THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE SUFFRAGE BILL.
IF it were the custom among us to print and distribute throughout the country Parliamentary speeches of special importance, we should like that tribute to be given to those made on Tuesday by the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. Both were admir- able statements of the cases for and against giving the suffrage to women, and we should wish to have equal prominence accorded to them because no great subject really gains by having only one side presented to those with whom the decision on it must in the end rest. For ourselves we hold Mr. Asquith's argument against Mr. Dickinson's Bill to be absolutely unanswerable. But nobody can take this view to any useful purpose unless he has carefully weighed Sir Edward Grey's presentation of the opposite argument. We should be glad, therefore, if every elector in the kingdom could study both speeches. At this moment probably a certain portion of the electorate is unconsciously sitting on the fence. By and by each man will have to come down on one side or the other. If he comes down intelligently, if, that is, lie has to the best of his ability weighed the reasons for and against the proposed change, we are quite willing to abide by the result. Abide by it, indeed, we must, whether we be willing or not, but it is one thing to have to accept a, change which we dislike after it has been fairly considered in all its bear- ings, and another to have to accept it when it has never been considered at all.
So far as his premises go, we can make every word that Mr. Asquith said our own. In the first place, Mr. Dickinson's Bill proposed to make the largest addition to the electorate ever made by Parliament. Every similar measure has increased the number of the electors, but it has not admitted a class of electors no member of which has ever before had the franchise. If the Reform Bill of 1832 had given a vote to every adult male it would have been an immensely smaller change than that which Mr. Dickinson's Bill would have made. The electorate would have been enormously increased, but no absolutely new element would have been introduced into it. The difference between a peer and a pedlar is as nothing by the side of the difference between a man and a woman. In the second place, Mr. Dickinson's Bill " has never been, either in principle or in detail, approved by the existing electorate of the country." There is a unique case cited by Mr. Asquith, in which a candidate got seven thousand of his constituents to sign a petition in favour of woman suffrage. That is a remarkable testi- mony to the zeal of the candidate, though we suspect that many of these signatures are evidence rather of his general popularity than of agreement with his views on this particular question. But, after all, what do these figures tell us ? That not quite one-third of the constituency were in favour of the petition. Out of twenty-three thousand electors seven thousand were willing to give votes to women. Even in this place the greater part of the Suffragists' work has still to be done. And, finally, Mr. Asquith appealed to members in every quarter of the House to say whether this particular issue had ever " determined, or even sub- stantially helped to determine," the question whether they should or should not be elected. The silence of all present gave the most significant possible answer to this question.
It is when we come to certain of the conclusions to which these premises have led Mr. Asquith that we are forced to part company with him. In spite of his conviction that any Bill to give the suffrage to women would have the initial demerits just enumerated, he was prepared, if the House of Commons thought differently, to give it his support and to try to carry it into law. Well may the Prime Minister admit that the attitude taken up by the Government " was open to legitimate criticism." He had shown earlier in his speech that there is not a fraction of evidence that the country wants such a measure. " Even if I were in favour of its principle," he said, "these general considerations would at least give me pause before I assented to its second reading." Why then did not they " give him pause " before he was ready to accept an amendment which wholly changed the character of his own Franchise Bill ? Only, it seems, out of regard to " the special and indeed unique circumstances of this particular political issue." It " cuts athwart ordinary lines of party division on both sides of the House." That the Prime Minister's own side is divided on the question would not apparently have troubled him. He would have given those of his colleagues who are in favour of Woman Suffrage the choice between treating the question as open or retiring from the Cabinet. It was only when he saw that the Opposition was in a similar plight that he deter- mined to accept the will of the Commons whatever it might be, and if necessary to become the instrument to carry into law an amendment which was wholly distaste- ful to him. To our minds this explanation only makes the Prime Minister's action more puzzling. It might have been expected that if the choice lay between himself helping to pass a mischievous law, which the existing electorate had given no sign of approving " either in principle or in detail," and leaving this unpleasing task to the Opposition, he would unhesitatingly have pre- ferred the latter course. This decision would not only have relieved him from the necessity of assenting to a change which he thinks mischievous ; it would have brought the question at once before the country. A break-up of the Cabinet would necessarily have precipitated a general elec- tion, and if that break-up had been caused by differences of opinion about Woman Suffrage, the electors would have been forced to give to this question some share of their atten- tion. As a matter of fact, however, there is no reason to suppose that if Mr. Asquith had refused to proceed with a Bill which had been amended in disregard of his deliberate judgment, there would have been any crisis such as we have been imagining. Great questions have been left open in Cabinets before now. Each Minister has been left free to vote in them as he thinks fit, without any obligation being laid on the head of the Government to adopt his colleagues' view rather than his own.
There is no need on the present occasion to challenge Mr. Asquith's opinion that this House of Commons is " perfectly competent to determine this question as it thinks fit." What may very properly be challenged is the right of the Prime Minister to allow the House of Commons to take a step which he thinks exceedingly mischievous when he has full power to prevent it. He said on Tuesday that if the House is to preserve its authority and to retain the confidence of the country, it must not " take a step unprecedented in its extent without a full and assured conviction that it has behind it the deliberate and considered sanction of the community." That, we whole-heartedly agree, is the moral restraint under which Parliament ought to exercise its legal omnipotence, and if it grows impatient under this restraint it is the Prime Minister's duty to recall it to the right path by an appeal to the community which it has disregarded. In the present instance, indeed, there would probably have been no need to go this length. An announcement that the Government could not incorporate into their own measure an amend- ment upon which the Cabinet was divided would have come as a relief to many members who had given over- hasty pledges to over-eager constituents. Let us suppose, however, that the worst hadhappened—that the Cabinet had proved irreconcilable, or that the Ministerialists had turned against the Minister. Mr. Asquith had a remedy ready to his hand. A dissolution might—this much we will freely admit—have proved useless for this particular purpose. What would have been wanted would have been the judgment of the electorate on Woman Suffrage ; what might have been obtained was the judg- ment of the electorate on the Insurance Act. That would have defeated the purpose of the appeal to the country, and might also have proved very inconvenient to the Government. But this was not the only way out of the difficulty. This particular question was adapted to a very unusual extent to another kind of treatment. Even those who are most opposed to the Referendum as a part of our ordinary constitutional machinery may admit that it was very specially suited to this particular case. Both Front Benches were equally divided upon it ; consequently the resignation of Ministers would have brought matters no nearer a settlement. A Unionist Prime Minister would have been in just the same straits as his Liberal predecessor. His sole advantage would have been that he might have beon more willing to take the opinion of the electorate by way of Referendum. But why need a Liberal Prime Minister have despised an experiment which seemed to grow so naturally out of the special conditions with which he had to deal P If "the special, and indeed unique, circumstances of this particular political issue" formed the only justification for the position the Liberal Government took up, they would equally have supplied a justification for passing a short Act creating the machinery by which every elector would have been asked to say " Endorse " or " Veto " a Bill sent to a Poll of the People by agreement—to answer, that is, the question, " Do you wish the measure entitled, Parliamentary Votes for Women Act,' to become law P" For the moment, however, we may fairly say, " All's well that ends well." Unfortunately it is only for the moment, and we can only hope that by the time the 2uestion next comes to the front members will have become more chary of making promises in the mistaken belief that they will never be called on to perform them.
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