TOPICS OF THE DAY.

THE MONSTER DISEASE OF PARLIAMENT.

DISMAY at the overwhelming mass of railway legislation which Threatens Parliament for next session, has probably occasioned the report, "that it is the intention of the Cabinet to consider the railway question generally, and the proper mode of deal- ing with it in Parliament, at one of their earliest meetings." There may, however, be some foundation for the surmise. Those who have any regard to the progress of public business may well be affrighted at the prospect of having it quite stopped next year from the sheer congestion of railway bills ; and there may be a reasonable doubt whether Members will consent to undergo a manifold increase of the labour which was felt even last session to stultify existence as a matter of enjoyment and to break down the health. All the pain and labour were incurred without any consolatory gain to boast of : the system of little Committees was quite a failure ; Members earned for all their toil no thanks, but only an ill name and universal disgust ; which some few richly merited, though the many perhaps were more sinned against than sinning. Out of doors there is no small anxiety on the subject. The vast extent of private interests at stake makes the tribunal which is to allow or disallow the endless projects a question of wide- spread prosperity or ruin,—ruin not to fall alone on the projectors disappointed of the Parliamentary licence, nor even on those more luckless projectors who have the Parliamentary sanction for ruinous schemes. The first question to be considered in any re- -vision of the system is, whether it were better to engage at once in all even of the practicable schemes? A vast deal of delusion is kept up on this point, as if some principle of free trade were in- volved. It is said that there is abundance of capital in the country, and that some of the projects are safe: but is it safe, to set about them all at once ? Observe, it is not a legitimate demand for certain iron roads which causes all this press of tchemes. Several such roads have been made, at an enormous profit to the makers; others envy that success and emulate it ; and there is accordingly a great demand, not for the railroads, but for opportunities to make profits. The roads are not the sub- stantive things, but pretexts for gambling in the "shares" which may be transferred at a premium. It is a delusion therefore when we talk of the railways as if they were the things about which all the fuss is made—as if they were the projects: the companies, in a great but unknown proportion of cases, are the projects—esta- blished, not to make the railways, but to deal in the shares ; the making of the railways being a mere suit and service for enjoy- ing the privilege of gambling. A real demand for conveyance might be more safely indulged ; for then, as soon as the railway were laid down, the passengers would travel, and a revenue from fares would reimburse the outlay : but how many of these rail- ways, if established, would really afford a paying revenue from the fares

And even if they did, such enormous sums could not be trans- ferred from one channel of industry to another without incalcu- lable danger to countless individuals. The capital for them must be drawn from some existing channel of industry; for you can- not, by taking thought, suddenly add to the total amount of ac- cumulated wealth in a country. We see how even in the case of a sudden demand for bullion to pay for the importation of corn, the abstraction of only five or six millions sterling from the ordi- nary channels of trade disturbs commerce : how much more, then, when hundreds of millions are to be displaced? Many, no doubt, will benefit by the extraordinary impulse to a new industry ; but many individuals in the abandoned channels will find their industry fruitless—they will be without cash, and a host of bankruptcies will be the shaded contrast to the splen- dours of prosperity.

Even short of such disastrous visitations for the country, an- other class of private interests is deeply concerned in the settle- ment of some better system. Are people with land and country, residences to be subjected for the next few years to a tenfold multiplication of the injuries and annoyances which they have endured for the last two or three? Is every homestead to be per- plexed with the fear of change, and molested at pleasure by the servants of the speculators or gamblers whose schemes deluge the kingdom? The answer will be expected with no small anxiety. Supposing, however, that we disregard private interests,—that all the private classes which cumulatively compose the nation be sacrificed to the " national " interests,—even in that view, a change of method is most imperatively demanded. The great public interests are neglected. Even in respect to the very rail- way projects themselves, Parliament neglects the interests of the public. There is no consistency of action—no definite principle by which the conduct of the public, whether as owners or users of railways, can be guided. The last change in the management of the railway business of Parliament effected no radical improve- ment; it only disguised the vicious material by complicating it : the small Committees were a failure, the Railway Department of the Board of Trade was a failure. Both failed out of the neces- sity of things.

The Board of Trade was not a railway tribunal, but a de- partment organized for other work, to which Parliament dele- gated a particular series of jobs : there was no intimate connexion between Parliament and its delegate, no good and well-established understanding: Parliament had no control over the Board ; the Board had none over the small Committees that were to follow out its judicial investigations : the very work to be performed by the Board was ill-expounded by Parliament ; and it was confes- sedly imperfect in its nature—as in excluding from the consider-

ation of the Board questions of private interests, and thus limit- ing the view to a part only of the subject : the Board owned at once an imperfect responsibility and an imperfect power, so that it could neither be compelled nor be expected to do its work satisfactorily.

