LORD HAMPDEN.
ASPEAKER ceases to be a personage the day after his resignation, and the lengthy encomiums passed upon Lord Hampden after his decease must have created in a part of the public a sensation of surprise. Journalists, however, are almost forced to be historians ; and neither they nor the older politicians could quite forget the immense service which Lord Hampden once rendered both to the Constitution and the country. By a course which it required an able man to think of and a brave man to attempt, he terminated a Parliamentary deadlock which seemed to make government by deliberation physically impossible, and which, had it continued, must have ended in serious changes in the method of governing the country. Long before they attained their numerical pre- ponderance in Ireland, the "Leaguers" had discovered the weak place in the Constitution, the power of any large and determined group to paralyse the House of Commons— the fly-wheel, as it were, of the machine—by continuous talk ; and on the last day of January, 1881, they deter- mined to exercise their power to the utmost. They threatened to prevent the immense majority of the House from passing the Coercion Act, "the Bill for the Protection of Person and Property in Ireland ; " and throughout Mon- day night, Tuesday, and Tuesday night, forty-one hours, they did prevent it by continuous speaking. There was no reason why they should not prevent it all through the Session. Every Irishman can speak for hours, even if, like Mr. Biggar, he has to read extracts from Blue-Books to eke out his natural fluency ; the Irish Party, though smaller than it afterwards became, was large enough to admit of relays ; and it was evident, after forty-one hours of continuous sitting, that they could go on for the entire week, could renew the process at each stage of the Bill, and could in Committee absolutely prevent its passing. In other words, though only a third at that time of the representatives from their own King- dom, and less than a twentieth of the entire House, the Irish " Leaguers " claimed and could exercise the right of vetoing any Bill proposed, even though it was a Bill directed against murderous anarchy. There was under the existing Standing Orders no power of stopping them, and there was therefore, unless some new device could be adopted, an end of Parliamentary government. It was at this juncture that Mr. Brand, previously known only as a singularly courteous and impartial Speaker of strongly Liberal opinions, displayed his latent force. Rising at 9 o'clock on February 2nd, on a wintry morning, in a House excited beyond precedent by the protracted contest, he calmly declared that the new and exceptional circumstances demanded "new and exceptional action," and, with only one imperfect and long-forgotten precedent behind him, of his own authority terminated the debate. The House, of course, eagerly ratified his action ; the dis- mayed and amazed " Leaguers " suffered the vote on the first reading to pass ; and when, on February 3rd, they rallied themselves, and insisted, despite the Speaker's ruling, that Mr. Parnell should be allowed to make a motion, he suspended them from the service of the House, and on their refusal to depart except under physical compulsion, ordered their technical arrest by the police. We shall probably find, when his memoirs are published, that he expected, and was ready to face, even more violent resistance, for he had accumulated a force in and round the House which would have terminated such resistance at once. His splendid decisiveness removed the danger, for though there was plenty of obstruction afterwards, the Leaguers dared not push it to the same extremes, and the constituencies, at last fully aroused, cordially endorsed the new and stringent Rules under which organised obstruc- tion in a visible and avowed form ceased—or at least Members so imagine—to be possible in Parliament. In a concealed form, and under the disguise of reasonable die. cussion of accidental subjects, it still exists, and is going on at this moment ; but overt obstruction intended to overawe Parliament and render the will of the majority powerless, has passed away. The credit of that great clearance from the path of constitutional government was due to the courage and decision of Mr. Brand ; and it is perhaps still more to his honour that the applause which poured upon him from all sides, the wakening-up of a whole people to his personal merit, never turned his head in the least. Another man might have posed as a bene- factor, or at least have magnified his office. He remained, till his resignation three years later, the same calmly impartial arbiter of debate, the only difference being that he was a little more anxiously fair, as they themselves acknowledged, towards the faction whose intended coup d'état he had so determinedly foiled.
