MR. GULLY.
AT the dinner given by the Fishmongers on Wednesday, Mr. Gully had to return thanks to that ancient Company for drinking the health of the Speaker of the House of Commons; and in the few words he said, touched the very characteristic of the House of Commons, of which, generally, we have all great reason to be proud,—though now and then at rare intervals we vainly wish that we could be proud of it,—with his usual tact and dignity. It was the sense of " discipline " in the House of Commons on which he happily congratulated the country (and on which many of those present must have felt that they in their turn might have congratulated him), that he dwelt as the very core and essence of the House's greatness. While retaining that, he said, the House of Commons would always be great, and only when that failed, as he hoped it might never fail, would the House of Commons in losing its self- respect, lose also the respect of the country. That is perfectly true ; and we are not going to say that the main cause of any Speaker's success in maintaining the order and dignity of the House of Commons, is his own tact and sagacity. That would not be true, for without a very keen wish in the House itself to enforce discipline, no Speaker, however able, could reduce a public meeting of six hundred and seventy Members to order and decorum. Among all the true things that Mr. Bagehot has said on the subject of our Constitution, be never said anything truer than that it was a singular and very audacious conception of mankind's to trust so big a public meeting with the duty of directing the legislation and administration of a great country. At first nothing would seem more hopeless. And nothing would not only seem but be more hopeless, if there were not in a great majority of the Members of these great Assemblies, an instinct which it is not easy to describe with any exactness, that puts a bridle on the tongues of almost all their Members, and gives them a direct sympathy with those who restrain the anarchy of individual eagerness and self-will. But the miracle of the constitutional history of European representation is that there is such an instinct, and that in an English public Assembly that instinct is very strong, and seems to grow with the traditions and history of the Assembly's continuous existence. Without such a deeply felt instinct, no Speaker could make the House of Commons what it has usually been ; and with it even very inferior men in the position of the Speaker have been able to discharge their difficult task with very tolerable and even respect- able success. But so far as we can judge, Mr. Gully, though he was chosen almost by an accident,—for com- paratively few Members of the House of Commons knew him even by sight, and still fewer had any means at all of judging his fitness for the Speaker's Chair before he was installed in it,—is not at all one of those inferior men who have discharged their duties with a moderate and only a more or less adequate success. He has certainly not, as yet, had a long or very severe trial ; but so far as he has been tried, he has attained a more than ordinary success, and, though following the greatest Speaker of the last half-century, has never yet encountered a situation which made us wish, through any indication of his inadequacy to meet it, that we could have had Mr. Speaker Peel back again. He has never failed to express with force and that sense of per- fectly calm authority which is the first requisite of a Speaker's manner, the self-respect and self-possession of the Chair ; and yet he has never failed to express what the House values quite as much, the strong sympathy of the great representative Assembly over which he presides, for any one of its Members who seems to be placed in a diffi- cult or cruel position, and who appeals to the House to give him the kind of hearing which may enable him to justify himself before the country. On the very day before Mr. Gully attended the dinner at Fishmongers' Hall, he had had an opportunity of show- ing to great advantage his capacity as a Speaker. He was placed in a delicate and rather difficult position by Mr. Havelock Wilson's appeal to him for the opportunity of re- moving the unfavourable impression which had been made upon the public generally, and probably on a considerable number of his colleagues in the House of Commons, by the result of a trial for libel in which he had been engaged, and from which he had emerged with a verdict in his favour,—nominally, at least, in his favour,—but with only a farthing damages. It was rather a delicate situation. On the one hand, the House never chooses to refuse one of its Members the right to appeal to its sense of justice. On the other hand, no Assembly can be worse adapted than the House of Commons for retrying a case which bad been tried in a regular Court of Justice ; and it would be the greatest blunder that such an Assembly could make to go into a series of complicated questions of financial ethics, of the true construction of which it would be necessary to form a judgment, if the Member who made his appeal to it were to be judged and justified or condemned. How was the embarrassing appeal of Mr. Havelock Wilson to be met ? The Speaker met it with the happiest combination of tact and sagacity. He pointed out to the House that the issue of the trial was not one which concerned Mr. Havelock Wilson's conduct as a Member of Parliament. It was his conduct in matters quite external to his duties as a representative, that had been attacked, and no precedent could be worse than to allow the energies of the House to be diverted from its true duties, to the quite irrelevant task of examining and judging the conduct of one of its Members on a commercial matter for which the House had no responsibility, and for the investigation of which it had neither time nor aptitude. Still, he admitted that if any- thing could be said in a short compass which would tend to explain to the House what had seemed likely to diminish the confidence of that Assembly in one of its Members, it ought to be said, if only as evidence that the House values the general reputation of its Members for trustworthiness, and will not refuse to hear what they think germane to their claim on its confidence. Mr. Havelock Wilson was therefore allowed to explain briefly why he had taken the general course he did take in the trial referred to, but was not allowed to go into details which could not but be confusing and mystifying to the House, and of which it would have been quite impossible to form any adequate judgment. The result was, we think, eminently satisfactory to the House, who heard attentively Mr. Wilson's explanation of his reasons for not going into the witness-box himself, but were not bewildered by any attempt to retry a case on which a regular Court of Justice had given its judgment. The Speaker could not have better hit the medium line between indifference to the moral reputation of one of the representatives, and the great blunder of assuming to perform a function for which the House of Commons is quite unfitted, and which had been properly performed ,lay a regular tribunal. Lord Peel himself could not have shown more discrimination in the treatment of Mr. Havelock Wilson's appeal. The truth is that Mr. Gully, in spite of his complete inexperience, has been so apt at interpreting the feeling of -the better Members of the House of Commons, and, no doubt with the assistance of the able clerks at the table, at learning all the better traditions and rules of the House, that he seems to act exactly as a Judge of large experience and fine sympathies would act in mediating between the individuals who suffer, or seem to suffer, from • causes external to the business of the House, and the better judgment of the House itself. He is neither hard and indifferent, or what might at least seem hard and indifferent to Members who are placed in a painful position, nor disposed to waste the time and ignore the best traditions of the Assembly over which he pre- sides. As it seems to us, he has gained the confidence of the majority to whom he did not owe his election, as completely as that of the minority who selected him for his high Office. Nor do we think that, if he goes on as he has begun, he is likely to leave a reputation inferior to that of some of the wisest of his predecessors. He was a happy accident. But the House of Commons may say with Hamlet that "There's a divinity that. shapes our -ends, rough-hew them how we will."
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