T O make two bites of a cherry has rightly been
held a culpable waste of time ; and already, it may be, Mr. Balfour has discovered that in moving the Resolution of Wednesday he has been guilty of this precise fault. Why did he not give his proposal a more general form? Why should his resort to the guillotine be restricted to a period of ten days ? All he. asks the House to do is to make short work of the votes " necessary by law to finish the financial business of the year " ; and that, no doubt, is all that he wants of it at the present moment. But it is not all that he will want of it during the Session,—possibly not all that he will want of it between now and Easter. What he really has in his mind might be much better expressed in a more comprehensive formula. Why not propose to apply the guillotine at an early stage of all public business which Ministers think it useful to place to their account during the Session ? Why not provide, for example, that as soon as a Government Bill gets into Committee its clauses and all amendments to them should at once be put to the vote without the idle ceremony of previous debate ? The Prime Minister has long ceased to regard the House of Commons as anything more than a registering machine, and it argues unnecessary timidity that he should shrink from stating this estimate of its functions once for all. A tradition which as yet cannot well be dispensed with makes certain votes indispensable. The Government always want money, and sometimes want to get particular measures passed. But all that a vote requires is a division. Debate is unnecessary, because debate implies explanation and justification of the Ministerial proposals, and the House of Commons requires neither. It only seeks to ascertain what the Government want. That as soon as it has ascertained this it is willing to give it is shown by an unbroken series of lessening, but still faithful, majorities. Nothing is needed, therefore, but a link which shall bring together the wish to get and the willingness to give, and this is supplied by the announcement that "the Ayes have it." When discussion is seen to be only an effort to delay the arrival of the inevitable, its futility ought at once to be recognised.
Mr. Balfour hesitates, however, to express this principle once for all. He is going this year to apply the guillotine earlier than he has ever applied it before, but he will not give his action the dignity of a universal formula. He asks the House to closure every vote which is needed to finish the financial business of the year within the term fixed by the law, but that is all. Though he knows that similar necessities will constantly present themselves during the Session, he still prefers to deal with each as it arises. Certainly this limitation is not to be explained by any special reasonableness in the particular Motion. To apply the guillotine before March 31st is so complete a violation of precedent that Mr. Balfour might well have anticipated future necessities at the same time that he provided for a present one. The difficulty of obeying the law, if it exists, is a difficulty of his own creation. He knew well that between February 14th and March 31st there are interposed exactly six weeks and three days. He knew that of this period a considerable part must be devoted to the debate on the Address. He knew that the time which remained after the Address was voted was liable to every kind of inroad that could suggest itself to a watchful Opposition. And knowing all this, he deliberately fixed February 14th for the opening of the Session. The delay thus interposed was wholly gratuitous. There had been no autumn sittings, nor had the labours of the past year been at all unusually exhausting. The House might perfectly well have met on January 31st, and in this way another fortnight might have been secured for the closing work of the financial year. It is difficult to suggest any reason for postponing the date of meeting' so late as February 14th, except, which is quite possible, that it did not occur to the Prime Minister to take precautions which an unusually early application of the guillotine could at any moment make unnecessary. A vote obtained in this way is just as good as a vote obtained m any other way. It carries as much money and has the same legal value. Why, then, curtail a holiday by bringing Members back to Westminster a fortnight too soon ? Parliamentary business is neither so pleasant to those who do it, nor so useful to those for whom it is done, as to call for any such sacrifice. Let Parliament meet as late as it decently can, and trust to the Prime Minister to get the necessary work through.
Nor did Mr. Balfour show the slightest anxiety to expedite business when Parliament met. The records of the House of Commons are the best evidence to the contrary. There is no better test of Ministerial manage- ment than the frequency of Motions for adjournment. We do not mean, of course, that an Opposition has any scruples about making such Motions if it thinks that it can count on the necessary amount of support. But when a Government is acting straightforwardly, is honestly trying to meet the wishes of the House, and gives it all the opportunities of debate that it can reasonably require, this support is not easily found. Oppositions seldom wilfully embarrass a Government unless they have been provoked into doing it. They are ordinarily willing to do as they would be done by, and to be content with a fair amount of public time if Ministers make no difficulty about conceding it. Mr. Balfour has not met the Opposition on these lines. From the first his evident desire has been to keep as many questions as possible outside the control of the House of Commons. He has not been able to shut out the Fiscal question altogether, but his failure has not been due to any want of effort on his part. To move the Previous Question as an amend- ment to a Fiscal Motion is the sort of step that is sure to defeat its own object. The Opposition are naturally tempted to make it plain that if the Government will not meet them fairly, it can be made to meet them in a variety of unlooked-for ways. The Prime Minister's attitude on Fiscal policy is a continual challenge to the Opposition to try their utmost to make him define his position, and the acceptance of this challenge necessarily leads to waste of time. Nothing worth having can be got out of the Govern- ment, but the attempt to extract it can be renewed again and again. When the Session comes to an end, it will be an interesting exercise to calculate how much time would have been saved. if Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the Address, had defined in plain terms the precise relation between his policy and Mr. Cham- berlain's.
This is only one of the matters which Mr. Balfour has handled in a fashion which almost suggests the belief that he is wasting time of set purpose. The MacDonnell incident has led to an amount of discussion which might have been wholly avoided by a little plain speaking. The public will know before long, if indeed it does not already know, all that there is to be told about the terms on which Sir Antony was appointed, and how far those terms were kept secret from all the Cabinet except Mr. Balfour and Mr. Wyndham. Nothing is gained, therefore, by the fencing, and not very ingenious fencing either, to which the Prime Minister resorts as often as he is questioned upon the subject. If he had determined to sacrifice Mr. Wyndham to Sir Edward Carson, and to make it plain that in his eves a law officer, if he has Ulster behind him, is of more value than a Cabinet Minister, he might have said plainly that he had consented to Sir Antony Mac- Donnell's appointment in ignorance of the hostility it would excite in Ulster, and that though the discovery gave him cause for regret, he had no more intention of standing out against Orange opinion than he had in the case of the Roman Catholic University in Dublin. Where Ireland is concerned his convictions do not, he might have said, rise above the level of pious opinions. No doubt this would not have been a heroic line for a Prime Minister to take ; but then heroic lines are not in Mr. Balfour's way, and at all events it would have been a line which would have saved an appreciable amount of time. When a Minister has made a clean breast of it, the most hostile Opposition cannot for ever be going back upon the subject-matter of his confession. As it is, Mr. Long's Irish policy promises to be qUite as fruitful in surprises as Mr. Wyndham's, not so much from any quality of its own as from the opportunities it will afford of wasting time in efforts to draw out the points of resemblance or difference which distinguish it from, Mr. Wyndham's. After all, there is nothing that saves more time in the long run than frankness and straightforwardness, and never was there a Government which was more conspicuously wanting in both qualities.
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