MR. BRIGHT AND THE LIVERPOOL ELECTION.
MR. BRIGHT has broken out again with his usual vehemence against the minority representation of the larger towns, especially in reference to the minority Member for Manchester (Mr. Birley), but his words appear at a time when they will be more likely to be laid to heart by the Tories of Liverpool than by the Liberals of Manchester. The death of the Earl of Dalhousie has suddenly raised Lord Ramsay to the Peerage, and consequently the minority seat for Liverpool is vacant, and is likely enough to be filled up, if the election is con- tested,—by a third Tory, so that Liverpool will then be re- presented wholly by Tories, and the immense Liberal minority in Liverpool will cease to have the smallest voice in the counsels of the nation. That is what Mr. Bright thinks an absolutely satisfactory condition of things,—assuming, of course, that the Liberal minority of Liverpool remains a minority, for we do not mean to hint that Mr. Bright is satisfied to see the Liberals of Liverpool outvoted by the Tories. What Mr. Bright asserts is that the minority representative of any constituency " sits in Parlia- ment by a direct violation of the ancient principles of the Con- stitution, which in all past times gave to majorities the right to select and to elect Members of the House of Commons." That sounds very much as though Mr. Bright was a Conser- vative protesting against the notion of leaving the third seat in Liverpool to be filled by a Liberal, and advocating, as against the claims of Mr. Rathbone, the right of some third Conser- vative to fill the place left vacant by Lord Ramsay's elevation to the House of Lords. If " the ancient principles of the Constitution " are sacred to Mr. Bright, they may well be still more sacred to Lord Sandon's supporters in Liverpool; nor will the latter be sorry to be able to shel- ter themselves under Mr. Bright's authority from the charge of taking an unjust and imprudent advantage of the vacancy caused by the disappearance of a minority Mem- ber, if they decide on doing all they can to wrest the third seat for Liverpool from the Liberals. We ourselves fully admit that it is a serious defect of the principle of the represen- tation of minorities, in the very partial form in which England at present applies it, that whenever a minority seat is vacated, the chances are that it will be filled up by a representative of the majority, so that on such an occasion a three- barrelled constituency suddenly trebles its party influence in the House of Commons, and springs from the position of com- manding a net force of one vote for the party to which the majority belongs, to the position of commanding a net force of three such votes. Considering that no change whatever takes place at such times in the proportional local strength of parties, this sudden turn in the wheel of party fortune is, of course, a glaring anomaly, which throws some discredit justly on the scheme which involves it,—the real mischief being, of course, not that at a general election a very powerful minority obtains a considerable influence in the representation of the constituency, but that, at a bye-election, it may suddenly lose the influence which it had thus obtained. So far, however, as the argu- ment for returning to the " ancient principles of the Constitution," which Mr. Bright so much reverences, is concerned, the true issue is this,—not whether the new anomaly introduced for short periods in rare cases by the minority representation is or is not tangible and injurious, but whether it is or is not so great and so injurious as that other anomaly which the new system has partially removed. Is there a truer or less true representation of party opinion in all the three-barrelled constituencies, taken together, at the present moment, even assuming that Liverpool was represented till the next General Election by three Tories, than there was under the old system, where each of them returned only two Members, but both these Members of the opinions of the majority ? We at least should say that though the new system has introduced an anomaly of a vexatious kind, it has introduced none that can fairly compare in importance with that which it has removed. In Glasgow, Leeds, and Birmingham, it has given much more em- phatic expression than before to the convictions of the majority. In other towns, like Manchester and the three-barrelled counties, it has given a much fairer expression of the real balance of parties in the constituency ; and only in case of a bye-election, when the seat vacated happens to be a minority seat, has the result been a distortion of the true picture of local opinion, instead of a correction of it. The temporary and rather rare instances of distortion should be set off against the much more lasting and much commoner instances of rectification, and the judgment given on the net result.
