is respect the present House is no worse
than its predecessors for the last thirty years; the political truce has
indeed improved matters in some respects. It is at least doubtful
whether under "pre-War conditions" either the Representation of the
People Bill or the Education Bill could have been carried, certainly
they would not have been passed in a form to secure so much general
consent. Instead of such consent, some measure strongly opposed by a
minority might have been forced through by free use of the closure. A
new danger has arisen, however, of a still more serious kind,
threatening the position of the House of Commons. It is that, instead of
national policy being controlled by legislation, settled by a recognised
constitutional body elected according to definite rules and representing
the nation, the real power of initiative and real directing force may
pass to some other body or bodies unknown to the law and representing
only a class or even to certain writers in the popular Press. The House
of Commons, unless its constitutional powers and its independence are
maintained or restored, may become a body for registering and giving
legal sanction to the resolutions of some conference or convention
indefinite in its constitution, but highly organised for the purpose of
making representatives in Parliament mere delegates to carry out the
proposals of the majority of those who themselves had acted as delegates
of a section only of the community.

The course of revolution in Russia should be a warning to all. Russia is
passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where is heard "the
continual howling and yelling of a people under unutterable misery, who
sit there bound in affliction and iron, and over it hang the
discouraging clouds of confusion; death also does always spread his
wings over it. In a word it is every whit a dreadful being utterly
without order." Had there been in Russia a regularly constituted
assembly possessing adequate power and representing the nation as a
whole, including the "bourgeoisie"--who also "are God's creatures"--as
well as workmen, instead of irregular bodies appealing to the greed and
hatred of a class, most of the misery through which Russia is passing
might have been prevented, and the prospects of early restoration would
have been assured. The British nation is too sane, too used to orderly
freedom, to adopt either the spirit or the methods of the Bolsheviks,
but we may hear of