The answer would perhaps provide fourteen square feet on the floor in a room twenty-six feet high for each of three hundred and seventeen members.  There would, when the answer was settled, be a ‘marginal’ man in point of hearing (representing, perhaps, an average healthy man of seventy-four), who would be unable or just able to hear the ‘marginal’ man in point of clearness of speech—­who might represent (on a polygon specially drawn up by the Oxford Professor of Biology) the least audible but two of the tutors at Balliol.  The marginal point on the curve of the decreasing utility of successive increments of members from the point of view of committee work might show, perhaps, that such work must either be reduced to a point far below that which is usual in national parliaments, or must be done very largely by persons not members of the assembly itself.  The aesthetic curve of dignity might be cut at the point where the President of the Society of British Architects could just be induced not to write to the Times.

Any discussion which took place on such lines, even although the curves were mere forms of speech, would be real and practical.  Instead of one man reiterating that the Parliament Hall of a great empire ought to represent the dignity of its task, and another man answering that a debating assembly which cannot debate is of no use, both would be forced to ask ‘How much dignity’? and ‘How much debating convenience’?  As it is, this particular question seems often to be settled by the architect, who is deeply concerned with aesthetic effect, and not at all concerned with debating convenience.  The reasons that he gives in his reports seem convincing, because the other considerations are not in the minds of the Building Committee, who think of one element only of the problem at a time and make no attempt to co-ordinate all the elements.  Otherwise it would be impossible to explain the fact that the Debating Hall, for instance, of the House of Representatives at Washington is no more fitted for debates carried on by human beings than would a spoon ten feet broad be fitted for the eating of soup.  The able leaders of the National Congress movement in India made the same mistake in 1907, when they arranged, with their minds set only on the need of an impressive display, that difficult and exciting questions of tactics should be discussed by about fifteen hundred delegates in a huge tent, and in the presence of a crowd of nearly ten thousand spectators.  I am afraid that it is not unlikely that the London County Council may also despise the quantitative method of reasoning on such questions, and may find themselves in 1912 provided with a new hall admirably adapted to illustrate the dignity of London and the genius of their architect, but unfitted for any other purpose.