Its freedom from rules or formalities
prevented any obstructive proceedings, and when one of the two newly
arrived Home Rule members for India sought for information how to bring
in a bill, they learnt simply that bills were not brought in. They asked
for the speaker, and were privileged to hear much ripe wisdom from
the ex-king Egbert, who was now consciously among the seniors of the
gathering. Thereafter they were baffled men....
But already by that time the work of the council was drawing to an end.
It was concerned not so much for the continuation of its construction
as for the preservation of its accomplished work from the dramatic
instincts of the politician.
The life of the race becomes indeed more and more independent of the
formal government. The council, in its opening phase, was heroic in
spirit; a dragon-slaying body, it slashed out of existence a vast,
knotted tangle of obsolete ideas and clumsy and jealous proprietorships;
it secured by a noble system of institutional precautions, freedom of
inquiry, freedom of criticism, free communications, a common basis of
education and understanding, and freedom from economic oppression. With
that its creative task was accomplished. It became more and more an
established security and less and less an active intervention.
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