MR. HARRTSON'S ADVICE TO MR. GLADSTONE. T HE advice which Mr.
Frederic Harrison has offered to the Gladstonian Party in power, in the form of a paper in the Fortnightly Review, headed, " How to Drive Home-rule Home," clears up a puzzle which has always perplexed us about his intellectual career. He is one of the most competent preachers alive, with great zeal, endless perseverance, and rare felicity of exposition ; but though le has preached for thirty years, he has hardly made a convert. His disciples are fewer than his years. The practical ex- planation is apparent in this paper. Mr. Harrison does not understand or sympathise with the character of his audience. Addressed to French Republicans or Spanish Revolutionaries, his advice might be a weighty factor in the situation, but addressed to Englishmen, it will fall as dead as Danton's toujours de l'audace would have done. Mr. Harrison's postulate, a perfectly sound one, is that the Election did not give Mr. Gladstone the necessary force with which to carry Home-rule through Parliament in the usual constitutional way. " The Duke of Devonshire," he says—and we hope his readers will note the admission—" Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Chamberlain are right. It [the passing of the Bill] cannot be done in the old style with the present House of Commons, with a majority of only 40, and that com- posed of different groups, with aims of their own." This statement is repeated in other words two or three times, and then Mr. Harrison propounds his remedy. He would rush the Bill through the Commons with revolutionary speed. " Give fair time to consider the new Bill : six weeks ought to suffice. Give one full debate on principle —say four nights of six or seven hours each. Divide : and suffer no second debate on principle. In Committee allow two or three weeks as a maximum, using the Closure every hour ; and if amendments multiply obstructively, closure them. It was done for Coercion, and it should be done for Home-rule—fas est et ab hoste doceri. Only it should be done far more drasticallyfairly, honestly, but rigidly. Let it be understood that a fixed time—say three weeks as a maximum—be allowed for Committee. It will be necessary to fix a time for speeches in Com- mittee. One debate, limited to two nights, for Bill as finally drafted. In this way it would pass before Easter. The conditions of despatch are these : rigid time limits for debates and separate speeches ; constant, hourly resort to closure ; no compromise or mangling of the original scheme, but the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill." With a programme like this, says Mr. Harrison, the majority would keep together, would always be present, would always be full of enthusiasm, and would sweep the Bill through all stages before Easter. That is the way, he says, in which business is done in France, and may be done here,—whenever, we would suggest, the House of Commons is full of Frenchmen, who, in granting a principle, grant all consequences logically deducible from it. The Members of the House, besides being themselves Englishmen, are amenable to constituents who are more characteristically English even than they, who accept principles—the principle of Monarchy, for example—and despise the logical deductions from them, who think its details the very essence of any measure, and who are so jealous of limiting deliberation, that even when they were forced to establish a Closure, or see the freedom of Parlia- ment disappear, they burdened the Speaker and the Chairman of Committees with the special duty of pre- venting abuse of the new power. In the case of Home- rule, every detail will involve a constitutional change of the first magnitude ;—for example, the retention of Irish Members involves the whole future of party govern- ment, while the clauses about taxation involve the right of Parliament to place war-taxes on Irishmen—and thoughtful Gladstonians, including the Premier, would be as reluctant to " rush" such far-reaching changes through the House as the Gladstonians themselves. The Unionists will not obstruct, because they consider obstruc- tion unconstitutional ; but they will insist upon full debate ; will appeal against violence, such as Mr. Harrison suggests, to the fairness of the English people ; and will, if their appeal is not heard, and their mouths are forcibly closed, compel a new reference to the electors, not upon Home- rule, but upon the continuance of government by delibera- tion. There will, however, be no need for such extreme resolves. The Speaker can be trusted ; the Chairman of Committees can be trusted ; above all, Mr. Glad- stone and his Cabinet can be trusted. They are, most of them, old Parliamentary hands ; they know quite well what Englishmen are like ; they want to succeed by con- stitutional, and not revolutionary ways ; and they are almost as likely to turn Parliament into a silent Convention, ruled only by counting heads, as they are to decree that juries shall in future decide on their consciences alone, and without the enfeebling delays caused by evidence and cross- examination. Mr. Harrison forgets altogether who the opponents of the Bill are. If, as he says, the Bill can only be carried by silencing half the statesmen of the country, and nearly half its representatives, then, he may rely on it, his prediction will come true, and the Home- rule Bill will not be carried in the present Parliament. The seven years' delay which Lord John Russell once declared was necessary to the passing of any great measure, is not imposed by the forms of the House, as Mr. Harrison imagines, but by the English character, to suit which those forms grew up, and which, for at least two centuries, has protected them. It would be as practical to ask for a new electoral law, under which only Gladstonians should vote, and then expect Gladstonians not to split, as to ask that the most revolutionary Bill of our time should be rushed through Parliament without the fullest deliberation.
