THE LIBERAL FAINT-HEARTS.
THAT the Prime Minister has replied with a courteous negative to the Liberal memorialists who wish to con- dition for a two-thirds majority whenever the closure of debate is in question, will be perfectly satisfactory to the great majority of his party, who, while they agree to the full with Sir John Lubbock, and other scrupulous Liberals, that there would be no misfortune greater than any gagging of free debate, yet believe, on the most convincing evidence, that there is much more to fear, even for the future weight and in- fluence of free debate, from those obstructionists who try at every turn to stop the practical work of the House of Commons, than there is from those who wish to shorten deliberation, only that resolute action may follow that delibera- tion within a reasonable and moderate interval of time. What the great majority of Liberals believe is this,—that a majority large enough to turn out a Government, a majority large enough to compel a total change of policy in the country, ought obviously to be accounted large enough, with the full consent of the Speaker, who is the appointed guardian of impartial debate, to decide that sufficient time has been given to deliberation, and that the moment for registering the opinion of the House has come. Now, what are the argu- ments on the other side, the arguments which such a man as Sir John Lubbock,—a genuinely reasonable Liberal, if ever there was a genuinely reasonable Liberal,—thinks of so much weight as to render him anxious that the Government should require a two-thirds majority to close debate, though he asks only an ordinary majority for the purpose of registering the conclusions to which debate has led ? So far as we under- stand them, they are simply these,—that whenever the majority are right and reasonable in their wish to shut the mouths of the minority, there will be at least a fair number of themini:Way to think so too, and to avow by their vote 'their conviction that, whatever the decision, the losing party have been fairly heard in argument against that decision. If, they say, the Speaker is right in believing, what he is to be required to declare, that the general sense of the House is in favour of closing the debate, then there must be some means of verifying that opinion of his ; and what test can be better than the willingness of a fair number of the losing side to vote with the winning side on this preliminary point, and thereby to prove that weariness of talk is not confined to that side of the House which hopes to win the day ? How, they ask, is the Speaker to judge that the debate has been sufficiently pro- longed If by the general impatience of the House, then surely that general impatience will betray itself in the division list, and you will find many of those who anticipate a defeat perfectly willing to hasten that defeat, rather than multiply further fruitless and redundant verbiage. Or suppose, even, that the Speaker judges rather by his own previous experience, by his knowledge that the most influential representatives of opinion have been fully heard, than by signals of general impatience,— even so, if he judges rightly, his judgment ought to be verified by the concurrence of men who think differently on the ultimate point, but who think with the majority as to the adequacy of the discussion by which the final decision has been prepared.
Such, as we understand them, are the considerations by which such Liberals as Sir John Lubbock are influenced, when they ask that a two-thirds majority shall be needful to compel the closure of debate. Let us now give what we deem the full and sufficient reply to these considerations. Except in a very thin House,—a case for which the very ample guarantees conceded by the Government sufficiently provide, the guarantee, we mean, that when the minority is under forty the majority must number at least 100, and that when the minority is over forty the majority must number at least 200,—it is by no means easy to secure a two-thirds majority. Take a House of 400 Members ; in such a House, no less than 267 Members must vote for the Closure, against 133 who oppose it, in order to secure the Closure by a two-thirds majority. Now, what does that imply ? It implies that if more than a hundred Conservatives join the Irish Obstructionists in opposing the closure, the closure would be hopeless. Yet, even in the present House, where the Liberals have an excep- tionally large majority, it would be all but certain that amongst four hundred Members there would be over a hundred strong party Conservatives willing to follow Lord Randolph Churchill, or Sir H. D. Wolff, or Mr. Gorst into the lobby, to the support of the Irish Obstructionists. And if this be true of a House in which the Government has so very large a majority as Mr. Gladstone can count on now, what shall we say of any ordinary House, in which, suppose, the full majority of the Government should be only fifty or sixty, though party feeling might be all the more violent on that very account. Suppose, what is by no means unlikely, that the Conservatives, on their next return to power, could only rely on a majority of fifty in a full House. That would mean, of course, that they had 350 against 300. In any average House, however,—in a House, say, of 400 Members,—they could not usually be sure of a much greater majority than thirty, so that in an ordinary party division taking place in an average House, we might expect 215 Conservatives to 185 Liberals. In such a House, even if all the Irish Obstructionists belonged already nominally to the Liberal party, and did not therefore in any way reduce the steady Conservative force, would it be reasonable to expect that, as a rule, more than fifty Liberals would go over to