THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. T HE Daily Chronicle,
which for a paper of somewhat extreme opinions, is almost always candid except when it is beside itself at noticing Mr. Chamberlain's increasing weight and influence in the country and in the House of Commons, made some very just remarks last Saturday on the occasion of Mr. Peel's celebration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of his birth. "We have," it wrote, "at times criticised Mr. Peel's decisions, and we have perhaps regarded with apprehension the rapid and continuous growth of the authority of the First Commoner of England. Mr. Peel is to-day a great power in the State ; in fact, we are not sure whether, since Mr. Glad- stone retired, he is not the strongest Member of Parliament ; almost, on occasion, the greatest personal force known to the Constitution. That is a serious fact. But Mr. Peel is a very notable, a very high-minded, a very characteristic Englishman, and he is a figure as picturesque as he is vigorous." That is perfectly true ; and it is very remarkable testimony from a paper which indulges so warm a sympathy with the most recalcitrant of the orators of the House of Commons. We conclude from the context that when it speaks of the great influence of Mr. Peel as a "serious fact," it means a fact which makes Radical politicians serious, and which it regards as not altogether of good omen, though it can do justice to Mr. Peel's high qualities. Mr. Gladstone, who selected him for the office, has often been spoken of as rather defective in his judgment of men. But in this case, at least, he showed himself a consummate judge of men ; indeed, there was an occasion on which he seemed to think he had found a master,—we refer to the scene when Mr. Conybeare attempted to defy the authority of the Speaker, and Mr. Gladstone gave the Speaker a somewhat half-hearted support. Yet we do not doubt that it was Mr. Gladstone's keen insight into one of his own qualities, one which is also found in Mr. Peel,—a quality which we .cannot describe better than by calling it the majesty of his manner,—that induced him to select Mr. Peel as Sir Henry Brand's successor, when the latter went to the House of Lords as Lord Hampden. Shakespeare makes Marcellus say of the apparition of Hamlet's father, "We do it wrong, being so majestical, to offer it the show of violence," and that is exactly the feeling which sobers even the wildest of the insubordinate groups in the House of Commons when they come into collision with the Speaker of the House. Curiously enough, an Edinburgh Reviewer in a very interesting article last year (the article in the April number of 1893) on the English Parliament, quoted from Mr. Barnett Smith's book a most amusing speech of Mr. Speaker Yelverton's on the ideal Speaker for the House of Commons, in which he uses the very word which we have selected as describ- ing the main characteristic of Mr. Peel. Mr. Yelver- ton, who became Speaker in the ninth Parliament of Elizabeth, either did not wish to be made Speaker, or, if he did, thought that "nob episcopari " was the right ettitude to itseume before the vote of the House had been taken, and this was his quaint apology for his real or apparent reluctance to assume the office. "Neither from my person or nature does this choice arise, for he that supplieth this place ought to be a man big and comely, stately and well-spoken, his voice great, his courage majestical, his nature haughty, and his purse plentiful and heavy ; but contrarily the stature of my body is small, myself not so well-spoken, my voice low, my courage lawyer-like and of the common fashion, my nature soft and bashful, my purse thin, light, and never yet plentiful." A Speaker's courage should be " majestical," said Mr. Yelverton, and "majestical" is a word which was a great favourite in the Elizabethan literature, far more so than even the shorter form " majestic " is now, for that was an age in which a majestic manner was far more heartily admired, and far more carefully cultivated than it is now, an age indeed in which the form of a man's speech and character was a great deal more attended to than now when democracy has levelled us down to its own hasty and rather rude standards. But at all events for the office of Speaker, form is as essential as ever, and a certain majesty of courage as necessary as courage itself. He who fills that office must speak with authority, and no man speaks with BO much authority as Mr. Peel. As a politician, before he became Speaker, he was not very influential. One quality which fitted him for the office was that he had no vehement party spirit, and though a man of force, was a languid partisan. That helped him to his great impartiality, and to an impartiality which is not of that rather too energetic kind which almost always ends in giving its ruling against the political bias of the umpire's own nature, but of that more natural kind which is due to the exercise of a strong judgment by one who has no very marked bias at all. The impartiality which is gained only by a strong effort is not the best for the office of Speaker. Like vaulting ambition, it overleaps itself, and is very apt to take the form of partiality to those from whom the umpire dis- agrees. What is wanted in a Speaker is a man at once resolute and with no appreciable bias to allow for, except his desire for the orderly conduct of business in the popular House, and his natural inclination to give expression to the wish of the House itself to hear what the greater men have got to say, and not to hear what disturbs the equanimity and exhausts the patience of the House, unless some very evident call of justice requires it.
To this kind of sympathy with the collective feelings of the different parties, Mr. Peel has attained with an almost miraculous success. Not even the Irishmen doubt his justice, and Mr. Conybeare, and this week Mr. Healy, are, we think, the only Members of the House who have ever accused him of injustice ; and Mr. Conybeare and Mr. Healy are the kind of exceptions which prove a rule. Yet to all this genius for holding the scales even, Mr. Peel has added a force and dignity of manner that has left it impossible to challenge his authority with any prospect of success. His position has been made immensely more difficult, but also immensely more important, by the adop- tion of the new rules for dosuring debate, and we cannot doubt that the choice of Mr. Peel, which took place before the Closure had attained anything like its pre- sent great significance in the procedure of the House of Commons, was, for the House itself, quite providential. He, and he alone perhaps, could have saved it from becoming the subject of innumerable conflicts and scandals. He has, of course, often granted the Closure when many of his critics thought that he ought to have refused it, and refused it when many of his critics thought that he ought to have granted it. That was inevitable. But he has often declined to give way to the wish of the majority, has often made even the weakest groups feel that his sense of justice was on their side, and yet has never forgotten to pay that legitimate deference to the Government of the day and the will of the majority, without which the authority of the House of Commons itself would soon be called in question. The Speaker was always a great weight in the House, but his weight has been doubled since his decisions made the precedents for the use of the Closure. He has shown himself so sensible of the necessity of guarding the rights of the smaller groups as well as of giving due weight to the necessity of carrying on both the Queen's Government and the Queen's Opposition, that he has won all sides of the House, and. even inspired respect in those whom he disappointed by his decisions. He has, indeed, illustrated the great advantage of cool political opinions as it would have been impossible to illustrate it except from the Chair which he occupies. In these partisan days, the cooler politicians get scant influence in the House of Commons, partly, perhaps, because they have not Mr. Peel's stately manner of giving expression to his views,—and if they had, would not be able to dis- play it without appearing ostentatious except from a position of authority like his. But to Mr. Peel the cool- ness of his *own convictions has been a very great source of power. In these heated days, no man could have been so "majestical" who had felt very deeply either with one side of the House or with the other. But he has always seemed to stand. above the conflict, and therefore to be pre-eminently fitted to assign the limits within which it ought to be carried on. We doubt extremely whether any Speaker since the great Reform Act of 1832, Lord Eversley- himself not excepted, has wielded so great a power in the House of Commons as Mr. Peel.
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