HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.
SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN'S speech of yesterday week on the wisdom of limiting the House of Commons to Sessions of about six months, lasting, as he suggested, from January to June, both months inclusive, was probably not intended as a proposal for putting a stringent pressure on the popular branch of the Legisla- ture. Rather was it proposed out of consideration for the health and enjoyments of the majority of its Members. But the best case to be made for the proposal seems to us to be a case for bringing more pressure to bear on the House of Commons by limiting strictly the time at its disposal. Mr. H. H. Fowler did not seem to be of that opinion when he addressed the Eighty Club last week. He described the present Parliament as the unconstitutional Parliament, and even invented for it the nickname of " the Anti-House of Commons Parliament." It is " especially the duty of the Liberal Party at this crisis," he said, "to uphold the power and prerogatives and unique and supreme position of the House of Commons in our system, and above all to defend the right of minorities and of individual Members." The last part of that sentence is, unfortunately, not very consistent with the first part of it, as Mr. Henry Fowler might have demonstrated had he gone back to the origin and history of the rules for closure of debate, and to the struggles of 1881 and 1882. Mr. Fowler announced. himself a cordial adherent of the right of closure by a majority, and then straightway went on to utter a bitter philippic against the present. Government for its practical use of that power. Yet the first assertion and the• most stringent and arbitrary use of that power was not due to the present Government or the present Parliament. It was Mr. Brand who first asserted the power of the Chair to close a debate prolonged for purposes of obstruction. It was Mr. Gladstone who, in the Autumn Session of 1882, first proposed rules for putting an end to the tenacious resist- ance of a minority. And it was the Conservatives who at one time vehemently resisted the policy of which the Liberals now claim to be the only earnest antagonists.
But, like Balaam, the Liberals are compelled to bless altogether what they are called in to curse. And, as we have seen, within a few nights of Mr. Fowler's impassioned appeal to the men of the Eighty Club to denounce " the Anti-House of Commons Parlia- ment" for exerting so unconstitutional a pressure on the freedom of minorities and of individual Members, we find Sir George Trevelyan advocating the applica- tion of a new time-pressure to the House of Commons, which would either force it to get through its business more quickly than it now does, or to incur the dis- pleasure of the constituencies for neglecting it. He asks Parliament, in general at least, to limit its Sessions to six months, and to bar the months of July, August, and September from any liability to be used for that purpose. It is true that Sir George Trevelyan held out a shadowy hope that in cases of great pressure, the House might have a six weeks' Autumn Session as well ; but he evidently trusted that that would be an expedient so disagreeable to honourable Members that it would be very reluctantly and very rarely used. Virtually Sir G. Trevelyan's motion,—a motion only lost by four votes,— meant that it would be a good thing to diminish the available time-resources of the House of Commons, and to apply the spur to its energies which is involved in that shortening of its hours of labour. He declared, too, and expressed, we believe, in that declaration the opinion of all the best judges, that the 12 o'clock rule has, on the whole, worked very well, and worked just in the same manner in which the six-months rule, if it were adopted, would work,—namely, so that by forbidding the House of Commons an unlimited right of trenching indefinitely upon Members' health and spirits, it has compelled men to hold their tongues who would not otherwise have held their tongues, and to deny themselves the luxury of a good deal of experimental legislation in which they would other- wise have expatiated. And it is noticeable that in thus narrowing the limits of time at the disposal of the House of Commons, the English people are but following the precedents of democracy all the world over. The United States of America, the French, and the Germans have all gone much further in this direction than we have. The Australians, too, have gone much further in this direc- tion. If the present Parliament is an " Anti-House of Commons Parliament," as Mr. Henry Fowler maintains, then almost all the democratic bodies in existence should be described by some similar nickname. The more the people rule, the more they see the necessity of putting the deliberative bodies through which they rule, under very strict limits indeed, both of speech and action. Most of the United States are fully determined that their repre- sentative assemblies shall not do too much. Indeed, if there is one democracy in the world which has cramped its House of representatives less than any other, it is at present the democracy of this country. And though it has begun to see the necessity of applying pressure to it very firmly on every side, it has as yet advanced but a little distance in the path in which other democracies have advanced much further. And we more than suspect that that screw the pressure of which Mr. Fowler resents so much when it is applied by the Tories, would be applied even more freely by himself and his friends,---who were, indeed, the first to discover the need for it,—whenever they might find them- selves again in power.
At all events, we heartily approve of the policy of fixing within very strict limits, both as regards the parliamentary day and as regards the parliamentary Session, the time which is to be at the disposal of the House of Commons, and compelling it to pass whatever legislation it really desires to pass, within those limits. No doubt that will and must tell in the direction of compelling a somewhat parsimonious use of the legislative power on the one hand, but it will also tell in the direction of economising still more carefully the discussion of mere party squabbles on which there is nothing fresh to say, on the other hand. Moreover, parsimony in the use of the legislative power is not at all to be deplored as States get more and more democratic : the danger being, in that stage, of too much meddling on behalf of what are thought to be popular cries ; and of this the people soon become aware. There cannot be a doubt, for instance, that efforts are being made in many countries to keep up the rate of wages which will really result in a substantial lowering of the rate of wages instead of the success of the legislative expedients tried ; and it would have been all the better if the pressure of time had prevented the application of these expedients, and so arrested feeble and fussy interference with natural laws. By far the most important and wholesome consequence of a well-established democracy, after baneful and unjust privileges have once been abolished, is that public opinion becomes so much juster, so much more disposed to treat the humble victims of a bad system with the same consideration with which it treats its more distinguished victims, that neither Govern- ments nor classes nor parties even think of defending abuses which under an aristocracy or an oligarchy would not have been regarded as abuses at all. All sides alike shrink from either partial legislation or partial administration, and the fear is not that any democratic Government will propose what is intentionally unjust, but that it will propose what is intentionally just, but in fact mischievous, from the natural inability of the popular mind to let even necessary imperfections alone. A better instance of this inability we could not have than the craving after Protection which all our democratic Colonies betray, and which France is just now betraying afresh in a par- ticularly aggressive form. We may depend upon it that what Mr. Henry Fowler calls an " Anti-House of Commons Parliament," is really nothing but a Parliament which has become aware of the tendency of representative assemblies to usurp all the functions of the nation, and of the necessity of curbing that tendency if the nation wishes to be master of its own purposes. We are wholly in favour of prescribing definite and severe limits to the activity of the House of Commons. Confined within such limits, its energy is all the greater, because it is not lavished on outbursts of mere self-will. Even Cromwell found out that Parliaments magnified their office till they superseded the nation they professed to represent ; and for our own parts, we believe that what Mr. Fowler calls an " Anti-House of Commons Parliament," means only a Parliament which cares More for the nation than it does for one particular popular institution which often misunderstands and misrepreSents the nation.
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