THIN-SKINNED DEMOCRACY. T HE debate on the payment of Members last
Friday week (March 22nd) brought out the thin-skinned side of democracy,—indeed, what we might even call, if it were not unfair to women, its womanish side. It was admitted on all bands that at present the great majority of English representatives do not want to be paid, will not be the better for being paid, and would probably only give away to their constituents the salaries which the State paid them, and so give them a very poor and selfish motive for electing them again. Nay, they would never have had the chance of being paid, but for the unmanly dislike of those who do need a salary to ask for anything which their richer colleagues do not get. Well, we say emphatically that that dislike of poor men to state frankly that they could not afford to give their time to politics without a salary, only because there happen to be many other very efficient men who can afford it, and would afford it, unless they themselves objected to the State's being spared the expense at the cost of their petty pride, is a poor and utterly unpatriotic feeling, and springs from the same sort of weakness as that which makes men and women ruin themselves in expenses they cannot afford, just because they cannot bear to be outshone by those who can afford these expenses. There is no real difference between the motive which makes Mr. Allen insist that Baron Rothschild shall have £350 a year at the cost of the State, which is to him a drop in the ocean that be would never miss, only because Mr. Burns or Mr. Keir Hardie need it and must have it if they are to sit in the House of Commons at all, and the motive which makes a woman who cannot afford a silk gown put herself to the expense of one, only because she will not be outdone by a comrade who can afford herself as many as she happens to fancy. In the one case it is true that the State is charged with the needless garment at the tax- payer's cost, and in the other case the woman makes her husband go into debt to buy one ; but the motive is the same petty and contemptible aversion to confess openly that what one person does not need, another does. Yet this is called democratic feeling, and is really one of the vulgarest forms of false shame. It was admitted, in the course of the debate, that the middle classes and the pro- fessional classes do not indulge in this poor privilege of gratifying their false shame. The Minister who has served the State, and who needs a pension to enable him to serve it in Opposition when he has lost his official salary, has to claim it formally, on the ground of poverty, and does so claim it. But because (say) as many as a possible fifty out of six hundred and seventy representatives need a salary to enable them to sit in the Commons,—there has never been anything like that number yet, and possibly enough never may be,—the other six hundred and twenty are to be paid salaries which they do not need, and will probably waste, or worse than waste, on the "nursing" of their constituencies, only that Mr. Keir Hardie or Mr. Burns may be able to boast that they are on a perfect equality with those Members who could, if they chose, buy them all up and not sacrifice a single luxury for the pleasure of doing so. We call that a very contemptible, as well as a very unpatriotic sort of jealousy. The overburdened taxpayer is to be asked to pay what, instead of benefiting the community, positively injures it, —for every addition to the funds already spent on " nursing " constituencies, is a positive evil,—only that a poor politician may be spared the very wholesome discomfort of acknowledging that he is poor, and that he stands in need of that of which the larger number of his colleagues do not stand in any need. If that be democratic feeling, it is a very unmanly kind of democratic feeling, of which the middle and professional classes are quite rightly ashamed.
There was a pretence amongst the advocates of the practice of paying all Members, whether they need it or not, of finding a difficulty in defining adequately a professional politician, but it was all pretence. There is no difficulty in the matter at all. A professional politician is one who becomes a politician not for love of politics, not because, like Mr. Burns and Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Broadhurst and Mr. Burt, he really wants to remove in- justice and to serve the State, but because he wants the salary attached to the work, and can find no better means of earning his bread and supporting his family than by obtaining that salary. Now the true question on which the debate of March 22nd turned, and the only real question is, "Do we want to multiply need- lessly these professional politicians or not ? " We main- tain that we do not ; that we could not render the State a worse disservice than by needlessly multiplying them. No doubt if we pay any of our Members,—even those who need it, and are not ashamed to say that they need it.,—we sh,all multiply this very undesirable class, but we need not multiply it needlessly. We shall get something for our money. We shall certainly have not a few Micawbers going in for politics, who, if there were no salaries to be gained by politics, would not go in for politics ; and that, so far as it goes, will be a real evil. But then it will not be a purely uncompensated evil. We shall get a good number of valuable representatives who really speak the thoughts of their class as no others could speak them, and who not unfrequently save us from the blunders into which the philanthropists, who do not know the real ways and habits of mind of the working men, would otherwise lead us. Mr. Burt has saved us from many such blunders. Even Mr. Keir Hardie has taught Parliament much, even if it often is only what to avoid. But it is one thing to open a career to a few professional politicians who are not politicians by temper and taste, only because it seems to them the easiest way of earning their living, and quite another thing to open it to a whole swarm of those who, finding that they will cost the State no more than the rich or well-to-do candidates cost it, will take their chance with them and hope to beat them in the political race by a profusion of fair promises and alluring schemes. So long as we pay only those who need it, and acknowledge that they need it, it will still be an advantage to a candidate that he is blown not to need it, and we shall still have a great majority of disinterested Members. But if we pay all indiscriminately, we may be sure that amongst them there will always be growing, and growing fast, the class of purely professional Members, who take to politics as other men take to engineering or the Bar, not because they are politicians by genius and choice, but because they find they can make more by their wits as politicians than they can in any profession in which an elaborate technical education is essential to success. Most professions are barred by the number of technical accomplishments which must be mastered before they can be taken up with even moderate hope of earning a living. Professional politics are not so barred. Even now we have not a few Members who make their membership of Parliament pay them well as directors of public companies, and v e all know how much the public has suffered by that class of Members. But do we want gratuitously and of malice prepense to multiply these evils ? We could not possibly do the State a worse injury. And yet that is precisely what we shall do if we dehberately abolish the distinction between politicians who may at least be presumed to be disinterested, and politicians who live by being politicians and would not be able to earn their living if they were not politicians. Whatever we do, let us avoid the amazing folly of offering prizes to the professional politician only because a certain number of very able and worthy men need salaries if they are to give their lives to politics at all, and are guilty of the weakness of not choosing to claim for themselves what they need, unless a host of others who do not need it and ought not to have it, are out of delicacy to their feelings to ask and receive it also. As was pointed out in the debate, that really means abolishing disinterested public men altogether. It means paying Parish Councillors, District Councillors, Magis- trates, trustees, and a whole host of men who now do far better service from the mere sense of duty than they would then do for pay. Surely we are not going to embark on such an expensive and demoralising crusade as that.
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