bond so weak, that the august spectacle of an all but
unalterable law is necessary to preserve society. In the early stages
of human society all change is thought an evil. And MOST change is an
evil. The conditions of life are so simple and so unvarying that any
decent sort of rules suffice so long as men know what they are. Custom
is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at
which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is
impeded, is the primitive check on base power. The perception of
political expediency has then hardly begun; the sense of abstract
justice is weak and vague; and a rigid adherence to the fixed mould of
transmitted usage is essential to an unmarred, unspoiled, unbroken life.

In such an age a legislature continuously sitting, always making laws,
always repealing laws, would have been both an anomaly and a nuisance.
But in the present state of the civilised part of the world such
difficulties are obsolete. There is a diffused desire in civilised
communities for an ADJUSTING legislation; for a legislation which
should adapt the inherited laws to the new wants of a world which now
changes every day. It has ceased to be necessary to maintain bad laws
because it is necessary to have some laws. Civilisation is robust
enough to bear the incision of legal improvements. But taking history
at large, the rarity of Cabinets is mostly due to the greater rarity of
continuous legislatures.

Other conditions, however, limit even at the present day the area of a
Cabinet government. It must be possible to have not only a legislature,
but to have a competent legislature--a legislature willing to elect and
willing to maintain an efficient executive. And this is no easy matter.
It is indeed true that we need not trouble ourselves to look for that
elaborate and complicated organisation which partially exists in the
House of Commons, and which is more fully and freely expanded in plans
for improving the House of Commons. We are not now concerned with
perfection or excellence; we seek only for simple fitness and bare
competency.

The conditions of fitness are two. First, you must get a good
legislature; and next, you must keep it good. And these are by no means
so nearly connected as might be thought at first sight. To keep a
legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial
business. If you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they
will quarrel wit