TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE QUESTION FOR THE NATION.
JORD SALISBURY'S remarks at the Merchant Taylors' 4 dinner on the extraordinary difficulty of making eminent foreigners understand how the House of Commons can at one and the same time be the most powerful body in this country, and yet apparently unable to put down the obstruction by which its whole power is wasted, will come in very good time for the grave consideration of those numerous political meetings by which the Whitsun recess is certain to be studded. Of course, the truth of the matter is that the House of Commons is not really unable to put down obstruction wherever it can determine, with something like sureness and without any appearance of partiality, who it is that obstruct. But at the same time, it is equally true that deliberative Assemblies which are founded on the principle of representation, work smoothly only when they work by consent, and that nothing is more difficult than to get such an Assembly to work at all when any considerable section of the body is anxious to paralyse the whole. In such a case, the only possible resource is to atop the mouths of the obstructive minority at every turn, and no one can devise a method of doing that which will not sometimes work unfairly and suppress arguments that ought to have been considered, and still oftener appear to work unfairly and produce upon the minds of those multitudes who are not and cannot be vigilant and constant observers of the deliberations of the Assembly, the impression of silencing persons who ought to have been allowed to speak. As Mr. Bagehot long ago observed in his remarkable book on the English Constitution, the true marvel is that government by public meeting, and by a large and miscellaneous public meeting, should be possible at all, not that it should be beset by very great difficulties. And the greatest of these difficulties is that if you once produce the im- pression that there is unfairness in the conduct of the deliberations, that honest objections to any proposed course are deliberately silenced, the whole value of the method of representative government is sacrificed at once. You might as well act confessedly by the instrumentality of a corps of red- coats as profess to debate and really stifle the most important portions of the debate. That, of course, is the answer to the intelligent foreigner who professes to be surprised that the most powerful body in the State cannot find an easy remedy for the organised obstruction of something like an eighth part of its own body. You have to combine two moat difficult acts of judgment,—the judgment when to shut mouths which are oftenest opened only to waste time, and when to leave them open on the ground that they are really urging what it is of the highest importance that the Legislature should hear, and what it is not only of the highest importance that the Legislature should hear, but what it is of the highest import- ance that the people of these islands should know that the Legislature is anxious to hear and to consider. There is the delicacy of the problem. It is perfectly true, as Lord Salisbury says, that when matters have come to such a point as they have now reached at Westminster, the waste of time is so lavish and so open, that it would be very nearly as profit- able to enact the whole farce by machinery with "a steam Irish Party, an electric Ministry, and a clockwork Speaker." If nothing more is to be effected than has been effected lately, it is a grievous and shameful waste of human brains and energies to consume them in such mental oakum-picking as the Parliamentary discussions of the present Session. At the same time, it must be admitted that to find the true remedy is not easy without striking at the very principle of representa- tive institutions, and weakening that confidence of the public in the fairness of the House of Commons without which it would be better for the House never to meet at all.
In this case, however, the country will certainly not think that the shortcoming of the House has been in the direction of too great peremptoriness, a too arbitrary use of the
Closure. On the contrary, when it observes the amount of progress made in four months of the most devoted work, the character of the all-night sittings, the conduct of such Irish Members as the two Mr. Healye and Dr. Tanner,—
especially the latter, who in any Assembly not composed of the most inexhaustibly patient elements would have been expelled long ago for the utter indecencies of his habitual interruptions, indeed we find great fault with the House of Commons that it has not expelled him,—the nature of the Government's concessions, and the absolute exclusion of all topics of debate except the granting of ordinary supplies and the Irish Question, the country will cry out with one voice that patience has had a good deal more than her perfect work, and that the House, while persisting in its deliberate resolve to hear all fair criticism, should make examples of those who abuse its patience, and should allot a reasonable and definite time to a discussion such as this on the Crimes Bill, and not permit it to swallow up all the time needed for remedial measures equally essential and much more fruitful of positive results. A contemporary has said that the use of the Closure four times on a single night should make the late Lord Iddesleigh turn in his grave. We suspect very strongly that long before Lord Iddesleigh left us, he had repented himself of his reluctance to use the only weapon which can save the House of Commons from utter disgrace, and that so far from being shocked by the use of the Closure four times on such a night as Monday, he would have been as warm in his support of Mr. W. H. Smith as Lord Salisbury himself. The Irish Party are undoubtedly adopting revolu- tionary methods, though revolutionary methods dressed up in a constitutional disguise. We can only meet them by adapting our constitutional methods, so far as it is possible to do so, to the successful resistance of revolutionary methods.
One political symptom, and one only, is satisfactory in the last week. It is obvious that the more reasonable Gladstonians are getting restless under their alliance with the obstructionists, and that on several recent occasions they have refused to sup- port the Irish tactics. We are not surprised ; but the country would do well to convince them that those tactics must be for ever abandoned, if even those electors who approve the Home- rule policy are to lend them their support in future. Conceive the indignation which would be excited, and justly excited, if tactics such as Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt have sanctioned, were adopted by the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists in fighting a Bill for the enactment of Home-rule. Yet that is precisely the course for which, up to last week at least, the Gladstonians were establishing a precedent. Nothing could be more suicidal. Of course the friends of Home-rule are perfectly right in working, with all the enthusiasm they can command, to alter the opinion of the country, and to turn the next General Election in their favour. But to paralyse Parliament now, because the Ministers whom the country has placed in power are pursuing honestly a much milder policy than that which Mr. Gladstone pursued five years ago, and one not very different from that which he was desirous to pursue only two years ago, is pure faction. Whether the Unionists are wrong or right, they at least believe honestly that they are bound to restore the authority of the law in Ireland, and that they are proposing the mildest possible measure which can successfully attain that end. That eighty-five Irish Nationalist Members should resist them with all their power, was, of course, to be expected. But that the majority of the Liberal Party should sanction a resistance that far exceeds the ordinary rights and precedents of a minority, was not to be expected ; and if their course is persisted in, it will certainly produce a very disastrous effect on the electoral prospects of Mr. Gladstone's followers. In that case, it will be said of them, and said of them truly, that they mete out a very different measure to their opponents from any which their opponents meted out to them, and that they strike at the very principles of a deliberative Legislature by making the House of Commons ridiculous and its legislation utterly sterile.
Previous page
