Page:Home rule through federal devolution.djvu/28

 and has been felt by many persons, both in the House of Commons and out of it, as almost intolerable; and the war has now entailed, not on this generation only, but also on those to come, a legacy of new problems of vital importance and of the greatest intricacy, demanding from the rulers of all the civilised countries more time and thought for their solution than it will be possible for our Government to give them, unless the Cabinet and the Imperial Parliament be relieved of a great deal of the work which now unduly absorbs their time and energies.

There is another direction in which federal devolution would open the way for a very much needed improvement in our parliamentary system. At any time, on short notice—or, conceivably, without any notice at all—a hostile vote of the House of Commons, perhaps on some quite secondary matter of administration irrelevant to the general scope of the Government policy, may compel the resignation of the Cabinet, and break in upon the continuity of its procedure, to the detriment of measures of vital importance to the nation and the Empire.

With these contingencies always present to their minds, Ministers are rarely free to present their measures to Parliament in the form best calculated to realise their conception. To save time they must take the line of least resistance, rather than that which would be the best, and must often omit or curtail essential features of their design, lest they should lead to long debate and so cause the loss of their Bill, or squeeze out other business of equal or greater importance. The unavoidable result of this overwhelming pressure on the available time of the House is an increasingly frequent resort to some form of closure, and the cutting down of important measures by dropping out provisions which, however valuable, seem to invite contention, with a view to reducing them to a form in which they may be likely to pass without that clause-by-clause discussion which is the raison d'etre of Parliamentary Committees; while many