In the long list of Speakers, there has never been a better one than Mr. Brand, and we can only hope that, as the new century proceeds, a line of men as quali- fied as he will occupy the chair. For we take it to be a certainty that, as the House becomes more and more democratic, the Speaker will become at once more powerful and more loaded with responsibility. At present, the respectable Members of the House of all parties think it their duty to support the decisions of the Chair, even on occasions when a number of them may doubt whether the Speaker has selected the wisest coarse of action open to his choice. He is, therefore, when he deems it well to intervene, "the House;" and resistance disappears when he has decided, as completely as if he were a Judge sitting in his own Court. That is the right position of affairs in an Assembly which, as it controls the Executive as well as makes the laws, needs always in its collective action to maintain, like a King or a Judge, an appearance of serene dignity. It is improbable, however. that democratic Members, many of them representing extreme parties, will continue always to pay this deference to a President who is protected rather by etiquette and precedent than by law, who has no power, as we think he should have, of committal for contempt, and who can of his own authority inflict no punishment other than the contempt which may or may not follow a formal reprimand. A House full of Labour Members and excited Nationalists from four Kingdoms—for we shall have English Nationalists yet, if the fringes keep tugging themselves away from the robe—will hardly leave to a Speaker his unquestioned supremacy, and will insist in some way or other on a criticism which will produce a necessity for defence only endurable by a very strong man. That occurs even now in France, though the President of the Chamber is armoured in prerogatives, such as the right of suspending a sitting, and of inflicting a fine by depriving a Deputy of his day's pay, which do not exist here. It will, we may be sure, take a Speaker as resolute as Lord Hampden was, or as Mr. Arthur Peel is, to govern the House in 1902; while there may be a still greater necessity that he should be a man of ability, energy, and calm temper. The tendency is to show him less respect, and yet increase his powers. During the eleven years which have elapsed since the great scene of 1881, all manner of proposals for improving the management of business in the House have been debated, inside and outside, with considerable acerbity ; but the actual changes have all been in the direction of in- creasing the Speaker's powers. The dread of entrusting authority to a mere majority has been so strongly felt, that in practice, though the House could, of course, stop a debate by a special vote, the Closure is never voted without the Speaker's consent, or that of the Chairman of Committees. He is made, in fact, more and more of a Judge, acting always as mouthpiece of the House, but acting, nevertheless, according to his own conscience and judgment. If the House, either through an influx from a new couche sociale, or through its disintegration into groups, or through the appearance, which is quite possible, of much less dignified leaders, should become more dis- organised, this process will probably continue until the Speaker becomes in reality, what he is in America, one of the most powerful personages in the State. In the United States, the office is held to be one of the three on which real power has devolved, the Speaker of the House of Representatives possessing in practice a veto on legislation. Mr. Bryce, indeed, says of this officer in his great work on the Union :—" He has power which in the hand-s—ol a capible and ambitious man becomes so far-reaching that it is no exaggeration to call him the second, if not the first political figure in the United States, with an influence upon the fortunes of men and the course of domestic events superior, in ordinary times, to the President's, although shorter in its duration and less patent to the world." The line of advance in this country will probably not take that direction, but that it will develop new preroga- tives in the Speaker we feel confident. That absurd system of balloting for the right to make proposals in Parlia- ment cannot endure very long ; and should every Member have his Bill to propose, which, with the increase of in- dividualism and of the desire for notoriety, is inevitable, it must in the end be the Speaker who will select the measures, as he now does the questions, which it would not be a mere waste of Parliamentary time to discuss. That question of time, too, is yearly becoming more imperative, and if all power over it is not to be conceded to the majority, it must be left to the only arbiter to whom the House is accustomed. Power, in fact, accretes to the House of Commons, and at the same time the desire to be distinguished by his constituency increases in each Member ; and. one result of the combined tendencies must be to aggrandise the only representative of the House who can have an individual will and power of action. We see, ourselves, no objection to the process. The alterna- tive is a Standing Committee of Procedure ; and as that Committee is sure to be more partisan than the picked individual, more tempted to dilatoriness and vacillation, and more incompetent to deal with sudden or new emergencies, we greatly prefer to see the Speakership grow. Only, as it grows, the necessity both for choosing efficient men, and for honouring them when they have proved their efficiency, will grow too. It is to be regretted even now that Speakers, with their vast ex- perience, disappear in old age so completely from the House of Commons ; and as the duties of the Chair enlarge, we shall not find the best men willing to spend themselves in the work of presiding, unless the public gives them, as after his death it has given Lord Hampden, some strong manifestation of respect. The Speaker, with his £6,000 a year, his conventional claim to a peerage, and his long holiday, is supposed to hold a pleasant office ; but those who think so should reflect for a moment on what he has to do and to bear. His work is to prevent the governing Assembly of an Empire, an Assembly preposterously large and raging with party feeling, from degenerating into a mob ; and his torture is to endure for four nights a week, through seven months of the year, the dilatory drip of fatuous debate on subjects really settled by discussion out- side. No compensation can be too much for such labour, which, however, when performed successfully, helps on the greatest and gravest function now performed in this world, the government of the British Empire.
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