PREPARATION FOR CONSTITUTIONAL PEACE.
ONE of the regions in which when the war ceases we shall want to have peace and not chaos is that of the Constitution.- At present that noblest work of time, accident, and the instincts of an Imperial people is somewhat- battered and out of order. Worst of all, it does not possess- that fixed certainty and calm which, the poet tells us, should' be the state of the centre, even, if there are ot•the extremities the endless agitations of party politics. As the Council of Cromwell's Army pathetically told the Long Parliament, we all want to feel that we have a rock-bottom somewhere- & foundation of government which shall not be always altering, even though it is alterable on proved necessity. We want, that is, before we start again at the old business of politics, to have the Imperial Power-house thoroughly cleaned and put in order. The methods for utilizing and distributing the power remain at our disposal. The genera- tion of the power is the immediate question.
We are aware that one of the many Committees which are engaged in ruling our stars is at this moment busy discussing N./tat particular kind of electoral register we ought to have— discussing, in fact, who ought to have a vote and by what methods that right is to be acquired. That, though an im- portant item, or, if you will, the most important item, in Constitutional reform, is, we venture to say, not one to be left to a Committee in which only the two party organizations are represented. In our opinion, it would be very much better to take a bolder course altogether, and imitate what is universally done in America in the case of revisions of State Constitutions. We should appoint a National Conven- tion, first to consider and debate, and then to draw up a series of Constitutional reforms, or at any rate to devise Constitu- tional machinery. We do not suggest that the Convention should consider such questions as the advantages of demo- cracy or aristocracy, or anything of the kind. These matters would be outside its purview. Clearly it must accept the democratic basis of the Constitution, but consider what reforms and improvements are necessary in order to make the will of the people prevail—to prevent the manipulation of the power of the people by external influences. The Convention must be instructed to get rid of whatever tends to take the power out of the hands of the people as a whole and place it in those of an oligarchy of professional politicians. The Constitu- tional Convention of the American type which we desire to see set up would not, of course, override Parliament in any sense. When it had made its Report and drawn up its scheme, it would present them to Parliament, and Parliament would then accept or reject them, according as it believed them to be the will of the people, or, if that will was not clear, according as it believed them to be for the good of the people. The Constitu- tional Convention would not be a mere repetition of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Though there would be members of both Houses in it, it would also contain representa- tive men such as do not usually play any part in political life, but stand wholly outside our party system. For example, there would be public servants of high rank, whether retired or active ; ex-administrators, say, like Lord Cromer, Lord Sydenham, or Lord George Hamilton ; ex-Ambassadors like Lord Bryce ; ex-Governors - in fact, representatives of every side of the national life—professors, historians, jurists, lawyers. Labour representatives, captains of industry, and so forth, The Convention would perhaps consist of a hundred men, so as to enable a considerable number of sub-Committees to be arranged to investigate special aspects of questions, while at the same time giving opportunities for individual opinions to be heard in full debate. A body of this kind, spending one day a week in open session and three days in Committee, would soon be in a position to draw up a scheme for resettling our Constitutional machinery.
Turning for a moment from the methods by which our Constitutional machinery should be revised to the machinery itself, we should like to say a word or two in regard to three points. Let us take the question of registration first. It is obvious that the register must, in the first place, be made up by independent officials, though they would no doubt hear petitions from men who alleged that they had been wrongly left out of the electoral register. For ourselves, we may say that we have no fear whatever of adopting universal instead of household suffrage. The effect of household suffrage, even when modified by such devices as lodger votes and so forth, is in favour not of the educated but of the uneducated classes. To speak generally, ours is a married man's suffrage. But the men who marry earliest are not the best educated, but the artisans. Therefore, as things work out, the labouring classes get a greater share of political power than their numbers justify. But we do not wish to lay any special emphasis upon an argument which can be represented as partisan. It is quite sufficient, in our opinion, to state that the effect of the present franchise is undemocratic. We want the will of the majority, not of the minority, to be expressed and to prevail. We hold that the result of cny bond-fide dis- cussion as to the best way of seeing that this will prevails must be the establishment of a register which shall be continuously kept in being. Three months' residence should be a quite sufficient qualification. Meanwhile we would establish a national register or census, to be taken every year on January 1st. This, quite apart from the electoral conveni- ence, would possess enormous value for all sorts of statistical purposes. Especially would it help us in the settling down of the nation after the war. We shall want then, and for many years to come, to blow exactly how we stand in regard to par- ticular trades and vocations, and if we do not have a properly compiled national register, corrected every year, we shall be having all sorts of special registers and special inquiries ordered by Government or Parliament, which will cost a great deal more than one national comprehensive annual register. When the qualification of the voter is settled, all that will be necessary will be to place a " V." opposite his name in the margin.
