apart from ordinary business.  That leaves twenty-two weeks, and out of these two nights a week are at the disposal of the Government and three at the disposal of private members; leaving in all forty-four days for the Government and sixty-six for private members.  Into those forty-four nights Government must compress all its yearly programme of legislation for the whole of the British Empire, from the settlement of some petty dispute about land in the Hebrides, to some question of high policy in Egypt, India, or other portions of the Queen’s world-wide empire; and all this amidst endless distractions, enforced attendance through dreary debates and vapid talk, and a running fire of cross-examination from any volunteer questioner out of the six hundred odd members who sit outside the Government circle.  The consequence is, that Parliament is getting less able every year to overtake the mass of business which comes before it.  Each year contributes its quota of inevitable arrears to the accumulated mass of previous Sessions, and the process will go on multiplying in increasing ratio as the complex and multiform needs of modern life increase.  The large addition recently made to the electorate of the United Kingdom is already forcing a crop of fresh subjects on the attention of Parliament, as well as presenting old ones from new points of view.  Plans of devolution and Grand Committees will fail to cope with this evil.  To overcome it we need some organic change in our present Parliamentary system, some form of decentralization, which shall leave the Imperial Parliament supreme over all subordinate bodies, yet relegate to the historic and geographical divisions of the United Kingdom the management severally of their own local affairs.

I should have better hope from governing Ireland (if it were possible) as we govern India, than from the present Unionist method of leaving “things as they are.”  A Viceroy surrounded by a Council of trained officials, and in semi-independence of Parliament, would have settled the Irish question, land and all, long ago.  But imagine India governed on the model of Ireland:  the Viceroy and the most important member of his Government changing with every change of Administration at Westminster;[19] his Council and the official class in general consisting almost exclusively of native Mussulmans, deeply prejudiced by religious and traditional enmity against the great mass of the population; himself generally subordinate to his Chief Secretary, and exposed to the daily criticism of an ignorant Parliament and to the determined hostility of eighty-six Hindoos, holding seats in Parliament as the representatives of the vast majority of the people of India, and resenting bitterly the domination of the hereditary oppressors of their race.  How long could the Government of India be carried on under such conditions?