The nature of the House of Commons offered still less promis- ing materials for a railway tribunal. The assemblage of six hundred and fifty-eight gentlemen comprises every diversity of

character—men the most unfit in natural abilities, as well as the most fit, to engage in railway business. They own none but a

very lax responsibility. There is no uniformity of opinions, of feeling, of conduct, among them. They are bound by no prece- dent, even of their own making. They are especially open to crowded influences of personal interest : standing on the boundary between the high aristocracy and the middle class, they are open to the influences of both sections of society ; as country gentle- men, they are amenable to local influence ; as suitors at the hust-

ings, to personal influence; as employers of Parliamentary agents and others who manage elections, to corrupt influence. There are

men in the House who would scorn a bribe, disguise it how you could ; but, we say, the House comprises the most opposite diver- sities of character. Such is the nature of the elective House, and its conduct last session accorded with its nature. There was neither uniformity in practice nor principle in the treatment of railway affairs. The most conflicting kind of conduct was pursued ; and conjecture, baffled in hunting for motives to the contradictions, incoherencies, and caprices of honourable Members, found them in discreditable partialities and personal advantages. One Committee would support the principle of protection for existing railways ; another would support that of competition ; and in the absence of all sufficient ostensible reason, the motives were detected in some indirect bearing of personal or corrupt sympathy with projects depending on the principle supported. One must not call Parliament " venal" ; but no barefaced ve- nality could create more disgust than the conduct of Members did on all sides. Captain Boldero and Mr. Bonham were victims to the ingenuous frankness which made them take no pains to conceal their irregularities : " Honi soit qui mal y pense " was their motto. A direct present of shares to the one, and an equi- vocal holding of shares by the other, were harmless trifles com- pared to the shameless effrontery with which some important public interests are understood to have been postponed to the corrupt interests of other Members, who contrived not to incur penalties. Triviality and dishonesty could not create greater disgust.

Parliament is therefore, by a priori reasoning and by experience, proved to be disqualified for dealing with railway business in de-

tail : but in order to do so it actually neglected the thing most of all needed—some defined and established principle of action. That alone is enough for the Parliament to attend to ; and it would be better to perform that task well than to spend half a session in debating whether this or that railway among a legion of projects should be sanctioned. Parliament might with no greater absurdity administer as well as make all its civil and cri- minal laws in detail. Last session indeed, Parliament usurped administrative functions without having executed the necessary

preliminary of laying down the requisite laws and principles—

playing the judge without a statute, and with nothing better than the regulations of the court for its guidance. These considerations point to the removal of private business from the House of Com- mons to some other body ; and perhaps, for a time at least, it might be desirable to have a special tribunal to adjudicate on rail- way affairs.

There are two classes of objections that stand most in the way of such a change, though others are more willingly avowed. One set of reasons is identical with the very abuses in the present sys-

tem: many persons who exercise much influence in the manage- ment of Parliament as a tool would grieve to lose their oppor-

tunities of 'prostituting the Imperial Legislature to personal

uses. Could the change be contrived, it would be no small in- cidental benefit, that a race of harpies infesting the lobbies would

be driven away : those electionmongering agents who make a trade of dealing in illicit Parliamentary influence would no longer so pertinaciously haunt the House divested of its private business. Members who procure themselves to be elected entirely to further local and private ends would also be deprived of their object, and the seats in the body of the House as well as the lobbies would be weeded. Such men are not Members for the nation, but for this or that Parliamentary agent's office : they are not even Members for their own " breeches-pockets," but for the very lawyer whose

bill they pay. They are mere under-Parliamentary agents sitting in the body of the House, which their presence degrades. Take away that business which they come to pervert, and they would cease to come ; to the great elevation of the House in political rank. Another objection which powerfully- sways Members though it is not avowed, is, that they fear to lose some kind of personal importance if they suffered the House to 'Dart with its direct con- trol over private business. We believe this notion is altogether a mistake and that Members might on the contrary deriveadditaal importance from being relieved of their drudgery In

that line. All would depend on the mode of effecting the change. As it is, railway business is not a privilege of the Commons, but an affair of the whole Legislature and its three Estates ; as the Lords showed, last session, in their summary way of dealing with bills sanctioned by the Lower House ; as the Crown also showed, by its Ministers, in obliging Parliament to act in con- junction with the Board of Trade. Parliament could retain its supremacy even over private business, though ridding itself of interference in detail: it would create the separate tribunal ; it would make laws to control that tribunal ; and it might even reserve to itself the final sanction of all measures allowed by any separate tribunal, much in the same way as it has done with bills passed by Colonial Legislatures, which are laid before Parliament to afford the opportunity of addressing the Crown to disallow them.

There would be nothing impracticable in such a change as this. It is the present system which is impracticable : it cannot be worked out ; it causes immense injury to the country and to private interests ; it disgraces Parliament before the face of the people. 'We say, in no 'hostile spirit to any party, that an imper- fect modification of the system—a merely palliative measure— will not do : as time advances and the work of private legislation accumulates, the evils will grow worse and worse. The Popular branch of the Legislature is rapidly becoming a mere Board of Roads and Private Bills—a mere subsidiary to trading compa- nies and municipal corporations ; and if statesmen do not wish to suggest to agitators and revolutionists some sweeping constitu- tional change—the establishment of a real National Legislature, in place of the one that is sinking under oppression and corrup- tion—they will save the House of Commons by relieving it of its fatal burden: its Old Man of the Sea is the private business, and it must shake off the monster or be strangled.