We say " Parliament" intentionally, and not the House of Commons, for Mr. Harrison intends to rush the Bill through both Houses. He does not, indeed, propose to silence the -Upper House, for that House talks only too little ; but he does intend, in some way or other, to deprive it of its freedom. The question how to do this a little bewilders him, it is true, and he hesitates between bleeding the Lords to death by admitting them to sit, if elected, in the House of Commons, or swamping them by the creation of five hundred Peers, chosen with a special contempt df their social feelings ; but it is to be done somehow, and if the Queen refuses to do it, the Commons must coerce her Majesty by refusing the supplies—that is, by disbanding the Army and Navy, repudiating the Debt, and leaving the country without any machinery for the ordinary administration of the laws. We really are not exag- gerating, for here are the words :—" We have now come to a turning-point in our Constitutional history, at which the House of Peers must do exactly as the Crown has done— surrender its veto in practice—or else suffer what the Crown has suffered, and risk a revolution. The Commons also have their technical rights. It is true that the Peers have a technical right to reject any and all Bills. But the Ministry in power also has a technical right to advise the Crown to create Peers, and it could elevate five hundred sweeps to the Peerage, by the assent of the Crown. And if the Crown did not assent, the House of Commons has a technical right to refuse supplies and arrest the machinery of Government. It is idle to talk about technical rights. There are technical rights on both sides. And the exercise of these rights on the popular side seems neither absurd nor impossible to men who have got rid of the glamour of the theatric ' part of our Constitution, and who see nothing but absurdity in this nation being under the heel of Lord Salisbury and his friends. The long and the short of it is that the Peers must give way—or go. And, of course, give way they will." And all these things—the stoppage of debate, the ending of the Peers, the coercion of the Crown by a disruption of the whole machinery of the State—are to be done for what P To pass a Bill giving Home-rule for Ireland ? Not a bit of it. To pass that Bill with such speed that a heap of other Bills for which the whole nation is certainly not crying—or the English would not have rejected them by a majority of 70—may be introduced, and some of them passed next Session, and so to avoid the possible disrup- tion of the Ministry, because of the non-homogeneous character of its supporters ! Was ever such counsel put on paper by a man who professed to be an English poli- tician My advice is sensible,' avers Mr. Harrison, because that is the way business is managed in the London County Council, of which he is a member. He might just as well say,= It is sensible ; because that is the way business is managed in the Bank of England, or Messrs. Rothschild's firm, or the General Post-Office.' The London County Council is an administrative body, does most of its business by secret, or rather unobserved Committees, and is as strictly responsible to the law if it decides wrongly, as any association in the City or the Strand. We think its way of doing business an extraordinarily bad one, which will have to be superseded by statute ; but granting it to be perfection, how is it to be a model for a Parliament which legislates but does not execute ; which is unlimited in power by any law ; which is irresponsible, and which exists because it represents electors who have, therefore, a right to know the main reasons for its decisions ? The attempted analogy is absurd, as absurd as Mr. Harrison's description of the forces which oppose him as, "the Irish Protestant Brigade, parsons, Pigottists, soldiers, and sailors, to say nothing of Dicey Brothers, Limited, duo fulmina belli." To which of those categories does he suppose the population of the Midlands to belong ?
We may be asked why we make so much of such an article by such a politician ? Because Mr. Harrison em- bodies in intelligible words a, quantity of the vague expec- tation and indefinite fury which is now seething in political society, and which expects Mr. Gladstone, of all human beings—Mr. Gladstone, who has been four times responsible for the Empire—to initiate at eighty-three a revolutionary programme. Mr. Harrison expresses, and expresses well, those counsels of impatience which pervade the Extreme Left of the present majority ; men who are doubtless most useful in electioneering, because of their zeal, but who not only expect Utopia, but expect it in six weeks, or, like Mr. Keir Hardie, in an Autumn Session. These gen- tlemen think and say, in a less perspicuous method, exactly what Mr. Harrison does in his clear-cutting style, and his utterance is, therefore, worthy at least of passing comment. The Impatients have been omitted from the Cabinet, but they are a factor in this Parliament., more especially as they are very angry, and—when Mr. Gladstone begins to move on the old lines and through the old methods which made him what he is—will be angrier still. Fortunately, the Impatients represent in England, as Mr. Gladstone has evidently perceived, only the passing mood of a not very powerful though exceedingly visible section of the community. The real rulers of the country will regard Mr. Harrison's advice at best with a tolerant smile, and at worst with the irascible commentary that, if he wants Home-rule sincerely, he need not have admitted quite so much.
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