THE SCENE IN ST. PANCRAS.
WE do not like winning causes by arguments we know to be false, and shall not, therefore, try to make capital out of the scene which on Monday diversified the proceed- ings of the St. Pancras Board of Guardians. Local Self- Government does not work well in London, but its demerits are not made more manifest by a scene such as that reported by the Daily Hews, which was no more the result of self- government than street rows are the result of household suffrage. It is no principle of self-government that the representatives of the taxpayers shall be liable to insult from a howling mob, that freedom of debate shall be destroyed by threats, that one representative shall insult another without reprimand or expulsion. These are gross breaches of self- governing practice, not results naturally flowing from it, and they no more tend to show its worthlessness than the riot at Mr. Murray's trial tends to show the worthlessness of police- courts. The real shame of the scene of Monday does not attach either to the mob or to Messrs. Watkins and North, but to the majority of the Guardians and their Chairman, who did not instantly expel the mob, by force of police batons, and give Messrs. North and Watkins the option of maintaining order or being expelled the sitting. The Guardians of St. Pancras are a legally constituted body, sitting in a room in which they had a right to sit, and had, therefore, a distinctly legal right to call on the police, or, if necessary, on soldiers, to preserve their deliberations from mob interruption—as much right as the House of Commons has—and in not exercising it they showed a want of firmness and self-respect for which self- government is certainly not responsible. The want was the more reprehensible, because they were not only aware of their powers, but have repeatedly exercised them as against reporters, whose legal right to be present is precisely that of any other orderly citizen. The Chairman was mainly in the wrong. It is not the business of the Chairman of a legal assembly, con- vened for deliberations ordered by statute, to sit patient and placid under illegal outrage, but to terminate such outrage by an appeal to force, or, if force is not at hand, to declare that deliberation is not free, and to adjourn. Mr. North and Mr. Watkins had some sort of legal right to talk, even if they talked outrageously ; but men who were not guardians had none, and should have been turned out sum- marily. There were a dozen at least of magistrates present, with ample authority to prevent a violent scene of that kind ; and they should not have endured it, as they apparently did, like martyrs. It is the right of every legally constituted body in the kingdom to maintain order during the transaction of business, and to allow it to be disturbed is not self-govern- ment, but an imbecile surrender of its first and most neces- sary prerogative. It is not the principle of self-government, but the principle of self-respect, which has failed in St. Pancras, as it is failing everywhere in England, under the weakening influence of that flabby Liberalism which holds that a despot or an aristocrat has a right to use force, but a representative of the people has none. The end of that kind of failure is bloodshed, for nothing but bloodshed ever regains respect for an authority which has failed under crucial circum- stances to maintain its legal dignity.
The Press is hardly less to blame than the Guardians in this affair. The riotous guardians deserved snubbing for being riotous, for impeding debate, and for appealing to a mob who were not guardians ; but the snubbing they actually get is for errors of pronunciation, every one of which, as far we can perceive, deserves to be classed as a provincialism rather than a failure in grammar. A guardian who insults his adversary at a meeting of guardians, whether by calling him a baboon or not, is a bad guardian ; but he is not necessarily bad because he drops his k's, or pronounces overawe " overawrer," any more than because he pronounces a robbery a " wobbery," as half the Peers used to do. It would be better, perhaps, if every guardian were an educated man,—though the body would be less representative,—but there is no grammatical qualification imposed by law ; and-to allow electors to elect, and prohibit them from electing the men they choose, is an absurdity. So, we begin to think, is the appointment of ex-officio guardians. The system was devised to secure the richer ratepayers a strong representation, but its result has been to deter all men of actual or potential magisterial rank from entering the Boards by election, thus greatly limiting the poor ratepayers' choice, while the rich are represented in an indirect and there- fore feeble style. The elected members always detest the nominated members, and whenever it comes to a contest beat them, the justices being, in fact, as Englishmen, conscious of weak constitutional ground for their own action. Even the Peers feel the want of electors behind them, and the Justices have neither their historic position nor their separate House. At all events, a struggle between them and the Guardians is no proof of the mischiefs of self-government, but of a par- ticular evil arising from an attempt to make self-government a sham.
The root of bitterness in onr parochial organization is not the electoral power, but its application to a purpose for which it is necessarily unfitted, the direct choice of the executive. The Guardians do not merely deliberate and make rules, they give orders, and contracts, and places, are, in fact, not so much a deliberative or even a controlling body as a Cabinet. Tho electors ought not upon English principles—which, it must be remembered, are the unconscious expression of our whole history—to elect guardians, but to elect the Council which shall appoint guardians, and the larger, more important, and more responsible that council is, the better. The best would be the common Parliament for London which we recom- mended only a fortnight ago. The councillors, elected by the people, would appoint, among other members in the executive, a chief Guardian, who would appoint either a Committee of three, or, as we should prefer, a Guardian of St. Pancras, who would wield all the powers of the present Board, and who would be a representative of the ratepayers after the English fashion,—a fashion which, whatever its demerits, has, at all events, worked so well that for a century no Minister of State has been so much as suspected of making money by his office, a statement which cannot, for an equal period, be made of the Ministry in any other country in the world. He would bear to St. Pancras the relation which Mr. Goschen bears to England, and would, in our judgment, be a better expression of the true theory of self-government, and even of local self-government, than any board which an isolated parish is at all likely to elect. Localism has its uses, but they tend to disappear, and when localisms and the subdivision of power have been pushed to such an extreme that the popular representatives have neither position, responsibility, nor traditions, incompetent representatives are elected, men unable even to keep a mob from invading their hall of business ; and self-government is necessarily, though unjustly, discredited. No mob will ever howl for five minutes at a Council representing all London, even if the Council, like the old Paris municipality, has to protect itself with bayonets.
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