MR. BURT'S DISMISSAL.
THE vote just passed by the "Northumberland Miners' Mutual Confident Association " to stop the salary paid for fourteen years to the Member for Morpeth, Mr. T. Burt, is greatly to be regretted, and that for reasons even higher than his personal claims. These are, however, great. He has, in our judgment, misconceived the probable effects of Home-rule; but he is, though a determined and even angry Gladstonian, by far the beat Labour Member now sitting in the House. Patient, reasonable, honest, and laborious, able to speak his mind without lapsing into insolence, and entirely clear as to what he and his constituents want, he endeavours to make every measure he touches better than he found it, and he has con- sequently acquired a marked consideration within the House of Commons, which, when business has to be done, is, contrary to the popular belief, singularly free of caste prejudice, and accords to the miner-Member a respect which Mr. Labouchere, though he is, for all the Redness of his speeches, a wealthy aristocrat, will never enjoy. It is bad for the country to lose such a man as Mr. Burt because his constituents decline to give him the means of living in London, but worse if their refusal indicates either discontent with his independence, or indifference to the direct representation of labour. We fear these two causes are those which influenced the poll. The suggestion that the miners in a time of depression are tired of paying £500 a year to a Member who devotes himself to other questions as well as theirs, does not strike us as even plausible. Mr. Burt costs the miners a shilling a year a head. They have paid his £500 for fourteen years, and we doubt if the money weighed at all, except, indeed, to increase their belief in their right to dictate. This belief was, however, very strong, and is, we fear, the grand obstacle to arrangements otherwise very sensible and easy to work. Poor men, when they pay, think their right to order indisputable, and have yet to learn, what larger ex- perience has taught to the cultivated, that the best agent is the man who, while faithful to his employers, shows a determina- tion to think for himself. The miners fret, it is said, because Mr. Burt has become a politician, not seeing that the Member who does not become a politican will never acquire influence, that he has a duty to the general community as well as to his immediate electors, and that the most effective, as well as the wisest representative of a class, is the man who can reconcile their special requirements with the general weal. Mr. Broadhurst could do far more for workmen as Under- Secretary in the Home Department, bearing his part in the general guidance of the great machine, than as a mere Labour Member, never interesting himself except when a chance appeared of raising wages or reducing hours. The workmen would see that quite clearly if a Member were selected, say, by the Insurance Offices, as happened once, or by the West India interest, as happened a score of times ; and they should not be blinded by their numbers to the fact that they are only one class. If they have dismissed Mr. Burt because he is not sufficiently a labour advocate only, they have done a most foolish thing, and will find that his substitute will be
far leas useful to them, as well as to the country. Specialists are bores, to begin with, and are so apt to miss the connections between the general interest and the interest they represent, that they have not as much influence in debate as politicians who know general facts, and get up a special grievance or demand, as Lord Melbourne was accused of doing, by a night's reading, or a keen cross-examination of the experts. The views of Mr. Burt as a real workman were on almost all subjects of interest, and even importance, to the House ; but if he had spoken only of coal-mining, he would soon have been of lees weight than the last intelligent witness before a Coal Committee.
But, it is hinted, the miners are tired of politics, and do not see why they should pay for a Member ; and a sort of satisfaction is expressed by moderate men that this should be the case. Why, it is asked, should there be work- men-candidates at all I The gentlemen can represent the workmen just as well as they represent the traders. Well, we differ, and want actual workmen in Parliament for three
reasons of somewhat different weight. First, they inform the House upon workmen's questions, and especially upon ques- tions involving class-feeling, better than the gentlemen do. The latter, besides their want of minute knowledge, are always imagining things, and attribute to the workmen stupidities which are wholly foreign to their minds. They are like converts to Catholicism, who are more priestly than priests, and never have an idea of the freedom born Catholics allow themselves. They are horrified, for instance, at the idea of arresting a priest, whom an Austrian or Italian devotee of the Church would shoot just as soon as a layman. As far as the instruction of the House goes, workmen are as necessary as lawyers. In the second place, it is exceedingly injurious to the power of the House that any class should be excluded from direct presence within its walls, and especially the class which possesses of all classes the heaviest amount of physical force. The irresistibleness of the House —and irresistibleness is the most valid argument for a wide suffrage—is greatly increased when it becomes a visible microcosm of the nation. And, in the third place, workmen choose much better workmen-Members than they choose Members supposed to be gentlemen. They know their own people, they have seen them at work, and they are little liable to be deceived as to their qualifications. They never choose fools when dressed in fustian, rarely select men who are not honest in pecuniary matters, and are utterly intolerant, when the candidate is a workman, of a faddist. They are not so acute when gentlemen offer them- selves, and are very apt to elect men who talk extreme Radicalism without in the least believing it, or men who are consciously self-seekers, or men of those intemperate and almost revolutionary opinions which the cultivated or the rich, when they are Radicals, are so apt, probably through an impulse of recoil, to profess or to believe. Stoke-upon- Trent had better have chosen any leading workman whatever than Dr. Kenealy, and the choice too fre- quently lies between the two. Who that cares for the good of Ireland, or the honour of the House of Commons, would not rather see twenty peasants sent up from the sister- island than any twenty of Mr. Parnell's nominees ? We admit the difficulty connected with maintenance ; but it is, after all, a slight one, and though it may seem a little unfair to working constituencies, it helps to induce care and vigilance in the selection of their representatives. The electors have, in such cases as Mr. Burt's, to pay as well as to select their Member, and are no more led away by fine words than they would be if they were choosing a foreman. That would not be the case if the nation paid, or even if the ratepayers, for nobody thinks about the Treasury, and expense out of rates is grudged; but it is the ease when each man pays out of his own pocket. As working Members must be paid somehow, their means of livelihood being local, the system adopted at Morpeth seems to us the healthiest, and we regret that it should appear even for a moment to have broken down. It has worked well enough for fourteen years, and that is quite long enough to test the value of a constitutional experiment. At Morpeth, certainly, if nowhere else, the payment of a Member by voluntary con- tributions from his constituents secured a valuable and a conscientious representative.
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