THE GRAND COMMITTEES.
IT is quite right that, considering Mr. Gladstone's great confidence in the experiment of Grand Committees, and his perfect readiness to meet the wishes of the House by giving to his proposed experiment a purely tentative character, the experiment should be made. If successful, it will, no doubt, be a great success ; and if, as we fear, the experiment proves to be unsuccessful, we do not see why it should involve any waste of time except in the two Grand Committees them- selves. Some of those who least approve of the Grand Com- mittees consider that if the experiment fails, another Session will be wasted for legislative purposes. We cannot see the reason for this very pessimist view. So far as we can see, the failure of the plan of Grand Committees will mean simply this,—that the House will not accept the discussions of these Committees as at all equivalent to a discussion in a Com- mittee of the whole House, and, will be very much disposed to find or make excuses for discussing everything afresh. Even if it does so, though the time spent by the Grand Committees in revising the measures submitted to them will have been more or less wasted, the House itself will be in no worse position than it would have occupied if the experiment had not been tried. It will still have its usual number of full sittings, and the help of the New Rules to economise that number of sittings to the utmost. The experiment, there- fore, even if it fails, will not waste the time of the House, though it will waste the time of the Grand Committees them- selves. And valuable hints may be gained from these experiments, even though they be unsuccessful. We are heartily glad, therefore, that the experiment is to be tried, for there is no one whose experience of the House is so large and so rich in official suggestions as Mr. Gladstone's. And yet we are not very hopeful of the result. We cannot say that even the remarkable speech of Monday has convinced us that the Grand Committees will be trusted by the House as Committees' of the whole House are trusted, or even so far trusted as to render them a useful and substantial part of the legislative organisation. We will briefly explain our reasons for this unhopeful view.
Mr. Gladstone's great point was that time is necessarily wasted by submitting to the consideration of the whole House that which has interest only for a part of it. The result of this course is that the House can only deal with one subject at a time, though in reality it is not the whole House which so deals with any subject, but successive portions of the House, one of which discusses financial ques- tions, another trade questions, a third legal questions, and so forth, Mr. Gladstone, observing this, argues that if all the more minute discussions on the details of these various questions could be taken in Grand Committees which should not over- lap each other, and should not interfere with the general business of the House, a vast deal of time might be economised. The Grand Committee on Legal Procedure might, for instance, discuss the new Penal Code at the same time when the Grand Committee on Commercial Questions was dis- cussing the principle of Patents, and if the former Committee virtually included all who took a living interest in the reform of the Penal Code and the second Committee all who take an interest in the laying-down a new principle for Patents, the work done on these Committees would bring the measures into such shape that the House would find few matters of detail worth a second discussion ; and so the dreary discussions on those subjects in Committee of the whole House would be saved.
The force of that reasoning, however, greatly depends on the implicit assumption that either the time during which the House itself has hitherto sat in Committee might be devoted to simultaneous Committees on different classes of Bills, or else that those Committees should sit at hours when the House is not accustomed to sit at all. Without either the one or the other assumption, there could be no saving of time. In the former case, the saving of time would result solely from the detailed discussion of two or more subjects going on simultaneously, instead of in succession. In the other case, the saving would result not only from this cause, but also from a great in- crease of labour, since the Grand Committees would have to sit in the morning, or on days when the House was in vacation ; while the House would have the same time as before at its disposal for dealing with such sub- jects as the whole House alone could deal with. But is either of these assumptions really practicable ? The former is universally assumed to be out of the question. The whole course of the discussion has assumed that the House will not appropriate to the Grand Committees a minute of the time devoted to its own session, and it is evidently quite right that this should be so. If it ceased to sit in order that Grand Com- mittees might sit simultaneously in its place, the country would note the certain fact that the House was itself doing less work than before, and would be exceedingly dissatisfied with that condition of things, unless the results were so good as to vindicate triumphantly so very strong a measure as diminished sittings of the House, in the face of accumulating legislative disappointments and rapidly-growing work. The first assumption, then, that the House might allow simul- taneous Grand Committees to sit instead of sitting itself, has not even been discussed by the House of Commons. The second assumption, that the Committees must sit at times other than those when the House itself sits, is the one which has been accepted universally, and Mr. Gladstone has even been compelled to guarantee that they shall never sit except when the House is not in session. And this is perfectly reasonable, bee tine it would be most unfair to compel a Member interested both in the proceedings of the Grand Com- mittee to which he belonged, and in the general proceedings of the House, to absent himself from either the one or the other, though he might be equally bound by his duty to attend to both. But now the difficulty will be to find times when these Grand Committees can sit consistently with the private engage- ments of their Members. How can active barristers, pro- foundly interested in the reform of legal procedure, sit during the mornings, when they ought to be in Court attending to their briefs ? How can active directors attend the Grand Committee, say, on Patents, or on Bankruptcy, when they are due at Railway Boards or at the Banks ? And suppos- ing that active and ambitious men are unable to attend the meetings of those Grand Committees in which they are most deeply interested, and that in consequence any Bill takes a shape they disapprove, is it to be supposed that they will not bring the whole subject before the House, and complain bitterly that their view was not adequately considered by the Grand Committee ? Now, if this happened often,—and it must happen occasionally,—we should be in very great danger of this,—that the details discussed by the Grand Committees would all be dragged again before the House by active mem- bers of these Committees who had not• been able to attend, or, if they had attended, had not been satisfied with the respect accorded to their suggestions. That there will be much jealousy in the House of the proceedings of these Grand Committees, we have no doubt at all. And the fear is that these jealousies will lead to even longer wrangles after the Committees have sat, than there would have been any occasion for, had the Committees never sat at all. It seems to us nearly certain that a great many able lawyers eager for political distinction, and a great many able commercial men who have their own views on commercial matters, will be unable to devote the hours requisite to these Committees ; and that where that is the case, they will feel the keenest jealousy of an adverse decision by such Committees in their absence, and w ill desire to rehearse to the House at length their grievances and their counsels. If that should be so, the Grand Committees will hardly bring about the economy of time for which Mr. Gladstone hopes. This is why there seems to us to be grave reason to fear that the experiment, bold and reasonable as it certainly is, will fail.
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