TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE CLOSURE.
MR.. FREDERIC HARRISON is quite right that " Cloture " is not English ; and yet what we want in the House of Commons is something exceedingly English,—a simple exer- cise of common-sense. And why not call the power which we ask for the House of Commons by a very good English word, the power of Closure,—which Shakespeare, or, at any rate, the author of Titus A nclronicus, uses in the precise sense needed, in the sentence," We'll make a mutual closure of our house"? —a suggestion which we recommend to the attention of all Members of the Commons who desire to put an end to the extravagant waste of time and resources of which the House of Commons has recently, by connivance at least, been guilty. And really, this question of the right of Closure of talk, for the sake of action, is the key of every other political question of the day. Lord Derby, in his otherwise admirable speech at Liverpool on Wednesday, made, we think, a very unfor- tunate concession to the opponents of the true policy, when he admitted that the right of Closure should only be exercised by a majority of three-fourths, or even a majority numbering three-fourths of the whole House. Such a rule would be next to useless. What is wanted is not a rare and very occasional weapon against a wilfully obstructive minority, but a new power of carefully ordering and administering the time at the disposal of the House, so as to get through its enormous amount of strictly necessary business. A careful administrator will always adjust his business to the time which he has at his disposal for getting through it. He will not undertake engagements which he knows perfectly well that he cannot perform, and he will not undertake at all engagements for the fulfilment of which he can give no real security, be- cause it depends solely on the arbitrary caprices of others how far they may choose to impede his operations. Now, what can be a more important duty for the Government of the day than to calculate the legislative resources of the House of Commons, and not to overburden that House with work which it will never get done, and which will prevent other work from being done ? Yet, what can be more unjust and oppressive than to throw such a responsibility as that on a Govern- ment which has no real power to control in any way the expenditure of its time by the House ? The prudent and economical arrangement of the business of the House is the first duty of a good Administration. But you cannot have a duty, without also having the right to put down whatever renders the performance of that duty impossible. If the Administration of the day is responsible to Parliament for its adjustment of the business, the Administration of the day must have a very distinct control over the expenditure of the time to be given to that business. And hence the first condition of an effective administration is the power of allotting to each stage of Parliamentary and Legislative procedure a reasonable amount of time, and of insisting that that time shall not be ex- ceeded. The right of Closure is not the tyrannical power of putting down minorities which the Conservatives represent it. It is simply and solely the right of preventing unreasonable minorities from fighting against time, so as to baffle the will of the majority, and wear out the physical power of the House. If it is feared that this power will be used unjustly, so as to silence any one particular section of the House rather than another, the Speaker is the security against that. He takes care that no party which has a special right to be heard, how- ever small, shall go unheard ; and no one, so far as we know, has ever proposed that the Closure of debate should ever be final, where the Speaker thinks it only just to give a hearing to some one who has not yet been heard. But what is wanted is not any new power of allotting proportionally more time than before to the speakers of the majority, and proportionally less time than before to the speakers of the minority ; nothing would be more unfair, or more contrary to the wish of the country at large. What is demanded is not that at all, but to lodge in the hands of the Administration—in all cases in which the Speaker does not interfere to demand a hearing for some as yet insufficiently heard eection of the House,—the natural right of an Administration to lay out the work of the House in such a manner that that work can be approximately got through; and this is, we maintain, quite impossible,unless the Administration is to have the right of saying how much time shall be devoted to each stage of a Parliamentary procedure, and when the time for that stage must expire, unless the Speaker is satisfied that some distinct injustice will be done by not prolonging it. If you do not give the head of a. house of business the right of laying out the duties of his officers for the day, how can you expect that firm to be suc- cessful in business, or to be responsible for its debts ? If any Government attempted to squeeze in so muck legislation as not to give the House adequate time to discuss it in the man- ner which the House would think wise and just, that Govern- ment would soon become aware that it was losing favour with the House, and losing favour for a reason not at all likely to increase its popularity in the country. Any Government might, of course, make this mistake ; and if it did, it would very justly suffer for it. But though you may prevent the mistake, by refusing to give the Government the power to. make it, you prevent it at the cost of all administrative effi- ciency in the Government, and all real legislative strength in the House. Such an Assembly as the House of Commons needs very careful guidance indeed in the disposition of its. time, and that guidance can only rest with the Govern- ment of the day. We ask nothing from a Liberal Government which we shonld not have been equally willing to give to a Con- servative Government, or any kind of Government possible in England. Whatever the Government, this is one of the first of its duties,—to compute justly the discussional and legis- lative power of the House of Commons, to adapt its duties, in proportion to the urgency of those duties, to that power,. and to keep the performances of the House fairly on a lever with the calculation. But to demand this of an Administra- tion without giving it the right to say how much time may reasonably be allotted to each stage of its duties, is to demand from it what it has not the power to effect. It is plain enough that the most essential, the first of all reforms, is to adjust- the powers of an Administration to the duties you require of it.
It is clear that in giving the House of Commons the right- of Closure by an ordinary majority,—the Speaker's right to interfere being, of course, carefully reserved,---there need be no special pressure on the rights of minorities. The Minister- of the day might well be expected to forecast in the case of ordinary business the maximum of the time to be allowed for it, and to announce this beforehand, so that the Closure would. come on no one by surprise ; while it would be the duty of the Speaker,—and one which, so far as we know, he has never neglected,—to see that the various sections of those most opposed to the measure, down to the smallest of them,. were afforded a fair opportunity of fully stating their case. As a matter of fact, the opposing minority almost always obtains a larger proportion of the attention of the house than the proposing majority, and quite rightly too ; nor would the right of Closure make any differ- ence in this relative allotment of time for the hearing of the defence. What is wanted is a new power of squeezing the talk of the House within the limits needful to render action possible. But that power of squeezing talk applies impartially to all talk, and would leave the talk opposed to action at least no less—perhaps, indeed, more—relative room, than it had before. And if this power of squeezing down talk to propor- tions not absolutely inconsistent with the power of legislative action is to be given to any one, it seems to us clear that it can only be given to the Minister of the day, who is respon- sible to the House, who knows that he will lose influence by incurring the displeasure of the House, and who is alone suffi- ciently master of the situation to understand what must be sacrificed by too generously extending the power of talk, and what is sure to be lost by too parsimoniously restricting it. The cry about minorities and liberty is all purely misleading.. A steward must have some control of that to which his stewardship relates. And a leader of the House of Commons. who has no control of the expenditure of the time at disposal for legislation, is a steward only in name. When Lord Derby proposes to require three-fourths of the whole House to acquiesce in any vote limiting the time of discussion, he pro- poses to render the leader of the House virtually helpless in the matter. And if the leader of the House is to be helpless. in the matter, he must also be irresponsible, and there will be no one to blame for the total legislative neglect of public- business, which Mr. Chamberlain on Thursday so vividly de- scribed. The perverse refusal of the greatest Assembly in the world to submit to the only conditions by which its time could be economised and its power asserted, would be the sole cause, and the sufficient cause, of the miscarriage of public business.
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