the help of the Conservatives, in order to give them the requisite majority And is it conceivable that this could happen, if the point in debate were, say, one which created as much party feeling as the question of flogging in the Army created in the last Parliament ? We do not believe that at a critical moment you could rely on it that party feeling would ever suppress itself sufficiently for such a result as this. The Front Opposition Bench might vote with the Government, and possibly a few more might walk out of the House without voting; but there would be no security at all, whichever party were in power, that the opposite party would be sufficiently impartial to eschew a triumph easily within their reach. It takes a great deal more conviction that the enemy is in the right than the rank and file of a party usually feel, to stimulate them to give effect to their latent conviction when tempted by the prospect of victory. We deny altogether the inference that because a Conservative Government with 215 supporters at its back could not secure an adhesion from the Liberal side of more than fifty votes—even on a question of procedure like the Closure—therefore it could not be the general sense of the House that the debate ought to close. The truth is that party government, with all its advantages, has disadvantages in- separable from it. One of the necessary disadvantages is an insuperable reluctance on the part of one side of the House to exert itself to save the opposite side from a humiliation. We have watched the Opposition during many party struggles, both when the Liberals have been in power and when the Conservatives have been in power, and we cannot recollect the Session when it could have been fairly expected that a suffi- cient number of the Members of Opposition would vote with the Government, even on such a matter as the closure of debate, to save the Government from a disagreeable defeat,—the only exception being such cases as those of the Irish Coercion debates of last Session, when the sentiment of the Tory party was so vehemently in favour of Coercion, that they were willing to go any length even with the Liberal Government to secure the result they so earnestly desired. In that case, however, the Conservatives voted with the Government not only in the matter of Urgency, but also on the practical issue to which that question of Urgency immediately led. Had it been otherwise, the Liberals would never have got even an Urgency vote out of them. Suppose that it had been neces- sary to obtain a two-thirds vote hi favour of closing a debate on the Irish land question. Does any reasonable mortal suppose that such a majority could have been got even out of the present House of Commons We do not hesitate to say that it would have been simply impossible. What with the disgust felt by the Conservatives for the principle of the Irish Land Bill, and the ease with which they would have persuaded themselves that the novel principles of that Bill could not have been adequately discussed, we are quite certain that a two- thirds vote in favour of closing a discussion could never have been extorted from the House of Commons during the debates of last Session on that subject.
You can no more persuade a considerable minority of the House of Commons to hasten its own defeat, than you can persuade water to run up hill. Nature does not abhor a vacuum half as much as a party minority abhors doing anything to accelerate its own defeat. We say it without a shadow of doubt, that if the House is ever to have a practical power of closing its own debates, you must vest that power in the vote of a bare majority, taking such guarantees as the Government have conceded that that majority shall not be the majority of a very thin and unrepresentative House. Sir John Lubbock and his colleagues may mean well, but they do not allow sufficiently for the deep-rooted disposition of one party to think that it is not, and cannot be, called upon to assist, or even to hasten by a few hours, the triumph of the opposite party, on any issue on which it entertains a diametric- ally opposite opinion. The stomach of party turns against so unnatural an act. There are a few who will achieve it. A few more may go out of the House, rather than take the responsibility of prolonging a discussion which they know to have been already tedious and redundant. But the great majority of party men will persuade themselves that by any means in their power what they regard as an iniquity ought to be averted, and they will think this so strongly that the two- thirds vote will never be secured except when the majority of the House are agreed, not only as to the adequacy of the debate, but also as to the practical conclusion which is to be adopted after the close of the debate. Such are the reasons which convince us that the only proper precautions against an abuse of the right of Closure, are those already conceded by the Government,—the full assent of the Speaker, and the condition that it shall either be a com- paratively full House in which this question is to be decided ; or, if a comparatively empty House, then one in which the majority for the Closure shall be very considerable indeed, for in an empty House the Government guarantee secures more than a two-thirds majority, a majority of at least 100 to 40. This is an ample security against a surprise vote.
But anything more than this, anything that requires a two- thirds majority in a full House, would only result in making the right of Closure utterly nugatory, a right which would only be exercised when the two great parties were agreed on the policy to be pursued, as well as on the sufficiency of the dis- cussion by which it had been canvassed.
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