From ‘Parliament and Registration‘, The Spectator, 10 July 1915:
The modern rigidity of the party system has enabled Ministers, once they have attained to power, to despise the House of Commons, for they know that the Whips will see that the party votes straight, and that is all they care about. This is a fundamental mistake, for the House of Commons in war time quite as much as in peace time is, with all its defects, one of the most valuable of our institutions. It provides the machinery for the criticism of the Government under conditions in which that criticism can most effectively be made and most effectively be answered. Newspaper criticism, useful as it is from many points of view, suffers from two defects—first, that it is often made by persons who are not directly in touch with the management of affairs and who certainly have no definite responsibility for that management; and secondly, that it is directed to a large and undefined body of people to most of whom the actual working of public affairs is more or less of a mystery.
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