodized means of bringing to a common stock the intelligence they undoubtedly possess, and to the want of a proper agency for giving to their resolutions and enactments fit expression.

It is to this point that we ought to draw attention, in our present consideration of the general question which forms the topic of this article.

It would seem to be the first duty of every member to take care that the House of which he is a member is reinforced at all points, and that he himself is provided with every facility for discharging his share of public duty.

At present a private member has no means of collecting his legislative information in a complete manner, nor of shaping the amendments which it may be his duty to propose in pending legislation.

Much of this duty he would be relieved from, if the Government did theirs; but the Government is nearly as badly provided; it has assistance, but not adequate assistance, nor organized assistance. In consequence, what it proposes the House disposes; which is aggravated by the want of machinery in the House for giving fair consideration upon general principles to the measures which Government and private members submit to it. We are not permitted to hope that either the law measures or any other will meet with a better fate than that of

last year, so long as our machinery is such as it is. The commonest agricultural machine, a chaff-cutter, or any other, does its business better than the House does it; and simply because the former is constructed for the purpose, and acts accordingly, while of construction, disposition of the forces, and distribution of the work, the latter has nothing.

It is a costly and laborious contrivance to defeat its own purpose. It has no proper means for the preparation of the information on which a measure is to depend, for the preliminary preparation of the resolutions, instructions, or draft Bill; for the consideration of the matters of the Bill, or of its framework ; for its revision, and for its promulgation. All design, contrivance, providence, and correct execution are put out of question, and individual members have come to think that while such matters may and do effect much for all other affairs, they are of no avail and quite inapplicable to English legislation.

We attribute this sense of inability, to the cause which we indicated at starting, of the state of affairs generally. They are so distracted by the infinite variety and hopelessness of their task, that they regard it as the wisest thing to let matters take their course.

If in the various departments of the State, in the Houses of Parliament, in the Administration, in the Privy Council, in the Executive, and among local members, there prevailed the ordinary principles of division of labour and distribution of work among those most able or most inclined to do it, but in a manner that should insure that nothing should be neglected, we should have all the advantages that can be desired, and without the agency of party, which goes upon the principle of opposing whatever the Government proposes, or of supporting it, as the case may be; and instead of this two-sided kind of party, we should have a shifting kind, not quite so much bound together for good or for evil; and yet so uniform are the dispositions of mankind, some from the impetuosity of their character being all for progress, and some from their slowness being all for delay; some from their practical tendencies being all for action, and others from their reflective tendencies being all for philosophizing-we should still have men ranging themselves pretty uniformly