In such an age a legislature continuously sitting, always making laws, always repealing laws, would have been both an anomaly and a nuisance.  But in the present state of the civilised part of the world such difficulties are obsolete.  There is a diffused desire in civilised communities for an adjusting legislation; for a legislation which should adapt the inherited laws to the new wants of a world which now changes every day.  It has ceased to be necessary to maintain bad laws because it is necessary to have some laws.  Civilisation is robust enough to bear the incision of legal improvements.  But taking history at large, the rarity of Cabinets is mostly due to the greater rarity of continuous legislatures.

Other conditions, however, limit even at the present day the area of a Cabinet government.  It must be possible to have not only a legislature, but to have a competent legislature—­a legislature willing to elect and willing to maintain an efficient executive.  And this is no easy matter.  It is indeed true that we need not trouble ourselves to look for that elaborate and complicated organisation which partially exists in the House of Commons, and which is more fully and freely expanded in plans for improving the House of Commons.  We are not now concerned with perfection or excellence; we seek only for simple fitness and bare competency.

The conditions of fitness are two.  First, you must get a good legislature; and next, you must keep it good.  And these are by no means so nearly connected as might be thought at first sight.  To keep a legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial business.  If you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they will quarrel with each other about that nothing.  Where great questions end, little parties begin.  And a very happy community, with few new laws to make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign relations to adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature.  There is nothing for it to enact, and nothing for it to settle.  Accordingly, there is great danger that the legislature, being debarred from all other kind of business, may take to quarrelling about its elective business; that controversies as to Ministries may occupy all its time, and yet that time be perniciously employed; that a constant succession of feeble administrations, unable to govern and unfit to govern, may be substituted for the proper result of Cabinet government—­a sufficient body of men long enough in power to evince their sufficiency.  The exact amount of non-elective business necessary for a Parliament which is to elect the executive cannot, of course, be formally stated.  There are no numbers and no statistics in the theory of constitutions.  All we can say is, that a Parliament with little business, which is to be as efficient as a Parliament with much business, must be in all other respects much better.  An indifferent Parliament may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave affairs; but a Parliament which has no such affairs must be intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.