TOPICS OF THE DAY
MR. BRIGHT'S BREACH OF PRIVILEGE.
WE do not suppose that Sir Stafford Northcote expected the House of Commons to declare that Mr. Bright's charge against the Conservatives of allying themselves with the "Rebel party" among Irish Members was a breach of Privi- lege. It is not his business to defend the Parnellites, who were most gravely attacked, and as regards his own party, he must have known that such a vote would be too unjust even for a partisan majority, had he controlled one. Mr. Bright intimated that an alliance existed between the Conservatives and the Irish Extremists ; but for months past every Tory speaker in the House and out of it has railed at the Liberal leaders for arranging a " treaty," the " Treaty of Kilmainham," with Mr. Parnell,—that is, from their point of view, for making a regular compact with a party whose object is the dismemberment of the kingdom. They have repeated this charge in every possible form and with every vitu- perative addition which anger could suggest, have wasted hours in a futile effort to prove it, and have specially endeavoured to fix it on Mr. Gladstone, but no one has ven- tured to accuse them of breach of Privilege. How often have we not heard that Mr. Gladstone was the confederate of infidels and treason-mongers, because he let out Mr. Parnell and voted for the Affirmation Bill ? The accusation levelled at Mr. Bright, as formulated by Sir Stafford, is in truth non- sensical. He may not have the right to accuse a party in the House of being rebels, for rebellion is a criminal offence, but he has a right, if he believes the charge, to accuse the Conserva- tives, or any other section of the House, of combining with a faction to delay business. If he has not, freedom of speech upon politics is gone. The very first question upon which the constituencies need instruction is the cause which delays public business, and one of the suspected causes is an agreement, open or tacit, between certain Conservatives and certain Members from Ireland to exhaust the time of Parlia- ment. If a Member speaking to his constituents may not state that suspicion, and say that for himself he believes it, he may not instruct them as to political transactions which they are bound to study, and one of the first objects of a represen- tative system is given up at once. He should give evidence, of course ; but Mr. Bright did give evidence, namely, the state of public business, and his own experience as to its cause. If our institutions are to work, the Member and his constituents must take counsel together, and take it publicly ; and they cannot take it without an amount of freedom of speech which, in the instance before us, was certainly not excessive. There is not a party in the country which has not accused its rivals of combinations quite legal and quite Parliamentary, but fatal to self-respect. Sometimes the accusations have been true and sometimes false, but in neither case have they ever been treated as breaches of Parliamentary Privilege. To set such a pre- cedent merely because Mr. Bright's voice, when he speaks, reverberates through the country, would not only be absurd, but fatally injurious to political discussion.
Sir Stafford Northcote's object, visible in every line of his temperate speech, was to raise a debate, and repudiate publicly a charge which he knows perfectly well undoes with the constituencies all the good his party might receive from the failure of the Government to carry its promised measures. He succeeded in raising the debate, but we question if it will benefit him much, unless, as is possible, he thinks any con- sumption of time a benefit to his party. Speaker after speaker from the Tory side repudiated Obstruction, but no one met the obvious facts that Bills do not get through as they were wont to get through, that they do not get through because time is wasted, and that time is wasted by the combined action, it may be accidentally combined action, of the Parnellites and a section of the Tories. They all fastened on an illus- tration used by Mr. Bright, which undoubtedly was not a happy one. The Affirmation Bill was not defeated by an alliance between the "Rebel party " and the Conservatives, but by an alliance between the Conservatives and the Mem- bers for Ireland at large. Mr. Bright's own figures prove this, for if, as he says, England and Scotland accepted the Bill by a majority of sixty-three, thirty-one Members, the highest Par- nellite figure, could not have defeated it. Notoriously the Bill was defeated not by a combination of Conservatives and "Rebels," but of Conservatives and Catholics, who either acted from reli- gious feeling, or under pressure from their electors. The Tories escaped under cover of that error of Mr. Bright's, but they never faced the remaining facts, or disproved the evidence