TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR BALFOITR AND THE NEW RULES.
MR. BALFOUR has the two best qualities of a leader. He is bold and he is gentle. He shows himself to be in hearty sympathy with those whom he has to lead, and yet he shows that he is well in advance of them in his insight into their needs and embarrassments. Nothing could have been better than his speeches, first, in moving the new rules last week, and next, on Monday night, in his reply to the not perhaps very effectual criti- cisms to which he had listened. Last week he made it clear to all his hearers that the present arrangements for Supply are almost intolerable, and that it is in the interest of the House of Commons itself, and not specially in that of the Government of the day, that he is proposing a reform. But the House of Commons, though a very sagacious, is also a very tenacious, Assembly. And the mere words "gag," "guillotine," and so forth, which are used to indicate compulsory terminations of debate, excite it both to laughter and to jealousy. We are not sure that the laughter is not the more dangerous mood of the two. When speeches like that of Mr. Bowles on Monday,—a very amusing speech, it must be confessed, —are made, the House of Commons falls to comparing what its leader has said in Opposition with what he says in Office, without looking into the occasions on which he has spoken. And so the true thread of the issue is lost in the riotous sort of carnival,—the pelting with sweetmeats,— with which Mr. Bowles indulged it on Monday night. He posed as a comic kind of martyr. He praised the Govern- ment for taking Fridays for Supply, and then he went on to quiz it for the tyranny with which it insisted that that step was useless unless it submitted to have its time for Supply rigidly economised and measured out, and told the House it was like the policy of a money-lender who, when mired to lend a man a hundred pounds on good security, Protests that he can only afford to do so on condition that the borrower shall take some old sherry and cigars which he has on hand, by way of part-equivalent for the ready money. Of course the House roared, and of course it was diverted from the meaning and drift of the new rules, which are not at all adapted to give the Government a fresh advan- tage over private Members, but, on the contrary, to secure something like method and order in the expenditure of the time of the House on the duty of Supply,—a duty which recurs every year, just as a man's dressing and undressing occurs every day, and wastes more time if it is done unmethodically, and with arbitrary interruptions, than any kind of austerity in limiting ordinary debate can compen- sate. Mr. Bowles was extremely amusing with his complaints that what wanted closuring was not private Members so much as the constituencies which insist on local reforms, like the Crofter constituencies of Ross-shire or the Hebrides. But he was so amusing because he was determined to be a Parliamentary wit, and therefore made his speech a succession of verbal fallacies,—a sort of practical pun on the superficial analogy between putting down debate where debate is the sifting of entirely new proposals, and putting it down where it is put down only to economise the time for the due transaction of a regular piece of routine business which it needs a good deal of administrative attention to do in a business-like fashion, but which must be done, and on much the same principles, every year. How much Mr. Bowles's jokes misled innocent men, may be seen in the pathos of Mr. Sydney Gedge, who really imagined himself the martyr that Mr. Bowles only assumed to be in order to get a hit at his leaders. Mr. Gedge was plunged in genuine grief at the desertion by the Government of that Liberty of debate for which he had so often pleaded with them when they were in Opposition ; forgetting that every- thing contributes to liberty of debate which methodises routine work and helps the House to accomplish it in a punctual and efficient manner. The very key to the new rules is the notorious fact that Supply is at present so very ineffectually conducted that all the more important votes are often passed without any adequate comment on the administrative defects in their allotment and ex- penditure in previous years, just because the end of the Session is approaching and the House is emptying, and an effective public opinion can no longer be brought to bear on the criticisms of those who remain. Mr. Bowles and Mr. Gedge appeared to assume that if they alone remained through August and September to criticise the use made of the votes in Supply of previous years, the criticism would be quite as useful as if it had been given in a full House with a keen audience present to discriminate between significant and trivial censure. But no assumption could be idler. As they well know, with an exhausted Government, and an exhausted Reporter& gallery, and an empty House with only an official quorum that rallies for a division but remains in the library or the dining-room till the division bell rings, laborious efforts at criticism are just as worthless as nothing else,— except only words without listeners,—can contrive to be. Mr. Bowles would not see, and Mr. Gedge probably did not see, the fundamental difference between applying the gag or guillotine to the discussion of new Bills which need not be passed at all, or might be passed, after full discussion in the country, a year or two later than that in which they are proposed, and applying it so as to economise the time of the House for the annual routine of Supply, and thereby both making the actual discussion of it far more practical, and the reserve of time for the consideration of the more important legis- lative proposals, more ample and adequate. Private Members who resist any methodising of Supply as a sort of tyranny, are really cutting their own throats. The time now wasted on Supply is so much deducted from the opportunity of useful criticism, and the new rules when at work will increase, not diminish, the opening for effective debate both in Supply and in the course of legislation. To quarrel with Mr. Balfour's proposals because they may sometimes inconvenience a private Member, is like killing the goose which lays the golden eggs. Mr. Balfour, as he carefully explained, has introduced these new rules at the beginning of a Session when there is no pressure on the time of the Government at all, because he believes them to be conceived entirely in the interests of the whole House, and wishes them to be considered by the House without any sense of emergency or excitement. The result showed that the greater part of the House was fully persuaded by Mr. Balfour of the value and the elaborate impartiality of the new rules. Indeed, when he suggested that the distribution of time between the various heads of Supply, should be settled by the four Whips with a decided leaning towards the wishes of the Opposition leaders, it became almost impossible to doubt that, so far from intending to stop the mouth of criticism, he really wished to give it freer and fuller expression. Nothing, indeed, could have been better than Mr. Balfour's conduct of the whole debate. He was as lucid as the most vigorous of leaders, and as devoid of any kind of irritability as if he had regarded the criticism of the Oppo- sition as a personal favour to himself. This told so much upon Sir William Harcourt that he commenced his speech by giving Mr. Balfour's proposals a frank support, though he seems to have been compelled later on by the depression of his party to have been induced to pass into certain cavils and sneers which were quite out of keeping with the opening passages of his speech, and had perhaps been prepared before he knew how completely in the interests of the whole House Mr. Balfour's plans had been con- ceived. The debate was one of the most remarkable testimonies to the powers and temper of the Conservative Leader which we can recall in our rather far-reaching memory of Parliamentary proceedings. And yet it was a debate on proposals of the greatest magnitude, which will probably revolutionise the effectiveness of House of Commons procedure.
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