THE DURATION OF PARLT A ATENTS.
IT is very natural that Gladstonians should wish for shorter Parliaments, and we shall not accuse them of giving their vote on Friday week out of mere impatience of office. No doubt they are impatient, angrily im- patient, to be done with the Unionists, and fretful under the accumulating burden of promises intended only to win their seats ; but still, they have other motives than simple eagerness for the enjoyments of power. The theory of representative government which they begin to accept— viz., that the people should govern through representatives, and should not be governed by them—leads logically to short Parliaments, and it has always been an article in the modern Radicals' creed. We cannot object to Glad- stonians following out their theories, nor is it a charge against them that whenever they are nearly convinced, they conciliate Radicals by announcing their quite complete conviction. They are quite right in not parleying too long when they mean to open the gate. Moreover, if Parliament were what it used to be, and what the Prussian Parlia- ment is now, a mere law-making body, we should hardly think the question worthy of serious contest. Changes in positive law are almost always the result of experience gained outside, and we do not know that new Members would make them any worse than Members trained by years of attendance on Parliamentary debates. The reasons for reducing a jury to seven are independent of Parliamentary experience, nor do we know that much listening to Budgets ever developed financial ability or knowledge of the incidence of taxation. If Sir Algernon West should, while still a new Member, enter the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he will probably make a much better one than any of the thirty most experienced sitters in the House, Mr. Gladstone alone excepted. It is because Par- liament is so much more than a law-making power that we regard the duration of Parliaments as so vital a question. The House of Commons, besides passing laws, makes and unmakes Ministries, and, moreover, controls their action during their term of office. It governs the country, and governing the country with its present tremendous respon- sibility to its subjects, to mankind, and to history, is a work that requires not only experience but time. No policy worth the naming can be carried out in a moment, or by a cataclysmal stroke. It must be argued out, if delibera- tive government is to continue ; it must be explained to a slow-thinking people, or it will not be popular ; and it must be followed up, or it will be comparatively infruc- tuous. Those conditions cannot be secured unless the Executive Government has a chance of continuing for a considerable period ; and if Parliaments were annual, triennial, or even quinquennial, it would not have the chance. If there is one thing nearly certain, as was fully admitted during the debate by speakers on both sides, it is that the small section of the voters, rarely 5 per cent., who hold the balance of electoral power, sway quickly from side to side ; that they are always rather critics than supporters of those who govern ; and that, consequently, the chance that a new Parliament will mean a new Ministry is at least greater than that it will not. Short Parliaments, in fact, imply unstable Ministries, and unstable Ministries imply one of two results. Either the country becomes in Home politics capricious, and in Foreign politics isolated, no foreign State daring to rely on it ; or power passes almost entirely to Permanent Under-Secretaries, who are no doubt competent to govern, but who are in no sense representa- tives of the people. Take the two questions now most strongly debated, one in Home and one in Foreign affairs, and see how short Parliaments would work. A Ministry with a tenure of two years and six months—for that, as Mr. Balfour showed, is what triennial Parliaments would mean—could not govern Egypt at all, for no Egyptian Minister would obey a Resident who might be recalled and his policy reversed within that period ; and, in particular, it could introduce no financial reform, for no investor could calculate what his investment might in a few months be worth, or could afford to lend money to Egypt except at extravagant rates. Or take the question of Home-rule. That question involves, as every statesman well knows, not only the passing of an Act, but a whole series of vital changes in the administration of Ireland, in the methods of conducting Parliamentary business in England, and even in the financial arrangements both for Great Britain and Ireland. How can they be carried out suffi- ciently in a short Parliament, or at all by short-lived Ministries of totally different ideas ? They will demand all the strength of a strong Administration, and short-lived Administrations are also weak. It may be said that in France and America the difficulty is not felt ; but in France it is the permanent bureaucracy which governs, and in America a strong Government enjoys in practice an immoveable tenure of eight years. Mr. Balfour put it at four, because that is the legal period ; but he forgot how frequently a, popular President, or even a strong one, is allowed a second term. Look, again, at all these social questions which are so rapidly coming up, and which may involve the greatest changes of our time. How can they possibly be settled by a series of shifting Cabinets, led by different men penetrated with different ideas, and apt to feel that these are questions of prin- ciple, compromise upon which almost involves degrada- tion like compromise upon the moral law ? The evil would be specially great at the present time, when men are still feeling their way towards change, and modify their ideas every Session, and in this country, where the eagerness for seats is so great that Members in the last year of their tenure are not thinking or learning at all, but pass their lives, as Mr. Balfour said, in a sort of "senile courtship" of the constituencies. There is too much of that at all times, but with triennial Parliaments—and that is the real object of any change—the Members would be so involved in the courtship, that they would lose character altogether, and become mere delegates of the people, who, if their direct intervention is wanted, could exercise it much better through the Referendum. The total result, as we believe, would be that there would hardly be a Government at all, and that the English people, who love efficiency above all things, would either allow the Crown to resume much power, or, more probably, would insist upon some radical reform in the Constitution,—that is, a fixed limit of Ministerial tenure, or the retirement of the Commons by thirds at a time, so as to minimise the chance of Executive change.
