TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ALL-NIGHT DEBATE.
IF the contemporary that explained so elaborately a few days ago how utterly the time had been wasted which the Government have consumed in transforming the power formerly given to the Speaker and the Chairman of Committee to declare " the evident sense of the House " that discussion should cease, into a Standing Order empowering any Mem- ber, unless forbidden by a veto from the Chair, to move the Closure, would but consider the proceedings of Monday night and Tuesday morning, we think that it would with- draw its somewhat hasty opinion. And yet on that occa- sion the Government Whips had not fully realised the character of their responsibilities. For many hours of the night, there were not present a sufficient number of Members to apply the Closure in a thin House. It was twenty minutes to 5 on Tuesday morning before Mr. W. H. Smith was able to move that the question as to the Naval Estimates "be now put," and the vote could not have been agreed to till 5 a.m. It was then necessary that a vote of credit of £3,624,100 should be proposed to carry on the Civil Service for two months, as March 22nd had arrived, and the financial year, as our readers are aware, ceases on the last day of this month. On that vote the Irish Members had a fair right to some hearing, for they had a number of grievances bearing on the Irish services to air, and though they were in great measure responsible for the enormous amount of time that had been already thrown away, it would not have been in accordance with British precedents to force on a vote of credit for the Irish Civil Services to which they objected, without listening to their remonstrances. The Irish Secretary was not then in the House, having only left it at about 4 o'clock in the morning, while the Navy vote was being steadily obstructed, and they had there- fore a plausible excuse for continuing the discussion on the vote of credit till he arrived, which was not till nearly 11 a.m. on Tuesday morning ; but after Mr. Balfour had arrived and given explanations which, so far as the Belfast riots were concerned, Mr. Sexton (who knew that the Closure would be applied, whether he chose to appear satisfied with them or not) found it good policy to treat as almost adequate, the Irish obstruction to the vote of credit was given up, though Mr. Dillon was as violent as ever in his attitude, and the House carried the vote before half-past 1 on Tuesday afternoon. That collapse of obstruction within the twenty-four hours was entirely due to the new power with which the Government was armed, and had the Whips been more au fait with their night-work, and had Mr. Balfour not been compelled by fatigue to leave the House within a very short period of the arrival of the reinforce- ment of Government Members, the twenty-two hours' sitting might easily have been shortened to one of considerably less than twelve hours. But prolonged as it was, it will be a great lesson to the country on the significance and dangers of obstruction. We wish that the outside sheet of Wednesday's Times, in which a too brief report of the obstructive proceedings is contained, could be circulated throughout the length and breadth of the land,— with Mr. Labouchere's threats of proposing twenty amendments to the vote on account ; with Dr. Tanner's remarks on comic songs ; with Mr. Conybeare's exhortation to reject the vote for all the Royal palaces and Marlborough House in tote— (this on a motion to report progress on the Navy Estimates, to the sanction of which Mr. Conybeare objected because it would hasten the vote of credit for the Civil Services)—with Mr. Molloy's anxiety about Port Hamilton (which was not pro- vided for in the vote under discussion); with Mr. J. O'Connor's historical comments on the Spanish Armada ; with Mr. Labou- ehere's liberal offer to give the Government enough money to go on with till about the middle of the Easter holidays, after which time they would have had nothing wherewith to pay their Civil Servants; with Dr. Tanner's comments on the condition of intoxi- cation in which he supposed another honourable Member to be ; with Mr. Labouchere's solicitude about "the foals reared at the Hampton Court Stud-House;' with Mr. Conybeare's solicitude as to the " waning popularity " of the Royal Family; with Mr. Wallace's comments on " the carnival of obstinacy " which the Government were celebrating; with Mr. Labouchere's desire to reduce our Cabinet Ministers to something like the pay of rail- way-traffic managers,—and a hundred other futile remarks made expressly to waste time, and for no other earthly purpose. Even the extremely condensed Times' report of the night sitting of March 21st and 22nd would be reading about as instructive
as the constituencies could find concerning the present condition of the House of Commons.
Bad as that condition is, we are persuaded that in trans- ferring the initiative for the proposing of the closure of debate from the Speaker to any Member acting without pro- hibition from the Chair, the House has made a very great advance towards the power to silence all this discreditable babble, this disgrace to Parliamentary institutions. For, of course, the motion to initiate the closure of debate will now, in nineteen oases out of twenty at least, be made by the responsible Government of the day, and made from that sense of responsibility to the country for the due apportionment of the time of the Legislature which every leader of an Adminis- tration must necessarily feel. The Speaker, under the former rule, was only empowered to interfere when he had what seemed to him perfectly clear indications as to "the evident sense of the House." He did not and could not interfere merely because he personally felt that the time of the House was being grossly wasted. That was not his business. He was told to intervene only when he could discover by the signs of impatience around him that the House was utterly weary of the discussion. Of course, he bad not such evidence as this of the impatience of the House once in a score of times where a Leader of the House, himself responsible for getting neces- sary measures passed and necessary votes of money accorded, would be perfectly aware that he could justify to the country a most peremptory interference to check idle and irresponsible waste of the public time. Mr. W. H. Smith seems to us just the man who, in his temperate and sober way, will realise this responsibility, and make the country realise it. He will not wait till he sees the House in uproar at the obstruction of men like Mr. Labouchere and Dr. Tanner. He will reckon what the House has to do and what time it has to do it in, and when he sees that the House is losing that time through the folly or the deliberate mischievousness of its Members, he will ask the House to close a discussion by which the public is losing great legislative and administrative opportunities, and by which the Members of the House are suffering, and are learn- ing the most dangerous lessons. We believe that, with such a record as the story of Monday night and Tuesday morning before it, the country will be disposed not only to support Mr. W. H. Smith in his use of the Closure, but to urge him on to use it steadily and frequently, though always with the modera- tion and fairness by which his whole conduct as Leader of the House has hitherto been characterised. Discussions on" Home, sweet Home," on the foals in the stud at Hampton Court, on the" waning popularity" of the Royal Family, and on the over-payment of Cabinet Ministers whose health is crushed by the deliberate rowdyism of the House of Commons, and a hundred such themes as these, while the services are waiting for their hardly earned salaries, and Ireland is being taught to love plunder and injustice by the very men who set the British Legislature at defiance,—are burlesques of legislation of which the country only needs to appreciate the discredit, in order to suppress them with a peremptory hand.
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