If it is true that the Commons’ House will not hold all the Commons, it is a very good example of what we call the anomalies of the English Constitution.  It is also, I think, a very good example of how highly undesirable those anomalies really are.  Most Englishmen say that these anomalies do not matter; they are not ashamed of being illogical; they are proud of being illogical.  Lord Macaulay (a very typical Englishman, romantic, prejudiced, poetical), Lord Macaulay said that he would not lift his hand to get rid of an anomaly that was not also a grievance.  Many other sturdy romantic Englishmen say the same.  They boast of our anomalies; they boast of our illogicality; they say it shows what a practical people we are.  They are utterly wrong.  Lord Macaulay was in this matter, as in a few others, utterly wrong.  Anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm.  And this for a reason that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself.  All injustice begins in the mind.  And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth.  Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed.  The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance.  It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me no good.  The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it.  But the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for all that.  If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater ease.  For there would have permanently sunk into every man’s mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power.  They would have grown accustomed to insanity.

For, in order that men should resist injustice, something more is necessary than that they should think injustice unpleasant.  They must think injustice absurd; above all, they must think it startling.  They must retain the violence of a virgin astonishment.  That is the explanation of the singular fact which must have struck many people in the relations of philosophy and reform.  It is the fact (I mean) that optimists are more practical reformers than pessimists.  Superficially, one would imagine that the railer would be the reformer; that the man who thought that everything was wrong would be the man to put everything right.  In historical practice the thing is quite the other way; curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who really makes them better.  The optimist Dickens has achieved more reforms than the pessimist Gissing.  A man like Rousseau has far too rosy a theory of human nature; but he produces a revolution.  A man like David Hume thinks that almost all things are depressing; but he is a Conservative,