We come next to the question of " One vote one value," which we assume would be agreed upon if a similar agreement were arrived at in regard to One man one vote." Here of course everything turns upon the question of the over-repre- sentation of Ireland. The Convention would have to con- sider this point, and of course, as in all disputed cases, to decide whether there is anything in Ireland's claim that the Act of Union which gave her a hundred Members in the House of Commons cannot be altered even though her relative population is so much smaller than that of the rest of the United Kingdom. Our reply to the Irish objection is that the Union is an incorporating Union, and that a majority in the House of Commons can whenever it likes, which of course is the hard letter of the law, alter the Act of Union or any other law, directly or indirectly. If, however, the senti- mental, historical, non-juridical view is pleaded, then all we have to say is that the injustice can of course be got over by leaving Ireland a hundred Members, but increasing the number of representatives in the rest of the United Kingdom. When there is so large' a number as six hundred and seventy Members already, we need not be afraid of adding another hundred, which is about all that would have to be done. In any case, it is obvious that if our system is to be democratic, we must have " One vote one value," and not let the accident of birth often give, as it does in the case of the small Irish boroughs, one man more than ten times the voting-power of others. A man in Newry has over thirty-five times the voting-power of a man in the Romford Division of Essex I A third point which the Report of the Constitutional Con- vention ought obviously to consider is the Referendum and the need of restoring the power of veto to the Constitution. The Parliament Act in effect destroyed the old semi :veto of the House of Lords as completely as the Declaration of Inde- pendence in America destroyed the veto power of the Crown in the various Colonial or State Legislatures. Most of the. American States within twenty years of the establishment of independence supplied the want of a veto power by enacting that the State Constitution could not be altered without reference to the suffrages of the people—i.e., the Referendum. We have got similarly to repair our Constitution, and replace the veto power in the hands, not of the House of Lords, however, but of those who are best entitled to wield it and whose orders cannot be criticized or disobeyed—the people themselves. But though that is the principle which we believe the demoCracy is certain to adopt sooner or later, there are various ways, good and bad, for securing its adoption, and these ought to be most carefully discussed and settled by the wise men of the kingdom, and not seized upon and made their prey by party caucuses.
We have only mentioned three representative questions which the Constitutional Convention should consider, but there are several others which we ve not space at present to discuss. We must, however, bee we leave the subject, point out that we have not forgotten that a great effort would be made to include among the subjects to be discussed by the Convention that of female suffrage. That female suffrage is in a very different position from what it was before the war we are perfectly willing to admit, but in our opinion its advo- cates would be very ill advised if they were to attempt to get the matter decided at a machinery Convention. It is much too big a question to be lumped in with the register, " One vote one value," or even the Referendum, which, after all, is only a more scientific way of finding out the will of the people than is a General Election. Female suffrage is a question of principle if ever there was one, and must be decided not before but after the machinery for ascertaining the true will of the present depositaries of power has been placed on a sound basis. However, we cannot argue this ques- tion now. nor do we dream of throwing our correspondence columns open to its discussion in any shape or form duri4 the war. We merely wish to prevent people from thinking that we had forgotten or ignored this, the most controversial of Constitutional problems.
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