TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE APOTHEOSIS OF PARTISANSHIP. THE Government's so-called Reform Bill is the most shameless piece of political partisanship that has ever been introduced into the House of Commons, These are strong words, but they can be proved up to the hilt.
Our electoral system is far from fair or reasonable. It is full of glaring anomalies and injustices. At present, however, the anomalies and injustices are scattered so blindly that they produce a kind of wild equity. One party in the State is injured and placed at a disadvantage by one set of anomalies and the other party by another set of anomalies. That being the case, what do the Liberal Government propose to do ? They propose to select those anomalies which are injurious to their party and to reform them in a way which they believe will very largely increase the number of votes available for Liberals. Those electoral anomalies which tell against the Unionist Party, and so in favour of the Liberals, though they are undoubtedly the most glaring and, from the public point of view, the most injurious, they propose to leave entirely untouched and i unremedied. That is, they propose to commit what is in spirit the most flagrant piece of gerrymandering that any body of politicians has ever dared to contemplate. The most unscrupulous of American " bosses," framing an electoral system in a raw Western State, might indeed look with envy at their cold-blooded effrontery.
What is the Government's excuse for proposals so monstrous ? They tell us that they quite admit that it is very unfair that the principle of one vote one value is so little recognized that constituencies like Pontefract with 24,000 inhabitants, Rochester with 31,000 —both seats, by the way, return Liberals—or Radnorshire with not many over 22,000 should have the same voting power as the Romford Division of Essex with close upon 313,000 inhabitants, Walthamstow with nearly 247,000, or Wandsworth with 253,000. We have taken English com- parisons, but if we compare with Ireland we find that not only has Ireland as a whole over thirty members more than she is entitled to, but that Newry with under 13,000 inhabitants, Kilkenny with under 13,000, and Galway with under 16,000 have each as much electoral power as the three Essex and London constituencies we have named. These are the kind of anomalies which the Liberal Government are in effect proposing to leave unremedied while they are compassing heaven and earth to get rid of the far smaller scandal of plural voting. It is idle for Liberals to tell us that they are not at any rate leaving the Irish over-representation alone because their Home Rule Bill will set it right. In reality it will do nothing of the kind, or, rather, it will only remove the anomaly by setting up one which is even worse. Newry has now about twenty times the voting power that Romford has ; but, if Home Rule passes, the people of Newry, and indeed of every Irish constituency, will not only have voting power over all their domestic concerns, but will have in addition a voting power over the domestic concerns of England quite as great as that possessed by the largest and most important constituencies of England. Ireland with a population of 4,381,000 will send forty-two members to the House of Commons, or, roughly, one member for every 100,000 of her inhabitants, whereas a group of English constituencies can be named with a population as great as that of Ireland which return not forty-two but only thirty members of Parliament.
We need not, however, deal very seriously with this apology, for we know that Liberals are somewhat chary of using it. Their official excuse for insisting on the principle of one man one vote while they do nothing to carry out the complementary and equally democratic principle of one vote one value is that they intend on some future occasion to deal with Redis- tribution. A year ago it might have been possible to be taken in by such a promise of future reform. We wonder now that even a Radical Government has the audacity to speak of it. That is a form of Parliamentary humbug which can only be used once to befool the country. The nation has not forgotten, though apparently the Cabinet have, that when the Veto Bill was passed last year the Government, by means of the Preamble, solemnly pledged themselves to reform the House of Lords. But that pledge has not only not been kept : it is obvious that there is no real intention of carrying it out. The Preamble has proved waste paper. Yet there is time apparently to introduce every other sort of measure except this one. The Preamble served its pur- pose in inducing a good many moderate Liberals and non-partisan electors to acquiesce in the Veto Bill, and having served its purpose it is now cynically shelved to the Greek Kalends. After such a record as that who is going to trust a Government which says that it will some day or other introduce a Redistribution Bill ? It is all very well for the Westminster Gazette to assure Mr. F. E. Smith that " we are as anxious as he can be that Redistribution shall be accomplished before Parliament is dissolved." But no sane politician believes for a moment that Redis- tribution will take place before the next General Election. The proof of what we are saying is easy. If the Govern- ment had really meant business in this matter nothing would have been easier for them than to have accompanied their electoral Reform Bill with a Redistribution Bill. Had they done so, as they know quite well, the Unionist Party would have been obliged, nay, would have been quite willing, to meet them as they met the extension of the Franchise Bill in 1884 as soon as it was accom- panied by a Redistribution Bill. One man one vote accompanied by a complementary measure giving one vote one value could have been passed by consent—the only proper and reasonable way under our party system for dealing with electoral reform. But the Government have been careful to make no such proposal for an equit- able compromise. They have not even proposed to pledge themselves by putting Redistribution into a preamble. Possibly they were right here, for preamble is not a word which Liberals are now very fond of :
"Oh no, we never mention it, Its name is never hoard ;
Our lips are now forbid to frame The once familiar word," In spite of this, however, we expect many a moderate Liberal is to be found to whom the words of the famous ditty we have quoted come home with no small poignancy. Sir Edward Grey certainly must feel the force of the refrain :
From Bill to Bill they hurry me To banish my regret,
And when they win a vote from mo They think that I forget."
