Committees

Abstract

It might be expected that in a great legislative assembly much of the work to be performed would devolve upon smaller bodies, chosen from the whole. This, to some extent, is so in the case of the House of Commons. Mention has already been made of the Committees which function in connexion with the Committee stage of Bills. Then there are the Committees which deal with the scrutiny of national finance, and the various Committees which are set up from time to time to investigate important questions of the day.. Nevertheless it is often said, and has been maintained by an articulate body of opinion for some years, that the amount of work which was thus delegated was too small a proportion of the whole. It has been a working principle of the British constitution that the House of Commons should itself handle at one stage or another all the matters which come before it. It is not an easy principle to maintain. ‘It is confessed on all hands,’ said Gladstone, ‘— I do not speak of this Parliament, but of all — that there is no legislative assembly in the world that works itself so pitilessly, so relentlessly, as the British House of Commons.’ If this was so in 1881, how much more so is it now?