threaten group unity. To be sure, the effectiveness of the personal principle in parliaments is modified by new levelings; in the first place, because the parliament to which the single person speaks is itself a relatively large body. It includes extremely diverse parties and individuals, so that the points of common and reciprocal understanding can lie only very low in the intellectual scale.[1] In the second place, because the individual belongs to a party which, as such, stands not on an individual but on a social plane, by which its parliamentary activities are a priori reduced to an average level. In the third place, because the individual speaks, indirectly but intentionally, to the whole country. These subtractions from the intellectual advantages of constituting organs are necessary only in the case of parliaments. They do not equally affect other forms. Indeed, these very disadvantages give proof, as the higher developments of parliamentarism show, that the differentiation of organs is necessary. In England the impossibility of governing with a body so numerous, so heterogeneous, so inconstant, and yet at the same time so immobile as the house of commons, led at the end of the seventeenth century to the establishment of the ministry. The English ministry is in fact an organ of Parliament. It is related to Parliament somewhat as the latter to the whole country. Since it is composed of leading members of Parliament, and represents the majority of that body for the time being, it combines the total tendency of the largest group—which it at the same time displays in sublimated form—with the advantages of individual gifts. This combination could nowhere else have such effectiveness as in a system of leadership by single individuals and within a body as small as a ministry. The English ministry is a well-adapted means of further concentrating the differentiated organ, and thus of counterbalancing the deficiencies in which the organ reproduces the defects of the aggregate group action, to avoid which the organ was instituted.
- ↑ What a poor order of wit, for example, is shown by parliamentary reports to have roused the legislators’ hilarity.
