power, not yet thought of, of revising the work of the present Standing Committees. Such an executive committee is not quite the device needed.
Apparently committee government is but one of many experiments in the direction of the realization of an idea best expressed—so far as my reading shows—by John Stuart Mill; and is too much like other experiments to be quite as original and unique as some people would like to believe. There is, said Mr. Mill, a “distinction between the function of making laws, for which a numerous popular assembly is radically unfit, and that of getting good laws made, which is its proper duty, and cannot be satisfactorily fulfilled by any other authority;” and there is, consequently, “need of a legislative commission, as a permanent part of the constitution of a free country; consisting of a small number of highly-trained political minds, on whom, when parliament has determined that a law shall be made, the task of making it should be devolved; parliament retaining the power of passing or rejecting the bill when drawn up, but not of altering it otherwise than by sending proposed amendments to be dealt with by the commission.”[1] It would seem, as I have said, that committee government is one form of the effort, now making by all self-
- ↑ Autobiography, pp. 264, 265.
