THE INDIRECT REPRESENTATION OF THE COLONIES.
THE Report of the Committee appointed to inquire whether or not Sir Bryan O'Loghlen vacated his seat for Clare by accepting office under the Government of Victoria, may not be regarded as a matter of great moment in itself. But, looking to the anxious Constitutional questions which arise every year, often more than once in the same year, between England and her Colonies, we must say that, in our opinion, the decision arrived at by the Committee, if it be good in law, —which, looking to the evidently opposite opinion of Sir T. Erskine May, we confess we are very much inclined to doubt, —is one which it would be well for the Imperial Parliament to alter by a legislative enactment, so as to interpose no need- less obstacle in the way of the adequate representation of our independent Colonies,—we are not now speaking of our Crown Colonies,—in the Imperial Legislature. It will be remembered that after Sir Bryan O'Loghlen's return for the county of Clare, he accepted the office of Attorney-General in Victoria, and the question arose whether he thereby vacated his seat for Clare, or not. If that question had only touched the case of a Member actually engaged in duties of a most important character at a great distance from home, it would have been rather desirable than otherwise that it should be found, as the Committee find, that by accepting such an appointment he did vacate his seat. Of course, no one wishes to have Members of Parliament who never take their seats, and who are giving all their energy to other political work at the other side of the planet. Unfortunately, however, the decision, if good at all, not improbably affects other cases of a very dif- ferent kind. Mr. Childers, for instance, was for many months the Agent-General for Victoria in this country, and also M.P. for Pontefract in Parliament, and we have no hesitation in saying that it was of the greatest possible advantage to Victoria to have its Agent-General occupying a very influential place in the House of Commons. So, again, Mr. Edward Jenkins was, for several months after he became M.P. for Dundee, the Agent- General of the Canadian Government in Parliament. There is a more notable illustration still of the value of such a double position. For a considerable time, Edmund Burke was Agent for the Colony of New York and also a Member of the British Parliament, having been appointed to that post in November, 1771, with a salary of £700 a year, and having delivered during his tenure of that post, some of the wisest and most remarkable speeches on American affairs ever delivered in the House of Commons. It is true that his biographer, Mr. James Prior, says of this appointment that, "though it tended on all future occasions to give him the most correct views of American affairs," it " diminished, perhaps, the effect of his oratory in the House and of his wisdom out of doors, from an illiberal surmise that his advice might not be wholly dis- interested. It was, of course, no gift of Government." Yet so great was the effect of his familiarity with American affairs, that in the middle of his great speech on the tea-duty, on April 19th, 1774, an American gentleman, who was in the gallery of the House of Commons, cried out to Dr. Franklin, who was sitting within two or three seats of him, with a dis- regard of the rules of the House which would now bring down expulsion on any one guilty of it, "You have got a most wonderful man here ; he understands more of America than all the rest of your House put together." No testimony could be more striking to the usefulness of the practice of allowing men with a special knowledge of the affairs of our Colonies to sit in the House of Commons, if any British constituency will elect them. Indeed, Burke did all that man could do to avert the catastrophe which a year or two later befell our Colonial Empire in North America through the blind obstinacy of George III. and the miserable pliancy of Lord North. Yet if the Committee on the Clare election have rightly under- stood the law, it seems that Edmund Burke's seat ought to have been vacated,—though no one raised the point,—for his acceptance of the Agency of New York. At least, so far as we understand the Report of the Clare Committee and the Memorandum of the Attorney-General for Ireland on which it seems to be founded, they regard "an office of profit under the Crown" as meaning any office the holder of which could, by the letter of the law, though it might be quite in opposition to constitutional practice or principle, be appointed or removed by an order issuing from the Crown in this country, even though such an order would have to be executed by a Governor whose admitted duty it is to be guided in such matters by the advice of his own responsible Ministers on the spot. If this be the true legal interpretation of the statute of Anne (6 Anne, c. 7) and 33 George III., c. 41, of the Irish Parliament, which applied the same principles to Ireland, all we can say is that the avowed intention of these Acts has been greatly overshot by the law, as it is now interpreted. We are glad indeed to see that the Home Secretary does not accept this interpretation of the meaning of the Acts, but regards it as quite possible that there is a broad distinction between the constitutional position of a Victorian Minister, and the constitutional position of a mere appointee or agent of the Victorian Government. But we cannot find this distinction in the Irish Attorney-General's Memorandum. Sir Erskine May defines the true drift of the old Acts on this subject clearly enough, and distin- guishes that drift well from the effect which it is now sought to give to them, when he told the Committee :—" The question which is referred to the Committee is really whether the Attorney-General of Victoria has accepted a new office or place of profit under the Crown, according to the true intent and meaning of the English and Irish statutes. It appears to me that the office in question is not held under any of the conditions contemplated by these statutes. The holder is not under the influence of the Crown at home ; the independ- ence of Parliament is not concerned in his acceptance of a new office. He cannot be reckoned among the class of officers against whom these statutes were directed, as being subservient to the Ministers of the Crown. No such office could have been in the contemplation of the Legislature when these Acts were passed." And if,—this being so,—these Acts are nevertheless so worded as to produce an effect which they were certainly never intended to produce, and which is exceed- ingly undesirable in itself, then we submit that so far as they
do this, there is a strong case for a legislative remedy,—for their partial repeal. But we cannot but doubt whether Sir Erskine May's view of the constitutional effect of these Acts be not the true legal construction of them, as well as the obvious moral intention with which they were passed.
