THE CHANGE IN PARLIAMENT.
T" great change which has come over Parliamentary parties and Parliamentary procedure can hardly be better considered than in the week in which the Session has passed the point at which even the very longest of all previous Sessions bad. terminated, and that, too, with probably, at the least, a full month of further debate before us. Even if there is no further adjournment to January, there will still have been an excess of a month over the very longest of all previous Sessions, without any apparent reason to assign for the long labour and the protracted strain. The longest of all previous Sessions was one in which the United Kingdom was in a condition of all but revolution, and when, under the popular demand for Reform, there was the best reason for the unexampled effort and delay. Now no one can pretend that Parliament has undergone the least anxiety justifying the long strain to which a statesman, himself of unexampled age, has deliberately prompted it. It is not as if the great coal strike had caused the mighty exertion. Till a day or two before Mr. Gladstone an- nounced the intention of the Government to intervene between the coal-owners and the miners, the Government had not only held quite aloof from the subject, but the Prime Minister had publicly announced that he saw no sufficient ground to justify intervention. Indeed, Parlia- ment had shown itself almost as little concerned in the coal struggle as it had been in the affairs of China or Peru. The chief enterprise of the Session had been a portentous, but ineffectual, Irish Bill, which everybody knew would be carried by a very narrow majority in the Commons,—which everybody also knew that the House of Lords would reject, and which the House of Lords did reject, without eliciting the smallest eien of popular emotion either in Ireland or anywhere else. The English measures, moreover, which cause the great prolongation of the Session, are measures concerning which no trace of popular excitement has been shown. For anything we see, the Employers' Liability Bill and the Parish Councils Bill might have waited till either the next Session or the next Parliament without causing the summons of a single indignation meeting, or the assembly of a single mob, all over the land. Outside the House, the people of the United Kingdom were quite unconscious of any crisis. In the House, there was frequently a difficulty in preventing a count-out ; and the reports of the debates have been as, short and uneventful as they have been supremely dull. As for critical divisions, no one has even pretended to snatch at the newspaper with any eagerness to see the fate of the Ministry. A great popular leader like Mr. Chamberlain has, indeed, absented himself till the opening of the present week, and no one has even so much as suggested that his absence was of the smallest im- portance to the people or the State. These protracted Parliamentary discussions have been as profoundly unin- teresting as if they had been the discussions of a Vestry about a new drainage-rate, or the quarrels of a School Board over a disputed class-book. What, then, has been the reason of all this almost intolerable labour and strain ? Simply this, that the majority,—the narrow majority,—of the representatives of the people are conscious that if they do not pass within the next year three or four measures which the local leaders of the Gladstonian Party can hold up to the con- stituencies as redemptions of the pledges given two or three years ago at Newcastle, the next General Election is sure to go against them ; while even if they do pass three or four such measures, it is very likely to go against them all the same. Parties are very evenly divided, and on almost all questions they are very evenly divided without the mass of the people caring two straws which of the parties may happen to win. Even in Ireland, it is the Irish re- presentatives only who appear to care, and they care ten times as much as the people they represent, who make no sign either when a Home-rule Bill just scrapes through the Commons, or when it is rejected by an overwhelming majority of the Lords. These gigantic efforts of our representatives are watched languidly in the United Kingdom without any evidence of public interest. If it were a question which of the two great parties would first produce a champion able to achieve a walk of a thousand miles in a thousand hours, it would excite almost ten times the interest which is taken in any aspect of either the Employers' Liability Bill or the Parish Councils Bill. It is the necessity of achieving something that the local leaders can flaunt before their followers' eyes as a popular victory for the party before the General Election, which leads to all this cruel over- work, and those endless discussions in Committee. There must be something to show as the achievement of the majority before the ballot-boxes are set to work again. Otherwise the almost inevitable recoil of the pendulum would come, and the narrow majority would vanish altogether, without any popular outbreak of either joy or grief.
And yet the change which has taken place in Par- liamentary procedure and tactics is of far greater importance than any one appears to see. One great change for the worse is that the House of Commons is making itself uninteresting and insignificant to the people at large. They see the disputes about nothing which are always going on, and they see that the greater the labour expended, the less is the national result. The differences between the two parties were never smaller, and never of less interest. The largest changes made, appear to be made almost by accident, as a consequence of the consent of the leaders on both sides without any sub- stantial discussion at all. For instance, only this week the Liberals have caught at the willingness of the Con- servatives to invest married women with a vote on all local government questions, and have engrafted it on a Bill introduced without any such intention at all, though the change, if it be made, will be about ten times as socially important As any other provision of the Bill. Yet this, just because the leaders on both sides happen to agree concerning it, is carried by a side-wind without any of those endless bickerings which make up the main subject of Parliamentary debate. We have the mint and anise and cumin of politics discussed at inordinate length, and the weightier matters of the law determined by a mere accident,—an apparently unimportant division showing an unexpected under-current of common feeling, and therefore followed by a sudden tack of the Government to catch a puff of air on which they had not counted. This is not a condition of things to improve the prestige of Parliament. When the people see enormous labour and squabbling without end expended on matters which they 'hardly understand, and then a great and far-reaching change adopted almost without debate, Parliament does not gain but lose in the esteem of the nation. People see that there is not only much cry and little wool, but some- times a great haul of wool without any cry at all. That looks like a Parliament that has lost its sense of the pro- portions of things, and debates a great many petty points for the sake of debating them, while it does not see the far-reaching consequences of very important points. We are not quarrelling with the decision in the present case. Our own belief is that, in questions of local government,— very often semi-domestic questions,—married women are not less, but better, qualified to vote than single women. But we do say that it is not creditable to Parliament to carry by a side-wind a change of far greater social conse- quence than the minute questions they have been squabbling about with interminable and intolerable reiteration.
Moreover, Parliament does not seem to see that the more it overworks itself, the less effective is its work, and the less effective it is likely to be. With over-fatigue, the habit OT pettiness grows. There is less of freshness, less of masculine sagacity in the House of Commons now than there ever was, though there is more of cleverness and educated capacity. These long squabbles about nothing deteriorate the judg- ment of both sides of the House, and certainly diminish the respect of the outside public for the decisions of the Commons. Fatigue enfeebles the brain, and renders Par- liament more and more disposed to hair-splitting, and to lay emphasis on insignificant matters. We have no doubt that another Session like the one now drawing (we hope) towards a close, would reduce the present Parliament to a sort of imbecility. Overworked men seem to be unable to arrive at any decision, especially when they are overwork.. ing not from any real enthusiasm for the work they are doing. but in order to whitewash themselves with their 0.)nstituents for having spent so much more time than they ought to have spent in proposing an ineffectual and most dangerous revolution in which their constituents are not really in the least interested. After flogging a dead horse for seven months, they have certainly quite unfitted themselves for driving a horse that is not dead at a reasonable pace and for a reasonable purpose.
Previous page
