iament but of the older, more direct, organs
of government which Parliament superseded. It meets in secret: it holds
all the strings of policy: it has almost complete control of political
and legislative initiative: it decides what is to be done and when and
how: it has its own staff of agents and confidential advisers in the
Departments and elsewhere whose acts are largely withdrawn from the
knowledge and criticism of Parliament. A modern Cabinet in fact is open
to the charge of being autocracy in a new guise. Such a charge would, of
course, be a gross overstatement. But there is no doubt that the
increasing complexity in the tasks of government has led to a
corresponding growth of power and organization at the centre which has
strengthened the Cabinet immeasurably of recent years at the expense of
the direct representatives of the people. There are, however, powerful
influences at work in the opposite direction, towards decentralization
and new forms of representation, which there is no space to touch on
here. Suffice it to say that here, as elsewhere, the price of liberty is
eternal vigilance.

England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges of British
citizenship have been placed by the progress of events in a position of
peculiar responsibility. The twentieth century finds us the centre of
the widest experiment of self-government which the world has ever seen;
for the principles of liberty, first tested in this island, have
approved themselves on the soil of North America, Australasia, and South
Africa. It finds us also responsible for the government and for the
training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more
politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about
one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth,
about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by
other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the
inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is
the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that
internationalizing of the world, to which reference has already been
made. It represents the control of law and organized government over the
blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of this
control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes selfish. But
'the situation of man', as Burke finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is
the preceptor of his duty'. The perseveranc