Professor A. V. Dicey sent to Monday's Times a letter
headed "A Warning," and directed against the policy of doming the Education Bill in compartments (in the way in which the Irish Home-rule Bill of 1893 was closured), which is of course a most objectionable practice, to which we earnestly hope that it may be quite unnecessary to have recourse, as it really makes a sheer mockery of Parliamentary deliberation, the result of that method being that great portions of a measure are never deliberated on at all, and are passed without discussion. To apply such a method to a great constitutional revolution like the Irish Home-rule Bill is not only objectionable, but an outrage on popular govern- ment, since it might well result in taking a fatal step forward which could never be retracted. We hope and believe that the Government will not force the Education Bill through in that fashion ; but an Education Bill which might be amended or repealed in the next Parliament, and a great constitutional revolution which could not, without still greater mischief, be so amended or repealed, stand on very different ground. As we have explained elsewhere, greatly as we should dislike and disapprove of such a course, even in relation to an ordinary Bill, we are disposed to think it would be less fatal than to allow the strongest Govern- ment of modern times to be checkmated by a knot of obstructives whose only object is to paralyse their opponents. As a matter of fact, what we urgently want is some method of greatly abbreviating the work of legislating, by casting more responsibility on the Cabinet and diminishing materially the elaborateness of the Parliamentary machinery originally devised for Parliaments of very different composition, as well as for a very different condition of the Parliamentary mind.
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