I SUPPOSE my experiences in the House were those of most
freshmen members. I wondered the first two days whether the
ceremonial and the millinery had much use, but decided when I
saw how the sartorial dignity of the Speaker helped in the
squelching of disorderly and unruly members, that it had. I was
impressed, first by the good nature and secondly by the bad in-
tellectual quality of most of the members on both sides. Six
hundred members seemed to me a mob; two hundred would
have made a much better consultative assembly. ( Walter
Lippmann, who was my guest in the House once or twice, was,
however, struck with the fact that it was much more a truly
consultative assembly than was the House of Representatives in
Washington.) In the Committee work upstairs more business was
done when members spoke sitting down instead of standing up to
speak. (It is astonishing what a difference in the intellectual
quality of a debate a little physical detail like that can make.) I
very seldom spoke in the chamber and much to my surprise was
elected to the Consultative Committee of the Parliamentary
Party; and was a member of that committee until after the Great
Schism of 1931.

I took my job seriously, but discovered very quickly that if I
continued to do so too ponderously I would either go mad or be
driven to give it up altogether. But then I had earlier--as far
back as my teens, thirty years before in the United States--made
the discovery, looking at the matter from the point of view of the
ordinary voter, that democracy as we know it involves certain
assumptions which are in fact fantastic absurdities; and that one
has to accept these absurdities because the only immediately
available alternative is something very much more evil. In the
United States the farce was illustrated particularly in the long
ballot of the great cities. where the overworked factory hand,

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