THE PETTY DEFEATS OF THE GOVERNMENT.
TORD SALISBURY'S Government has, apparently, one very singular taste. It likes to be beaten on questions that do not affect its existence. Possibly it is the pleasure of contrast that leads Ministers to court defeat, as they did last Tuesday. They are ordinarily so sure. of a majority, that it may be an agreeable change to find themselves in a minority. Possibly it is a kind of Lenten discipline that they think it right to impose on themselves,—a method of afflicting their souls and keeping them low. The debate on Mr. Buchanan's motion makes strongly in favour of this latter theory. For Ministers were not only beaten, but beaten deservedly. They had every possible warning vouchsafed to them. Mr. Finlay urged them, if they could not accept the motion, at least to promise to consider in what other way the object might be attained. Mr. Chamberlain hoped that they would accept the motion as it stood, and in time extend the principle to England. Yet after these plain intimations of what was coming, the Lord Advocate opposed Mr. Buchanan's proposal, divided the House, and got beaten. The result could have been no surprise to him. When all the arguments and nearly all the speakers are.against you, and when among those speakers are two of the strongest supporters of the Government, there can s .1dom be much doubt as to the issue. The Lord Advocate must have gone into the lobby with a pretty sure conviction that the cause he had to defend was hopeless as well as bad. No theory save that of voluntary mortification seems adequate to explain the facts. We can understand going to . certain defeat in a good cause. We can understand that logical rapture which finds delight in defending even a bad cause by plausible arguments. But there can be no pleasure in unsuccessfully defending a bad cause by worth- less arguments. The Government that consents to do this must, we fancy, be prompted by a secret asceticism.
Any one who has read the Lord Advocate's speech will not think that we have spoken too harshly of it. Mr. Buchanan asked that the duty of maintaining and pro- tecting rights-of-way in Scotland might be entrusted to the County Councils. Against this the Lord Advocate had to show cause, and this was the fashion in which he set about it. First of all, he said that in many cases where there is a prinicilade right-of-way, it turns out on examination not to exist. Unfortunately, the Lord Advocate did not think it necessary to show how this bore upon the question. It is as important for landowners that an unjust claim to a right-of-way should be upset, as it is for the community that a just claim should be established. All that Mr. Buchanan proposed was to provide machinery for bring- ing these claims to trial. The Lord Advocate seemed to think that he meant to provide machinery for actually trying them. It is conceivable that Scottish landlords might have a bad time of it, if the County Councils were empowered to try their title to shut out tie public from their lands ; but why should the Lord Advocate be so alarmed at the notion of giving the County Councils a mere right to raise the question ? To the same confusion of ideas must be attributed his declaration that her Majesty's Government could not agree to matters of this kind being placed in the hands of elective bodies. There is everything to be said against elective Judges ; but we know of no reason why there should not be elective Prosecutors. On the contrary, it is a most natural office for the County Councils to perform. They are the representatives of the ratepayers, and it is the ratepayers who are injured by the closing of a footpath. It is really a much simpler thing to give the County Council the power of prosecuting, than, as was proposed last year, to vest it in the Sheriff of the county on the application of two or three of the inhabitants. A provision of this latter kind has a whiff of the aggrieved parishioner about it, and the application might be prompted by a desire of giving annoyance. The County Council would be under no such temptation. The expense of a suit would impose a very real check on those who have to raise the money, and unless the alleged infringement of a right- of-way were tolerably clear, they would not be likely to resist it before a Court of Law. A third reason urged against the motion was that landowners who now throw open their lands to the public, would close them rather than run the risk of creating a right-of-way. But why should rights-of-way be more easily created if the County Councils were the prosecutors than if the duty were left to individuals ? The motion did not propose to alter the method in which these cases are tried. Where they are now tried by a Judge, they would be tried by a Judge still ; where they are now tried by a jury, they would be tried by a jury still. The only difference would be that whenever there seemed fair cause for asserting a right-of-way, there would be an authority capable of asserting it. What would ordinarily happen would be, that a ratepayer who conceived himself injured by the denial of a right-of-way would apply to the County Council; that the County Council would refer the application to their solicitor ; that the solicitor would invite the claimant to state on what evidence his case rested, and would then report to the Council whether the primci-facie case was strong enough to make an action advisable. There is nothing in this process to terrify a landowner who has a good case. He ought rather to be glad that he has the rate's to look to for his costs, in the event of judgment going in his favour. We should expect that if the County Councils erred at all in the matter, it would be on the side of requiring too much evidence rather than of being content with too little. The knowledge that the rates would bear the cost of the prosecution would make applications numerous ; but the knowledge that the rates would also bear the cost of the defence, supposing that the decision went against the claim, would dispose the Council to subject these numerous applications to a very rigorous scrutiny. We are sorry that the Government opposed the motion, because it encourages the notion that their sympathies are with the landowners as against the community. The Lord Advocate declared, it is true, that it is of the essence of Conservatism that popular rights and privileges of this kind should be protected. They are, he thinks, of the utmost value and the most sacred character. But fine words about their value and sanctity are of very little use if the process of defending them is extremely costly, and there is no public authority to bear the burden. We could wish that the Lord Advocate had been less im- pressed with the importance of rights-of-way, and more ready to provide an improved method of asserting them. At present they depend for their recognition on the accident of there being sufficient money within reach to institute the necessary proceedings in vindication of them. We suppose that the Government were anxious not to offend the landowning interest unnecessarily. In that case, we can but wonder at the extraordinary short- sightedness of landowners. If they were wise, they would lynch any one of their number who shut up a footpath. It is one of a class of acts which excites a really dangerous irritation, since it irritates men who have no sympathy with the Radical attack upon the owners of land, and who, if those owners were only wise, would be always ready to take their part. In these days, when population is increasing and land becoming more and more enclosed, great proprietors are sometimes, and might be always, the natural protectors of open spaces. When, instead of this, they constitute themselves the assailants of open spaces, and insist on continually enlarging the area from which the community is excluded, they become their own worst enemies. If there were no other reason for giving effect to Mr. Buchanan's resolution, we should advocate it in the interest of the very class at which it is apparently aimed.
Previous page
