This is the political machinery to which we entrust the most delicate and momentous issues of our national life, and to which we have to look for the realisation of our most treasured hopes of reform. The impartial critic will not question that there are men in the political world as eager for reform as he, or that during the last half-century some excellent social legislation has been passed. These measures are, however, due in great part to a studied endeavour to retain or gain support in the country,—the Insurance Act, for instance,—and many of them—relating to the sale of cigarettes, to the admission of children into public-houses, to the flogging of procurers—are small sentimental reforms which occupy time that could be better employed. We think that we open a new epoch of civilisation when we give a very small pension to a very aged worker, but the problem of the roots of poverty or the abolition of warfare does not enter the party-programme. Our bishops enthuse over their success in inducing a complaisant Home Secretary to lay the lash on the backs of a sordid little group of criminals, and even offer to roll up their own lawn sleeves for the job; but they are indifferent, or hostile, when other people would induce our Ministers to amend those brutalities of our marriage-laws which tend to foster prostitution.
This political machine must be radically and comprehensively reformed before it can be a fit instrument for the reform of the nation. All the pyrotechnic distractions and gross irregularities of