However this may be, nothing is to our minds more certain than that we ought not to place any needless difficulties in the way of bringing the House of Commons face to face with authorised exponents of the wishes of our great self-governing Colonies in the East and West. We have at the present moment every reason to wish that we still had in the House of Commons—as we once had—an official representative both of the Canadian Dominion and of the Colony of Victoria. So far as we can judge from rather imperfect knowledge,Lord Lorne has made the mistake of refusing—at least, without first re- ferring the matter home,—to act on the advice of the Cana- dian Government to remove the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Quebec and appoint a Lieutenant-Governor who has the confidence of the Central Government, in his place. It is perfectly true that the Lieutenant-Governor in question has the confidence of the Provincial Parliament of Quebec, since the late election ; it is perfectly true that the last Canadian Parliament itself refused to censure him, though the new Canadian Parliament is, no doubt, well disposed even to censure Lord Lorne for hesitating to remove him. But these are considerations which, though they ought to have had great weight with Sir John Macdonald and the Canadian Government, in relation to the advice they tendered to Lord Lorne, do not seem to us to have any bearing on the ques- tion whether, such advice having been tendered, Lord Lorne ought to have reserved the question for the consideration of the Government at home. The Canadian Government would have had no difficulty in finding a man for the Lieutenant-Governor- ship of Quebec, at once more trusted by themselves, and not less willing to be guided by the wishes of the majority of the Provincial Assembly of Quebec, than M. Letellier de St. Just, whom Lord Lorne was asked to remove. It is obviously in- trinsically reasonable that the Lieutenant-Governors, who are the links through which the Central Government of Canada is bound to the local administrations of the federated States, should be persons at once agreeable to that Central Govern- ment, and at the same time ready to adapt themselves to the will of their local Parliaments. Great Britain, at least, insists on appointing her own Colonial Governors, though, in the case of self-governing Colonies, she expects them to ad on the views of their Constitutional advisers. And why should not the Central Government in Canada have the same privilege, in relation to the subordinate local Govern- ments, which the Government of Great Britain claims in regard to the subordinate Colonial Governments ? This, at least, appears to be the prinui fade view of the matter. But if a dispute of any seriousness is likely to arise, how much easier it would be for the House of Commons to judge the issue, could it have not only the authoritative statement of the Imperial Cabinet on the one side, but an equally autho- ritative statement coming from the Canadian Cabinet, on the other.
And the need for such an official representative of the case of the Colony of Victoria is just now even greater. Our readers know that there is at present in this country a Commission sent home by the Victorian Parliament, to obtain, if possible, by imperial legislation, some remedy for the recurring dead- locks between the Assembly of Victoria and the Council. But so far as we can see, that Commission is making no way to its ostensible end. No measure has been proposed by the Colonial Office to carry out its object. No discussion has taken place in either House. The Parliament of Victoria must meet as usual in the summer, and there is now hardly time, even if there be the will, to pass through Parliament any measure such as the Colony desires. Worse still, our Parliament has not even had the issue placed before it, though it is one on which the Colony feels very strongly, and the ignoring of which by this country will be deeply felt. Melbourne is the most excitable of our Colonial capitals ; and if Melbourne, by the time the next Victorian Session begins, should have caught up the notion that Great Britain had treated its deliberate and urgent demand for a constitutional remedy of a great constitutional evil with anything like contempt, we might hear of disturbances in Mel- bourne very dangerous to the loyalty of the Colony, if not to the loyalty of a whole group of Colonies. Now, this, at least, seems to us clear,—that if the Agent-General for Victoria had had a seat in the House of Commons, he would have long ago have elicited the view of the House of Commons on these constitutional troubles in Victoria, in a way that might well have had a great effect in moulding the views of the opposite parties in the Colony, and perhaps in bringing them to a reasonable compromise. The most dangerous policy we can adopt towards a Colony rapidly growing in power, is the policy of frigid neglect. And that is just the policy which would become impossible, if there should happen to be among our influential Members of Parliament men who really represented not only their own constituencies, but also the official opinions of our great self-governing dependencies.
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