27 MAY 1871, Page 8

MR. GLADSTONE'S DECISION.

AIR. GLADSTONE'S announcement of Tuesday, that he would press on the Army Bill and the Ballot Bill "without any reference whatever to time" was not made a

day too soon. The tactics of the opponents of those Bills tended to bring Parliamentary government itself into con- tempt. The one grand danger of that system of government,

at least among people who speak English, is that its excessive cumbrousness, its incapacity for vigorous, or rather for rapid, action, and its tendency to paralyze genius for executive affairs, should rouse the popular disgust, and impel the electorate to demand more effective or more dramatic methods of representation. All three of these evils are distinctly apparent in the conduct of the Army discussion. The sub- ject itself is one on which discussion is almost useless, Par- liament having no option except to accept or reject a proposal which more almost than any other conceivable measure involves the right of the Government to rule. If the Ministry cannot be trusted to remodel the Army after it has openly denounced the existing organization, it ought to be dismissed at once as incapable. If, on the other hand, it can be trusted, then its proposal, once understood, ought to be accepted, and supported by the whole force of Parliamentary opinion. The principle once admitted, all else is matter of executive detail, which under a system wiser than ours would be left entirely to the responsible Minister, who, and not the House, must rebuild the condemned military structure. To accept a revolution in principle as the House of Commons has done, and then endeavour, by sheer dint of talk to delay or spoil its realization, is merely to show Parliament as an obstructive power. No Ministry can seem efficient while forced every night to defend an accepted measure, or capable while prohibited from action, or instructed while called on for details which it cannot arrange until the bases of its plan have passed out of the region of controversy. If the Military Members could defeat the Government plan they would be entirely in their right, but to delay it without hope of defeat- ing it is to weaken the Executive and endanger the safety of the country without a cause. No great organizer would consent to work under such conditions, and in imposing them the minority are securing not that the plan they hate shall be dropped, but that its authors shall be harassed, hampered, and consequently inefficient. Their greatest project is not legal- ized and not rejected, but only suspended,—not for further consideration, but because some of its opponents retain a hope that if time can be gained something may happen which will cause it to fall through. This is not government through Parliament, but the suspension of Government by Parliament, and the Premier, in applying pressure to the minority, deserves the gratitude of all who believe that Parliaments exist not that government may cease, but that Cabinets may be wise.

The form of the pressure is singular, and we are not altogether sure that legislation would not be improved by the concession of a little more power to the Premier and the Majority. Partly from antique habit—a habit which arose in days when Parliaments had little to do and debates were not reported—partly from its old dread of the Crown, and partly from characteristic tolerance for opinion, the House of Com- mons protects the rights of minorities within itself as no other popular assembly has ever done. There is no power under its rules of compelling a minority, if at all respectable in numbers, to allow a mea sure to pass. There is no law of the edture as in France, no "one-hour rule" as in the American House of Representatives, no right of "challenge," that is, of forcing on a final division, such as we believe exists in the practice of the United States' Senate. Any man can speak for a week if he likes, and a hundred men may submit a hundred amendments to every clause of any particular bill. It is perfectly possible, as far as the rules of the House are concerned, for a body such as the Irish Members to forbid legislation altogether, by merely employing their prescrip- tive right of appearing to try to improve it in Com- mittee. As a matter of fact, this power is very seldom employed, as it irritates the House too much, but, when it is, the majority has but one resource. The Session is no more limited by law than are the privileges of the minority. Nothing prevents the agent of the majority, the Premier, from sitting continuously throughout the seven years during which a Parliament may remain undissolved, that is, from waiting until the obstinacy of his opponents has been defeated by obstinacy like their own. In many countries that power would be of little use—the Poles, for instance, in Berlin, would forbid legislation until their claims had been satisfied— but in England, by national good fortune, the autumn is the season of sport, and to sit through September and October would be to almost all members a serious privation. The threat of sitting until a Bill is passed therefore almost in- variably breaks the resolution of the minority, even when that minority, as in the case of the Divorce Bill, is supported by religious feeling, and we have no doubt it will overcome it even in the case of a Bill so detested as that for the Abolition of Purchase. But if it does not—and we can imagine cases in which it would not—the only resource will be to reconsider the forms of the House, and give a majority, say of a hundred, some right of bringing a sterile debate to a close. A minority has a right to be heard, and fully heard ; but it can have no right to suspend the action of the Legislature except to secure full discussion, or to paralyze an Executive which it is powerless either to censure or dismiss. The Queen's Govern- ment must go on, and if the whole time of Parliament is to be taken up by the repetition on every official night of the arguments refuted or voted down during the previous sitting, government in any true sense of the word becomes an impossibility.

The case for the Ballot Bill is, on different grounds, as strong as that for the Bill for the reorganization of the Army. The Ballot Bill is not, it is true, an executive measure, or one which involves the safety of the country, or one without which the Ministry must of necessity resign. A defeat in the Com- mons on such a Bill would only mean that the Commons were more content than the Government with existing modes of election, and as they have elected the Government, the Ministry might be content with their content. But it is certain from previous votes that the majority of elec- tors wish for the change, and have made the change an instruction to their representatives ; and when that is the case, the minority, after sufficient discussion, is bound, as we hold, to give way. It has a moral right to resist such a measure by vote and argument, but no right whatever when outvoted to trick the nation out of its will by the use of forms devised not to defeat the nation, but to secure to every

party within it a fair hearing. If the minority can do that in one Session it can do that in the next, and the total result would be that the machinery devised by the country to carry out its will would neither obey nor disobey that will, but merely acknowledge, instead of realizing it. A dead-lock of that kind of necessity impairs public confidence in the value of our institutions, and Mr. Gladstone, apart altogether from party considerations, is in the right in bringing it to an end. At the same time, those party considerations are very strong.

We do not profess to admire the Ballot, which seems to us a device for diminishing the electors' responsibility in the exer-

cise of their trust ; but there can be no doubt that the great majority of Liberals believe that intimidation and bribery interfere with freedom of election, and that the Ballot will greatly diminish both corruption and intimidation.

They hold the change to be vital, they consider Mr. Gladstone pledged to accomplish it, and they resent any

appearance of hesitation in the matter as if it were a

treachery. They have welcomed the renewal of the pledge with enthusiasm, and will, we doubt not, to secure its reali- zation, vote with a steadiness which of late they have some- times failed to display. Mr. Gladstone's menace, therefore, while it discourages his opponents, reinvigorates his friends, and will, we sincerely believe, facilitate, and facilitate greatly,

the conduct of public business. At best that business is in a bad state ; but if the opponents of Army Reform and of the

Ballot Bill had gone on talking unchecked, the work of administration must have gone, in the printer's phrase, to pie.