TOPICS OF THE DAY
PUBLIC FEELING ON THE CLOSURE.
PUBLIC feeling on the Closure is maturing, and is maturing in a manner very favourable to the proposal of the Government, or if possible, to some even less restricted pro- posal. Of all the unfortunate arguments ever used against it, none has ever been more unfortunate than the assertion of the Times, that a dissolution on this question would be a repetition of the same mistake which Mr. Gladstone made in 1874, when he dissolved on a financial proposal. To put the question whether or not the Income-tax should be re- pealed, directly to the constituencies, was, in our opinion, both then and now, a serious mistake, for the repeal of the Income-tax is a question of means rather than ends, and should at least have been proposed to Parliament and discussed by Parliament, before it had been proposed to the country and discussed on the hustings. But a dissolution on the failure of Ministers to carry the closure of debate by a majority, would stand in a different position in every conceivable respect. In the first place, it would not be the submission to the people of a subject not first submitted to the House of Commons, but a submission to the people of an appeal on an adverse decision by the House of Commons of a question most vitally concerning the people's interests. And, in the second place, it would be absolutely impossible to find a ques- tion touching the constituencies, as distinguished from the House of Commons, more nearly than this right of the House to end its own debates by an absolute majority, when they had gone on long enough, or too long, for the interests of the public. For what that right really means is simply this,—that each constituency shall have the chance of getting as much of the time of the House devoted to questions touching its most urgent interests, as the still more urgent pressure of the interests of other and more numerous constituencies may allow. Let those who think this matter one not affecting the constituencies just consider what has already happened. The people elected in 1880 a Parliament pledged to a series of great reforms, land-law reforms, franchise reforms, county- government reforms Bankruptcy-law reforms, and many others. Two years have elapsecl, and not one of them has yet been even touched. Ireland, whose case was not then known to be so urgent, has taken up the whole of the time of which the Government or private Members could dispose. For as Mr. Bryce pointed out., in his very powerful letter to the Pall Mall of Wednesday, private Members with large constituencies are even more completely paralysed than the Government itself. The Government can at least get a single important measure, and two or three measures of secondary importance through in each Session ; but as things are at present, the private Member is simply nowhere. And the private Member being nowhere means, of course, that his con- stituency is nowhere ; that no legislation which has been pressed upon him by the urgent wants of his constituency has the remotest chance of success, while it remains only in the hands of a private representative. We do not, indeed, approve of Mr. Bryce's proposed remedy,—at all events, without the condition of the Speaker's sanction,—namely, that any private Member ought to have the right of moving the Closure of debate,—for the following unanswerable reason :—Give that power, to any private Member, without the sanction of the Speaker, and it would at once become the most powerful in- strument of the Obstructionists. Land Leaguer after Land Leaguer would propose the premature closure of every debate which they knew to be quite unfinished, in order to waste the time of the House in dividing on the subject. That seems to m a danger which Mr. Bryce has not considered; and it appears to us to make the acquiescence of the Speaker as essential for the closure when proposed by a private Member, as, for other reasons, it would be, if proposed by the Leader of the House. But we referred to Mr. Bryce's letter not in order to point out the danger of his remedy, but the unanswerable force of his argument that the private Members and their constituencies suffer at least as much as the Government itself or the whole nation whom the Government represent, by the present gross abuse of the rights of minorities.
This the public is coming to see very quickly. And they are also coming to see that any dream more irrational than the dream that the Closure can be used by such a Government as ours to gag free debate, never entered the heads of public men. At present, the responsibility of suggesting the Closure is to be thrown, very unfortunately as we believe, on the Speaker; and the effect of that, if it is persevered in, must be to render debate under the new system not less exhaustive and exhausting, but very much more so than it was in the days when the two front. Benches were allowed to settle between them how soon debate should end. We sincerely hope that the Speaker may not be placed in this position of direct responsibility for a suggestion that, once made, may be carried, and must be made carriable, by a party majority alone. It would be infinitely better to. give him a veto only on the proposal of the Government. But even if this change were made, the notion that any Minister could cram his measures down the throats of the House of Commons without a fair and reasonable consideration from all the leading points of view under which they are regarded, is one of the most fantastic ever suggested. Mr. Gladstone is the last man in the world to attempt such tactics. If any- thing has been remarkable since he assumed power, it has been the almost inexhaustible patience with which he has treated the Obstructionists. His sympathy goes almost too much with the rights of minorities, rather than too little.
But if Mr. Gladstone himself proposed to end debate prema- turely and peremptorily, and if ha secured the consent of the Speaker to such a course, he would be deserted by large sections of his own followers, and would fall from power as suddenly as he was raised to it. And the same is' of course,. true of Sir Stafford Northcote. No imaginable leader of the, present House of Commons, or of any possible House of Commons, could tyrannise over it in this way with impunity.
The danger of the closure is not the danger of its being to stringently used, but of its being too cautiously and hesitat- ingly used. The closure by official agr cement was a far more powerful weapon than we shall ever have in the closure by a. vote.
The point which has been made that the New Rule will invite to disorder, since it only permits the Speaker to declare that it is the evident sense of the House to finish up, whereas he will have no means of judging of the evident sense of the House, except the interrupting cries of " Divide ! divide !" is not without force. But then it touches.
only the error, as we regard it, of throwing the responsibility on the Speaker. We submit that there are other and very important considerations beside the evident sense of the House which ought . to contribute to the proposal for a closure,— namely, the time at the disposal of the House, the pressure of its other business, external exigencies such as often affect Budget proposals, the dates when certain Acts expire, and so. forth. For this reason, we maintain that the Leader of the House ought to have it in his power,—unless the Speaker,. as the guardian of the liberties and rights of the House, disapproves,—of proposing to close a debate on grounds of public exigency of any kind ; and in making this pro- posal, he would, of course, carefully take into account and state to the House those other reasons for coming to a vote which would be quite independent of any universal desire in 'the House itself to have done with the debate. Put the power of making the proposal into the hands of the Leader of the House, and you get rid at once of any fresh motive for- disorder, as a means of expressing the impatience of the House with the debate. The general impatience of the House with an exhausted debate is, of course, one reason, and a very important reason, for dividing, but by no means the only reason. It might very well happen that the House was by no means weary of a debate, which had yet gone on as long as the very limited time at the disposal of Parliament for that special subject could allow. And when this was the case, it seems to us perfectly clear that the Leader of the House ought to have the power of proposing a closure, even without evi- dence of an impatience which had not yet sprung up. The time to be given to special debate must always be more or less a ques- tion of administrative responsibility, and therefore we contend that the right of proposing to close should be left in the hands of the head of the Administration. There would be few discretion- ary powers confided to him more important, and none by which his administrative capacity could be more securely judged. But the last thing we have any right to expect is that it would be used in a sense injurious to the dignity, or oppressive to the liberties, of the House of Commons.
On one other point public feeling seems to us to be maturing. It will hardly leave the power of arbitrarily closing a debate in the hands of the Government at the fag-end of a Session, unless the House be a tolerably fall one. Mr. Dillwyn's limit of last Session may have been too strong ; but no House of loss than 150 Members should be competent to vote the closure at all.
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