known to all men, that night after night business is arrested by trivial discussions, by useless amendments, and by shoals. of questions ; and that discussions, amendments, and questions. are in the main brought forward by Tories or by Parnellites. Suppose the Fourth Party, three or four Parnellites, and Mr. O'Donnell out of the House ! There may be no alliance what- ever, as Mr. Bright admitted there was none, still less any treaty ; but the two parties perceive the situation, think that legislation can be stopped, desire, though from very- different motives, to atop it, and do stop it, till the will of the constituencies, as expressed in the elections, cannot be carried out. Why, Mr. Parnell himself said on one occasion that "he left the Tories to do his dirty work." That is the charge, and the debate only gave Mr. Bright an opportunity of bringing it more closely before the people, who, being rough in thought, will ask why, if Sir Stafford Northcote, and Sir R. Cross, and Mr. Gibson are so. anxious that business shall advance and Bills be accepted or rejected, they do not help it on, and compel the more violent. Members of their party to fall into line behind them ? They may allege that they are not followed, but do they really try to be followed, as they would try if they were in power Obviously they do not, and the reason is that they think the waste of time makes in their favour, and exhausts the Gladstone period.
The speech was not one of Mr. Bright's best, for he was full of the Irish, who had not seriously raised their case against him. Mr. Parnell did not appear, no one rose from the Irish side till Mr. Bright sat down, and though many Extremists spoke, and insulted Mr. Bright as much as they could, it may be doubted if any one of them cared a straw for his words. Men never really care much for denunciations which help them with their constituents, and in Ireland, un- happily, the words " rebel" and "patriot" have become histori- cally synonymous. Even the accusation of taking pecuniary help from American-Irish falls very dead. Half the poorer Irish in Ireland look for help to Irish-Americans, and see no more reason why their Members should not culti- vate such support than why they themselves should not be helped by their kinsfolk to emigrate. What was. wanted was a still more crushing exposure of the waste of time and its causes, the kind of exposure which a master of statistics who was also a master of eloquence could give. That kind of exposure is not Mr. Bright's forte, and though he did all he could, and did it with singular command alike of words and temper, he did not do all he might have done. Still, he emphasised his charge, and Sir Stafford Northcote has only to glance over the country papers to see how com- pletely his attack failed, how strong is opinion that the Tories are either obstructing or consciously allowing obstruction to go. on. That is, we repeat, the gravamen of the charge against them, which can be disproved only by their lending effective aid to the conduct of public business. Nobody disputes their right to oppose Bills which they disapprove, by every argument in their power. What is denied is their right so to occupy time that. votes upon Bills—votes which actually advance the machine— cannot be taken. The fact that Government passes few Bills is, of course, no evidence against the Tories; but the fact that. Government takes few decisive votes for or against, is. The Tories deny that their conduct on the Affirmation Bill is. evidence to Mr. Bright's charge ; but it is evidence, though not in his way. They hated that Bill. They declared it irreligious, atheistic, and we know not what, and were ready to take any course by which it might be defeated. Nevertheless, as they saw a chance of victory, they allowed a decisive vote to be taken, and consequently it was taken without any unusual delay. All the country asks of them is to treat the Government measures as they treated that Bill, to fight as hard as they can, or as they like, but to let the final vote be taken, and then respect it. It is because they do not do this, or at all events are suspected of not doing it, that the electors are growing savage, and that, as the Tories will find, day by day men's minds are widening about the Redis- tribution Bill, which would at least put a final stop to English Obstruction. In failing to remove the public impression by means much simpler and more direct than attacks on Mr. Bright, they are making Great Britain Radical with a speed of which they have no conception. Men are often greatly moved by slight arguments, and the fact that no large ,con- stituency would bear to see its Members stopping work?' may yet be a fatal one for those petty boroughs in which Conser- vatives put their trust.
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