What, on the other hand, is the object of making so vital an alteration ? Sir W. Foster says that ninety thousand new voters are added every year to the register ; and that if a Parliament lasts six years, nearly half a million of voters have never had an opportunity of voting by whom they will be governed. What does that matter ? If the complaint is one of justice, it is groundless, for the half-million will survive, and will have just as many opportunities of voting as any of their rivals have had. To do justice to them in the abstract sense—that is, to secure that every elector shall have his chance of voting for or against every Government as soon as he is registered—there ought to be a General Election every year, and triennial are only less unjust than sep- tennial Parliaments. Or, if the plea is one of expediency, where is the harm done in leaving a section of the youngest and least experienced voters to wait a little before they exercise their power ? Sir W. Foster might just as well complain because every voter whose party is defeated at the elections has to wait till Parliament is dissolved before he has a new chance of being accurately represented. That there is an evil in the House of Commons getting out of connection with its constituents, wo do not deny ; but it is a much less evil than instability in national policy or in the guidance of home affairs, and it is an evil which decreases every day. The pressure of opinion upon the House of Commons is growing stronger, not weaker, until the danger before us is not that the nation and the House will be at variance, but that the House, ceasing to be an animated entity with a voice and an opinion of its own, will become a mere telephone for national decisions, the decisions of a rude majority arrived at through momentary impulse, and unfiltered by passing through more experienced minds. What with meetings, letters, deputations, and evening newspapers, the House has grown as sensitive as a barometer, and we should as soon expect to see it defy a popular decree as to see the mercury in a thermometer fall because the air had grown hot. There is no real discord possible between Parliament and genuine opinion. What there is, is only a resolve that the Ministry entrusted with the representation of the nation shall not go out before the hostile opinion of that nation is unmistakable. Sir W. Foster insinuates that the Unionist Members elected as Gladstonians changed their opinions, and still kept their seats ; but the charge is utterly unfounded. They were all sent back to their constituents, and sit now because those constituents gave them a mandate to preserve the Union even if they retained Conservatives in power.
Moreover, there is another consideration which was not mentioned in the debate, and which men of Sir W. Foster's opinion will do well to ponder over. There is such a thing as the accumulation of energy as well as its conservation. The growth of the dislike to a Government, which in recent times has made the pendulum swing so violently, is a very gradual process, requiring much time, and consecutive time too. The men who hold the balance of power in each constituency are not all converted in a heap ten days after the election, but one by one, through the slow dripping of events, disappointments, or, it may be, alterations of in- tellectual belief. It is by no means sure that two years and six months would suffice to complete the process, or that a Ministry would always be turned out at the end of a three-years' term. It is much more probable that it would obtain a renewed lease, but with a weakened majority, and that the only result of halving the usual term would be to halve the efficiency alike of Parliament and the Ministry. It is difficult in our days to do any- thing with the minute majorities which sufficed of old, and nine years' government with a majority diminishing from a hundred to thirty, and finally disappearing, would hardly be, even in Sir W. Foster's view, an improvement upon the present system. Indeed, the result might be worse even than this. A Ministry is always at its best just after re-election, and a continuance of short Parliaments might end in very long Ministries, usually very weak, but spasmodically full of "go." That, we will do them the justice to say, is not what Radicals desire, and it is only they who are sincerely anxious to cut down the term of Parliamentary life. The majority of Members hate the proposal ; and as for Mr. Gladstone, though he has once or twice denounced the Septennial Act in platform speeches, when it came to voting he walked quietly out of the House. As he fully believes he is coming in, that was a very significant act.
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