PROGRESS IN THE BETTER CONDUCT OF BUSIN ESS.
TEE new spirit which animates the Commons in the conduct of business works well—so well as to incite the hope of effecting further improvement. " A Parliamentary Reporter" has usefully drawn attention to the loss of time occasioned by the present mode of mustering Members in the lobby and writing down their names. The Members, it seems, are as intractable as pigs—as difficult to get into the lobby as sheep into the slaughterhouse; and "the tellers" are to this day far slower at the work than the shepherd who
"tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale."
The plan of ascertaining the names in divisions was accounted a great improvement ; but if the process can be shortened, so much the better. According to the Reporter, it is now performed so tediously, that on an average each division consumes about half an hour. On a night of ordinary despatch in the furtherance of business, the aggregate loss of time by divisions will be one hour ; sometimes it may amount to several hours. The Par- liamentary Reporter suggests a plan of remedying this by a turn- table and the delivery of a ticket from each Member in passing, like that directed for checking the labourers in our dockyards : a mode which might serve as well as any other, but at all events some plan for abridging the delay that lurks under the brief phrase " the House then divided " ought to be devised. At present, the same Members that waste the public time by the most prolix speeches, also multiply divisions on the most trivial points, or throw away the time when the decision is foreknown. Look at Monday night, which ended at two o'clock " tomorrow " : Members might have gone home to recruit their faculties in recreation or sleep, say at eleven o'clock, but for the six divisions. In three of them, the decision must have been as distinctly foreknown as that of Mr. John O'Connell's annual Repeal motion. Mr. John O'Connell divided the House on the question "that the Speaker do now leave the chair," but could not lead into the lobby more than 14 Members against 84 : now it must have been as plain as the dial of the clock that his proposition would be negatived, without a pure waste of time in division. In the next division, Mr. Anstey's pro- posal to omit certain words was negatived by 79 to 12; Mr. John O'Connell's idle and supererogatory clause sanctioning public meetings to petition was rejected by 105 to 11. We do not for- get that useful purposes may be served by divisions in which the merely numerical proportion of strength is foreknown ; because the display of influential names, or of any names at all, may give strength to a proposition ; a nucleus may be formed for an in- creasing force ; or waverers may be coerced by the compulsion of public opinion thus brought to bear. But no useful purpose could be attained by those divisions of Monday night. It was hopeless loss of time, productive of no result, but the vain display of in- dividual Members, or the gratifying of a malicious love of obstruc- tion. A firm check should be put upon this silly waste of time. The plan of condensation, both in speaking and reporting, de- cidedly gains ground. The Times on Monday published a useful tabular view of the time consumed by different speakers in the debate on the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act on Friday. By this table we perceive that Sir George Grey, who propounded the arguments in favour of the bill, spoke for 45 minutes ; but Mr. John O'Connell must, forsooth, have 100 minutes : now which of these two speakers contributed the most matter ? Mr. Grattan required 53 minutes, Lord John Russell only 24. Again we note in the Leading Journal a vigorous elibrt at condensing : we find the reporter giving in half a dozen lines the substance or drift of what Members are saying, when the substance or drift and not the manner of the speech is the thing to be known. A useful auxiliary to this condensation in respect of length would be an effective check on the habit which Sir Robert Peel pointed out and Mr. Cobden has so well reproved by example, of repeating arguments and even statements of fact. In some parts of the Continent, critical audiences have a custom of reproving the musical plagiarist who repeats the phrases of another com- poser, by crying, when Bellini for instance is the offender,
Bravo, Piccini " or when Rossini was copying, " Bravo, Paesiello 1 " and Members might well add some such significant exclamations to the less intelligent noises in whose variety they so delight : the speaker of almost any party, especially any Irish Member, might be warned of this sin by applauding him in the name of the first speaker on his side for the evening. And the press might help, by steadfastly omitting every argument so needlessly repeated. That could not very well be done, indeed, without some arrangement in the gallery for providing a super- vision of the reporting, by a person who should sit there for the whole evening : each journal would need a captain of its own band of reporters to sit throughout, and direct when to ply the pen and when to suspend it : but such an arrangement, we pre- sume, might be neither impracticable nor unprofitable, since it would immensely conduce to economy and efficiency of labour.
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