THE COMMONS AS A CAREER.
IT is not unnatural that Lord Rosebery should be inclined to belittle Parliament. He says he is "a Member" of that body ; but he is only a Peer, and we can imagine no position more vexatious for an ambitious man than to be sure, if he were eligible, of election to the House of Commons, and sure also to be a great power within that House, vet to find himself disqualified by invincible etiquette. -With his knowledge of politics and of men, his command of felicitous words, and his rare gifts of humour, Lord Rosebery would always be a great figure in the Lower House ; one of the few whose rising is ex- pected with delight by their friends, and regarded with trepidation by their opponents. To be a power in the Upper House is, after all, to occupy a secondary place, to stand apart from the realities of political life, and to miss the dear delight of battle on a field where victory has in it something of the "earthquake voice" which Byron attributed to Marengo and Austerlitz. We do not wonder, therefore, that Lord Rosebery should some- times feel bitter or give expression to his bitterness, but we rather regret that he should make the feeling public. It is not for men who have been Premiers to depreciate the Parliamentary career, or to suggest that ability and energy might possibly find a, better field in the municipal life of cities. The House of Commons occasionally irritates us all, but we are all in the wrong in scolding the House of Commons, for there is nothing like it in the world, and no substitute that can be so much as sug- gested, or even seriously thought of. We say it is unideaed ; but it has governed, almost absolutely, an Empire that is felt in every corner of the planet during sixty- five years with a success unparalleled in history. We say it is vacillating ; but when in those sixty-five years has it ever turned back upon itself, or replaced any- thing of importance which it had removed ? We say it is poor in oratory ; but after a great debate the most .critical people in Europe, a people with whom grumbling is .a recognised characteristic, accept its decision as final, and thenceforward will allow no change. Great is eloquence no -doubt ; but has eloquence any other end than the per- suasiveness which has superseded it ? It is a repressed assemblage, says Lord Rosebery, where no one can revolt against Whips or be individual ; but has he forgotten the revolt against Home-rule, or can he name men more individual than the Parliamentary leaders of his own time,—Peel, and Palmerston, and Lord John, and Mr. Disraeli, and above all Mr. Gladstone ? Who dic- tated their policy to them ? To be individual in the House, we admit, one must be an individuality ; but in what assemblage of men is that not true ? Certainly it is true in every parish vestry in the world, even if it assumes the glorified form of a great municipal Council. There is little to be done in Parliament, says Lord Rose- bery, except act as part of a voting machine for the grind- ing out of laws, whereas in a great municipality the man who is felt may help to found free libraries, or gymnasia, or even — think of the glory — the mechanics' institutes made grandiose, now called "People's Palaces." Lord Rosebery forgets that one of those Commons' votes may change the position of entire races, as the prohibition of slavery did ; or modify the character of .an imperial people, as has, we believe, been done by the introduction of compulsory education. Lord Rosebery, strange to say, needs the reminder that the House of Cemmons has another function besides grinding out votes on laws. It also grinds out votes which practically elect and direct the policy of the Executive Government of this vast realm. There, as it seems to us, is the truest and the greatest function of the House of Commons. Every race can create a Government—even the blacks of Benin did, that—but to create a Government , which shrinks ...sensitively from doing wrong, which dare not for its life oppress the humblest citizen, which cannot tax, or organise armies, or make laws for a conquered people without general approval, yet which has on occasion more than the energy and unflinchingness of a despotism—recollect the Free-trade Acts or the suppression of the Indian Mutiny—that seems to us a wonderful achievement ; and to what is it due if not to the oddly elected, oddly selected representative 1 body which, because it is the House of all classes, we call the House of Commons ?
We have every respect for the government of great white cities by representative bodies, and have steadily defended the London County Council against all the leaders of the party we usually support, but it is absurd to exalt their work above that of the governing bodies of nations. It is useful work, philanthropic work, even necessary work, but it is inferior work, if only for this single reason, that the better it is done the greater is the injury inflicted in one serious respect upon the whole body of the people. Make London a paradise such as Fabians dream of, and what will become of England, out of which it will drain all that is energetic, or ambitious, or intellectual, till life in the country—the only natural and wholesome life—will be pronounced, as it already is in France and in America, too tiresome to be endured by the thoughtful. or the aspiring, or the inventive ? Lord Rosebery himself once on a time called London "a wen," and though he exaggerated then as he is exaggerating now, he indicated accurately the grand drawback to the influence of great cities, the evil quality which has made Paris a curse to France, and would, but for the Federal system, make New York a curse to the United States. In making our cities healthy we are doing unspeakable good to a community whose tendency is towards anEemia ; in making them intelligent we are pro- viding against the worst of the evils cities generate ; but in making them pleasant,—there is a side to that which Lord Rosebery once saw, but has for the purposes of this speech forgotten. As to his implied assertion that cities cultivate the powers of men better than Parliaments, we would ask him where his great citizens are, or whether he seriously believes Mr. Chamberlain, Mayor of Birmingham, to have been a wider-minded man, or in any way a greater man, than Mr. Chamber- lain who is trying to be a Providence to the Colonies, and finding, at all events, that they strain his powers more than the wards of Birmingham ever did. We regret the time of Lord Rosebery's speech, for it has been uttered at a moment when the representative principle is dis- credited on almost the entire Continent, when the French Chamber has lost its self-control, when the Austrian Cham- ber is filled by two shrieking mobs, and when the German Chamber feels and acknowledges its powerlessness against the throne. And we regret its substance because it tends to deter the young and ambitious of Great Britain from seeking a Parliamentary career. It is them we want to attract, not the middle-aged millionaires, with whom the House is choked, and who cannot within its walls acquire a training which for them has already, and oh, how im- perfectly! been completed. Every really able man under forty who turns to the citizen life when he might enter Parliament is a loss to the nation which Lord Rosebery, of all men, ought to perceive is of more value than many cities. He not only while making his speech at Glasgow did not acknowledge that, but he even appealed to the selfishness of men against it, the whole drift of Ins speech being that the Councillor or the Bailie has a livelier life than the Member. We do not care much if he has, holding the life of literary interests much livelier than either, but we should gravely question the assertion. After all, the life in a City Council is not usually a lively one, while the Member, even if he never makes a position for himself, and never escapes the authority of the 'Whips, lives for half the year in the very centre of great affairs, can always, if he will take a little trouble, learn the true story of events at first hand, and every now and then is a 4 felt person, even if only through his vote, in accepting or 1 rejecting an important proposal, or—which involves the fate of many proposals—in supporting or overthrowing the Lord Rosebery of the day. Surely Lord Rosebery must acknowledge that to be as interesting a power as the power to persuade a City Council that it is time to build a gymnasium, or to establish a swimming-bath, or even to ask Mr. Passmore Edwards to beguile the citizens into voting a halfpenny rate for the collection of a free city library. The amenity of a city is a great thing to secure, hut it is hardly as great as the freedom of a country, or its place among the nations, or its grandeur in the history which the Gibbon of the next millennium will one day write. We suppose it was all said for momentary effect, and that if Lord Rosebery were ad- dressing an assemblage of rats, he would be eloquent on their value as scavengers of the sewers ; but it must be a little galling to politicians who are giving their lives to drive on the great machine for which the opinion of the House of Commons provides the motive power.
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