THE RE-ELECTION OF MINISTERS.
IN his speech at Preston on Monday night Mr. Hanburv aired a grievance which he shares with most tnemb.es of her Majesty's Government, and which, we think, is not without its significance for the constituents themselves. He deplored the antiquated law which compelled a newly
appointed Minister to seek re-election. He bad always been opposed to shame, he said, and he would not be aorta to see this one done away with. We have always
disliked any tinkering of the framework of the Constitu- tion unless some serious purpose is to be served. 'Small changes, even when they reform some trivial abase, are
not desireble, and the spirit which engenders them is often a false one. But an abuse, trivial enough in all conseience, may be so unworthy of the dignity of govern- ment and vexatious in itself that we may press for a remedy without exposing ourselves to the charge
of impatience and abstract idealism. The statute-book contains, or has contained, many curious provisions, but most of them which it was found impossible to regard in practice were quietly neglected for years before they were formally repealed. For example, an Act of 1372 pro- vided that no lawyer might sit as a Member of Parlia- ment, and though its provisions bad been disregarded for centuries, the formal repeal did not come till 1871. But for some reason the law passed in the reign of Anne pro. vidirig that every Member of the House of Commons who aecepted office under the Crown should be compelled to Vacate his seat and seek re-election, still imposes its unwelcome duties upon each new Cabinet Minister. It is not a conspicuous monument of legislative wisdom. It is the compromise arrived at after repeated attempts to sever the Executive wholly from the Legislature. A clause in the Act of Settlement, which never came into effect. would have excluded all office-holders finally from the Lower House. Subsequent Place Bills on the same lines were rejected or vetoed, and then the present compromise was accepted, which sends all the more prominent. Ministers post-haste to the country to get a perfectly unnecessary vote of confidence. At the time of its incep- tion it had a possible value as a safeguard. It kept the more notorious placemen —the gentlemen who drew large salaries for work which they did not do—out of the House, it. provided some check upon the Royal authority, and it may have helped to impress upon the irresponsible Minister the fact that he wee in some sense a popular choice. But nowadays these lessons have been so well learned that they are all hut meaningless from their familiarity We no longer fight against a Bedeharober influence , jobbery has gone out of fashion, and most of the richest jobs out of existence; and the daily Press does Dot suffer the Minister to forget the country which appointed him. The Lower House, great as its faults are, is robustly independent and aggressively critical. The former times have passed utterly away, and we are left with this one wearisome and needless relic.
The existence of the law is indeed a centre of paradoxes. The most important offices, whose holders are peculiarly in the public eye and exposed to the breath of popular criticism, must bow to it, hut the minor offices, the link between the permanent officials and the Parliamentary heads of Departments, escape scot-free. As Mr. Hanbury pointed out, when he was Secretary to the Treasury he bad not to journey to his constituents at Preston ; and why the Board of Agriculture should be regarded with more suspicion than a Treasury Secretaryship does not appear. It is no check on salaries, and indeed the salaries of Cabinet Ministers, as compared with those of successful men in other professions, are BO moderate that safeguards are superfluous. It is, in fact, founded upon a series of legal fictions, none of which can be construed into a serious meaning. One is that the House of Commons is suspicious of Ministers and chary of allowing them to enter its gates, when the perennial cry is that every Minister if possible should sit in the Lower House to answer for the misdeeds of his Depart- ment. Another is that the constituencies do not like to be represented by Ministers, which is a doctrine no con- stituency in the British Islands would subscribe to, though it may have a grudge against a particular specimen. Another is that a man's tenets change in some vital way, when from being a mere supporter of a Government he becomes a member, and that, therefore, a second act of approval is necessary on the part of his constituents. Office may indeed work a change in views, but not assuredly the mere acceptance of office without its expe- rience. The custom is simply an idle ,formality when there is no opposition, and an expensive nuisance when the seat is contested ; and the sweeping away of the
anachronism would be a useful act of administrative reform.
The arguments against the continuance of the custom are numerous, and it would be ridiculous to parade them against so trifling a, business ; but a few will suffice to show its discomfort. It may operate, as Mr. Ha.nbury pointed out, to limit the choice of the Prime Minister. When a Government is returned with a narrow majority and every vote is of value, the Prime Minister might seriously hesitate to give office to a man whose seat was unsafe, assuming that a substitute of nearly equal ability could be procured. For though another seat might be found for the rejected Minister, there would always be a seat lost to his party. Since it is our duty, as Lord Rosebery has told us, to procure talent from every possible source, it seems illogical thus to am- barrage the choice. Let it be granted that a sense of chivalry frequently keeps an Opposition from contesting a seat which may have been gallantly won a few months before ; yet this does not always happen, and in con- stituencies where party feeling runs high it will rarely happen. Since the election the other party may have learned a lesson and profited by a recognition of mistaken tactics, while at the it Ale time there comes to the winning side the inevitable inertia after a hardly-won success. The consequence may easily be that the by-election is not fought upon the questions at issue in the General Election, but upon purely local and accidental matters,— the kudos of the Minister-elect, on the one side ; the slack, netts of his supporters, the improved position of the Opposition, and the slight popular reaction, on the other. Such eases must constantly occur ; the Opposition may occasionally win ; and who shall say that the accidental victory represents the real verdict of the constituency upon the general political question? In 1892 Mr. Morley, after his appointment to the Irish Secretaryship, had to fight a difficult by-election at Newcastle. Such con- tests can be productive of little good Suppose that the Minister-elect, is defeated. He finds, of course, another seat, but he enters upon office with a feeling of failure. He realises that be has lost a seat to his party, he has lostthe verve and freshness which his earlier victory gave him, and he cannot resist the feeling that he has already forfeited to some extent the confidence of the country. Or let us suppose that he is successful. Here, also, there are disadvantages. In the contest he has been compelled to give his opinions on ,certain questions connected with his future office, give them with the air and authority, and at the same time without the equipment, of the specialist. He has already in his first stage given certain crude pledges on the sub- ject which will engross his attention for the next few years ; and when he feels compelled to depart from such a rough-and-ready policy, these rash pledges will be brought up in judgment against him. The inevitable result of success or failure will be to handicap the Minister at the outset. If, on the other hand, he is unopposed, the whole affair becomes a mere fiasco, and the wasted time will be scarcely atoned for by the reiterated expression of his constituents' confidence.
The truth of the matter is that in the democracy in which we live this system of re-election is inconsistent with the first principles of politics. It may have served a useful purpose in its time by guarding against preroga- tive and corruption, but nowadays it is inconvenient and absurd. When a Minister is appointed, the people have already signed and countersigned his credentials. If he is a Member of the Lower House they have elected him, and so given him his representative authority, But they have also indirectly put the Prime Minister in power by returning a majority of one party, and so appointed the man who gives their representative office. What further ratification is necessary ? Let us by all means have safe- gnards against caprice and frequent appeals to the popular tribunal, but let such appeals be sane and intelligible, and not a remnant of an obsolete political tradition.
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