SILENCE IN THE HOUSE.
THE Select Committee on Public Business has recommended November sessions. The recommendation was carried by a majority of only one, and will scarcely be accepted by the Commons, who are jealous of any attempt to retrench their hard-earned holidays, or by the Ministers, who are forced when Parliament is sitting to keep awake all night after labouring all day. Yet the proposal is probably the only one which would enable Parliament to deal with its ever-increasing mass of work, without placing such limitations on debate as would deprive the Lower House of its character as an educat- ing body. There is most serious danger of a recourse to this alternative. Every year, as the pressure of business becomes more severe and the apprehension of a block more acute, there rises a storm of complaints about the waste of time, the endless speeches, the length and the dreariness of the debates, till men who have something to say are half-ashamed to rise, and debate on each subject proposed is reduced to a very dry con- versation among experts. The tendency towards silence is increased by the growing dislike of the House to late debates, arising partly from the love of comfort, partly from the ever- increasing number of old members, and partly from the injuri- ous resolution of the newspapers to report nothing that may be said after the clock has struck twelve. The journalists are getting as lazy as the politicians. But stronger than any of these influences is the obvious desire of the Premier to limit, or rather to compress, the practice of debate. Mr. Gladstone seems to be of M. Thiers' opinion that an Assembly is never so dignified as when it remains silent. The Cabinet, as a Cabinet, takes no share in the debating of the day. So far as we can remember, it has not this year given a single collective opinion upon any measure, any event, or any line of policy. The Premier speaks, and the head of the department interested in the subject under discussion, and perhaps some legal official, and there.the contribution of the Cabinet towards the political education of the country ends. No one knows authoritatively what the members of the governing Committee who are sup- posed to lead opinion think of the European War, of the reorganization of the British Army, of the Westmeath Com- mittee, of any one topic of the first political importance. The Cabinet will not even reply to a formal proposal of a vote of censure on a cardinal point of policy. The Under-Secretaries are reduced to dummyhood, the Secretaries abstain religiously from assisting, or explaining, or defending each other. As for the rank and file of supporters, they are valued for their votes. It is the rarest thing for one of them to make himself con- spicuous, unless he desires also to be disagreeable, and the work of discussion is left almost avowedly to the independent members, whose function in the House is not to explain, but to criticize the measures of the Administration. When they try to do more they are regarded as bores, grudged the time they occupy, and very often shunted off by an official demand that in the interest of the public service the debate shall Close. Of course, while the statesmen are silent, the subor- dinates silenced, and the supporters sulky, debate grows dull, the speakers are half listless, half ill-informed, the arguments used are snippety and fractional, jokes take the place of witticisms, the debate is reduced first to a conversation and then to a chat, and oratory as a high political art disappears. The debates grow stupid, and the country is incessantly called on to ratify measures which the House has not taken the trouble to explain. Not one elector in a thousand understands what Mr. Cardwell proposes to do with the Army, not one in a million has made up his mind as to what he should like to see him do with it. The leadership of opinion is left to journalists, who ought to be its critics or mouthpieces, and of political education there is none. The electorate as a body has not an idea, for example, why that Westmeath proposal so shocked and alarmed politicians, missed the instruction which in old days it would have received from a great debate on the duties and responsibilities of government in a State controlled by its representatives. An immense question, the right of men living under a Monarchy to ask in a constitutional manner for a Republic, but not to agitate for it, was left to be discussed in a chat of three minutes between a Tory member for Nor- folk, who does not pretend to be a statesman, and the Premier
who did nothing but put him down. As a first consequence of all this reticence, the interest in the debates of Parliament is declining, until the penny papers, whose conductors are keenly alive to their own interest, scarcely report them at all, giving in- stead, dry, lifeless synopses, such as New York papers give of debates in Congress ; and even the Times' staff grow careless to a degree which only Members fully perceive. As a second consequence, the country is growing cowardly. It notes the reticence of Ministers on foreign polities, till it begins to imagine that they see cause for fearing that if they " ven- tured " to have an opinion of their own, Bismarck, or Thiers, or Gortschakoff would put England into his pocket and carry it away. And the third consequence is that the old difficulty of rising in the opinion of the country has been indefinitely increased. The country cannot judge of the qualificationkof men whose opinions it never hears. Members, Londoners, and journalists generally manage to judge ; but the electorate, whose will is supreme, has under the re'gime of silence no direct means of estimating the comparative powers of new men, or, for that matter, even of men with whose names it is familiar. It has not only no means of understanding why this man should be taken into subordinate office and that man left o u t in the cold, but has no reason for thinking Mr. Gladstone right in making or forbearing an appointment to an office within the. inner circle. To take a single instance within this very week, we venture to say that the average "influential elector" is better convinced that Mr. Goschen will make a good First. Lord by his single speech on the Navy Estimates, than by his. whole career in the Duchy or at the Poor Law Board.
We regard this last consequence of the reticence now practised in the House of Commons as the most impor- tant, next to the injury to the political education of the people. If Parliamentary Government is to go on successfully, the supply of men who can sway the House, and through it the country, with their tongues must be kept up. Speechmaking may be an imper- fect instrument of government, it may be most unfortunate that an orator should have a better chance of power than an administrator, it may be much more important to preserve. the traditions of office than the intellectual pedigree- of the Treasury Bench ; but of this fact we may remain assured, that Government by public meeting is not possible, unless that meeting develops a perpetual succession of mem who can guide it aright by their tongues. They cannot be developed under a system which converts the Deliberative Assembly into the Assembly for registering laws. The pre- sent practice is to keep independent members as silent as may be ; then if one of them emerges a little into notice, to give him office and bid him hold his tongue, and then, when he is " experienced " enough, to introduce him to the Cabinet, but discourage him from speaking about any department bat. his own. That scheme may breed administrators, but it does not tend to breed men able to convince the country that they are the men to govern it, or even to sway the House of Com- mons, which, supposing the race of eloquent administrators to be extinguished, would inevitably fall under the control of eloquent men incapable of administering. Free deliberative assemblies are and must be governed through their ears, and a re'gime of silent voting is no training for such government.
Previous page