But then it will be argued that, though in the particular cases of the greater number of three-barrelled constituencies, during much the greater number of Parliamentary years, the new system has improved the representation as a picture of local opinion, it has yet not improved, but injured the relative political weight attaching to these constituencies, as compared with the many other constituencies represented not by three Members, but by two Members, or only one. It is said, for instance, that while a great city like Liverpool, with over 60,000 electors, supports the Conservative Govern- ment with only a single net vote in the House of Commons, a comparatively small place like Ipswich, with only 7,000 electors, supported the same Government in the last Parlia- ment with two votes. The anomaly is obvious enough. But it is no greater than the anomaly of allowing a consider- able place like Birkenhead, with 8,500 electors, to support the Conservative Government with only a single vote, while a little place like Abingdon, with just one-tenth part of the number of registered electors, is permitted to cancel that vote by returning a Liberal to balance it. No one made a great outcry about that, nor, indeed, could have made such an outcry, without being prepared to substitute something like a scientific system for the historical haphazard of our present elec- torates. The only question, of course, with regard to the introduction of a new anomaly is this,—is it a step in the direction of removing the worst anomalies which previously existed, or a step in the direction of aggra- vating them ? Now, no one can deny that while the granting of a third Member to Liverpool, where there is a very power- ful minority, subject to the minority vote, reduces its com- parative political importance to the party of the majority, as compared with that of many much smaller boroughs, it, nevertheless, does enable Liverpool to express much more justly than before the almost evenly-divided state of its actual opinion ; so that the complaint should run, not that Liverpool no longer wields, by a majority of some- thing like 3 per cent. of the constituency, the whole influence of the city for the Conservative party, but that so small a constituency as Ipswich should ever have been permitted to wield so great an influence on the same side, or that so minute a borough as Abingdon should be able to neutralise, on party matters, the power wielded by so large a borough as Birkenhead. The truth is, that the step which conferred an extra Member on some of our largest constituencies, and gave power to a very large minority,—but only to a very large minority,—to return, that Member, was a step towards the rectification of anomalies, even though, as must of course happen while the rest of our system is so irregular, it introduced one or two fresh ones, besides greatly reducing others. No one who does not object to Abingdon having the power to cancel the influence of Birkenhead, has any right to object that Ipswich exercised in the last Parliament a greater influence on the side of Toryism than Liverpool. We must tolerate even new anomalies, if they are inseparable from the attempt to rectify still more injurious anomalies prevalent before. All that we should insist on is that any change shall be a change, on the whole, in the direction of a fuller representation of the true will and mind of the people, and not a change in the opposite direction.
As regards the present crisis in Liverpool, we should cer- tainly say that the Conservatives will act in the very reverse
of a Conservative spirit, if they do not acquiesce cordially in
Mr. Rathbone's election in place of Lord Ramsay. At present, doubtless, the Conservatives gain less by the minority principle than the Liberals. The Liberal Member, both for London and Liverpool, owes his election to that principle, and the Conservative in Manchester only ;—for Birmingham, Leeds, and Glasgow have all so great a Liberal majority that in the present Parliament even the minority seat is filled by the candidate of the majority. Again, in the three-barrelled counties, the Liberals at present obtain more advantage from the arrangement than the Conservatives. Mr. Walter, a nominal Liberal at least, fills the third seat in Berkshire ; and Mr. Cartwright, a real Liberal,
fills the third seat in Oxfordshire. But the Conservatives must look not to the moment, but to the future. Will it be better for them ultimately to discredit the minority principle,
or to sustain it ? What will be the prospect in the counties, after the counties have received household suffrage, if the re- presentation of minorities is entirely abandoned, or even for the future ignored ? Even in the boroughs the Conservatives have held a seat, both in Leeds and in Glasgow, by the help of the minority principle. Though they hold none now, it is inevitable that when the redistribution of seats takes place, the claims of large minorities to a certain amount of representation must be reconsidered. Do the Conservatives wish to deliver their protest against that claim ? Do they wish it to be said that they dislike the claim of minorities to be heard, and dislike it so much, that whenever they get the chance, through the vaca- tion of a minority seat on a bye-election, they will repudiate the claim ? Which is, on the whole, the winning political creed, the creed of the majority,—the Liberal or the Conservative ? If the former, is it not the true wisdom of Conservatives to show how they value the one strictly democratic principle which, in recent times, has offered the prospect of giving them a fair hearing, even in a country ruled by the masses of the people ? Again, do even the Conservatives of Liverpool think it desirable that so able and so moderate a man as Mr. Rathbone, who knows Liverpool so thoroughly and is so absolutely iden- tified with its commerce, should be excluded from Parliament ? In nine cases out of ten, where Liverpool interests are concerned, the question at issue is not a party question, and on all these Mr. Rathbone would represent the Conservatives of Liverpool just as well as he would represent the Liberals. And even in party politics, Mr. Rathbone, though a hearty Liberal, is always moderate, always inclined to listen to what the other side have to say, and to allow it whatever weight a good Liberal can allow it. If the present writer were as strong a Conservative as he is a Liberal, he would certainly argue for admitting Mr. Rathbone to the seat vacated by Lord Ramsay. Assuredly, if that course is not adopted, the Conservatives will do all that in them lies to sustain Mr. Bright's violent prejudice against the fair representation of minorities, and to lend their authority to those Radicals who declare that what they want is not the adequate representation of the whole people in the House of Com- mons, but only the elaborate representation of the small b«lance between the one party and the other which each constituency happens to show.
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