The last refuge of the Liberal who is perplexed and per- turbed by the cynicism of his party leaders is to say that, even if all we have said is true, the Unionists, if they were in earnest, ought not to refuse half the loaf of electoral justice because they cannot at the same time get the whole. " Why," he says, " should not the Unionists at any rate combine in putting an end to the scandals of our registra- tion system and when they come into office at some later period deal on their own lines with Redistribution ? " In other words, let each party carry out the reform to which it is specially pledged. The answer, of course, is that if the Government scheme of gerrymandering is carried out, it is quite conceivable that the Unionists might never again be able to come into power, or not, at any rate, for a great many years ; and in this way a vast number of measures would be carried contrary to the will of the people and solely owing to the violation of the principle of one vote one value. The Unionists, then, are quite right, not merely from the point of view of party tactics, but on much higher grounds, to refuse to allow a partial treatment of the question, and to insist on its being treated as a whole. In truth the only. instrument that they possess for obtaining a recog- nition of the democratic principle of one vote one value is the existence of the other anomalies. If those anomalies are got rid of without the recogni- tion of the principle of one -vote one value, the Liberals will be entrenched behind a system of unjust privilege from which it may be impossible to dislodge them. The Unionists would be absolutely unworthy of their trust if they were to assent to this monstrous pro- posal, which is in fact the Parliamentary version of the confidence trick. If they show their confidence in the fair dealing of the Liberals by agreeing to the abolition of plural voting they may feel perfectly certain that they will never get " one vote one value," but that the over- representation of Ireland and the under-representation of England will be used to defeat the real will of the people.
In our opinion, then, the Unionist leaders, while expressing their complete willingness to carry out a general scheme of electoral reform which shall recog- nize both the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value, should declare that without this act of justice they will have nothing whatever to do with the Government's proposals. By doing this they will not in any way forfeit the good opinion of moderate non-party people in the country, but on the contrary will give an assurance, which is needed, that the prime duty of a Unionist Government when it is returned to power will be to deal with the whole question of electoral reform on a sound and equitable basis. At present and owing to a variety of circumstances there are a great many people who do not realize that the Unionists are deter- mined, whether it helps them from a purely party point of view or not, to get rid of the scandals which we have dealt with at the beginning of this article. And here we may note that the proof of the unwillingness of the Liberals to ado pt the principle of one vote one value is to be found in the scheme advocated by the Spectator of endowing the whole of the electorate through the instrument of a Poll of the People with a veto over the log-rolling tactics of our legislators. Under a, Referendum, as Lord Lansdowne has pointed out, there is no question of electoral anomalies. Every voter has exactly the same power in vetoing or assenting to legislation. The vote of the man at Newry has the same value as the vote of the man at Romford, and not as in a Parliamentary election twenty-six times more value.
Before we leave the subject with which we are dealing we should like to put in a plea in regard to two points. We are quite prepared to accept manhood suffrage, and indeed should welcome the change, for in our opinion every adult male should have his full and fair share in the government of the country. We think, however, that there is a great deal to be said in favour of making twenty- five rather than twenty-one the age at which a man may attain a vote. That is about the age when a man settles down and becomes a householder. Next we desire very strongly that no electoral reform should be passed which does not include provision for the holding of all elections on one day. There is a very great danger, in our opinion, both internal and external, in allowing the kind of interregnum which takes place during the three weeks now spent in an election. Imagine a great foreign crisis or a great strike complicated by a prolonged election. In old days when the King died the King's peace died with him, and until his successor was crowned there was an interregnum of several weeks, during which there was no law in the land. The position was, of course, intolerable, and the very proper legal fiction was invented that the King never died, but that his successor at once filled his place. We would have the Parliamentary interregnum reduced to one day. The new Parliament should at once succeed the old by the reasonable and convenient plan adopted throughout the rest of the civilized world of holding elections on one and the same day.
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