nothing this session.  Some things were promised in the Queen’s speech, but they were only little things; and most of them have not passed.”  Lord Lyndhurst used for years to recount the small outcomings of legislative achievement; and yet those were the days of the first Whig Governments, who had more to do in legislation, and did more, than any Government.  The true answer to such harangues as Lord Lyndhurst’s by a Minister should have been in the first person.  He should have said firmly, “Parliament has maintained me, and that was its greatest duty; Parliament has carried on what, in the language of traditional respect, we call the Queen’s Government; it has maintained what wisely or unwisely it deemed the best executive of the English nation”.  The second function of the House of Commons is what I may call an expressive function.  It is its office to express the mind of the English people on all matters which come before it.  Whether it does so well or ill I shall discuss presently.  The third function of Parliament is what I may call—­ preserving a sort of technicality even in familiar matters for the sake of distinctness—­the teaching function.  A great and open council of considerable men cannot be placed in the middle of a society without altering that society.  It ought to alter it for the better.  It ought to teach the nation what it does not know.  How far the House of Commons can so teach, and how far it does so teach, are matters for subsequent discussion.

Fourthly, the House of Commons has what may be called an informing function—­a function which though in its present form quite modern is singularly analogous to a mediaeval function.  In old times one office of the House of Commons was to inform the sovereign what was wrong.  It laid before the Crown the grievances and complaints of particular interests.  Since the publication of the Parliamentary debates a corresponding office of Parliament is to lay these same grievances, these same complaints, before the nation, which is the present sovereign.  The nation needs it quite as much as the king ever needed it.  A free people is indeed mostly fair, liberty practises men in a give-and-take, which is the rough essence of justice.  The English people, possibly even above other free nations, is fair.  But a free nation rarely can be—­and the English nation is not—­quick of apprehension.  It only comprehends what is familiar to it—­what comes into its own experience, what squares with its own thoughts.  “I never heard of such a thing in my life,” the middle-class Englishman says, and he thinks he so refutes an argument.  The common disputant cannot say in reply that his experience is but limited, and that the assertion may be true, though he had never met with anything at all like it.  But a great debate in Parliament does bring home something of this feeling.  Any notion, any creed, any feeling, any grievance which can get a decent number of English members to stand up for it, is felt by almost all Englishmen to be