PHINEAS FINN IN AMERICA AND ENGLAND.
THEfight in the American House of Representatives over the pay of Members has been violent beyond all pre- cedent, and has roused the Press to a degree of temper which we do not understand, but has ended in a manner which Englishmen will not, we think, deem very unwise. We cannot acquit the Members of that House of selfishness, for, after all, that "back-pay steal" was entirely indefensible, but they are probably right in the compromise upon which they seem finally to have settled. They have abolished the old scandal of " mileage " once for all, replacing it by a pledge to pay the actual expenses of travelling—which is indispensable, if equality between a Member for Maryland and the Member for Oregon is to be maintained—and have assigned to each member a salary of $6,000 a year. That is now about £1,000 per annum, and on a return to specie payments will be £1,200 a year, and has been received in the States with a great deal of annoyance. All intellectual labour is there less paid than with us, the average being probably half even in New York, and in country districts, which contain so much larger a proportion of the people than with us, the rate of remuneration is very bad indeed. Two-thirds of the country professionals, we are told, receive less on the average than they would earn as skilled mechanics, and become, of all classes in the Union, the most carefully economical. Two thousand dol- lars is, out of the great cities, quite an income for a professional man, and for the taxpayers to pay £1,200 to Congressmen, who are regarded only as political servants, and distinctly de- spised by the higher class, is considered oppressive. If this feeling should lie deep, then, of course, the amount must be changed, for a genuine and permanent severance of feeling between elector and elected is always dangerous to representative government ; but we suspect Congress, though possibly selfish in motive, has been judicious in act. It is better for a country to be represented by the kind of men who desire a professional income, than by the kind of men who are content with a maintenance, if only they may steal a little. Twelve hundred a year is enough to enable a member to live and keep his hands clean, and devote himself to his work as he would to any other business, and when that is discovered, better men will come. forward to the polls, the best being excluded still by the preposterous rule, adapted only to times when newspapers and telegraphs were not, which disqualifies a man for election outside his own district.
We wonder—it is a dull season, and one may wonder over a constitutional point, even if it be somewhat abstract—how such a system would work in this country. The proposal, owing partly to the intense dislike with which it is viewed by the wealthy, and partly to the sound political instinct of the people, has never been heartily pressed here—we do not re- member a single division upon it—but it has always been a point in the Democratic programme, has been adopted by every Parliament in the world, except the Germanic and our own, and may at any moment be forced on by the electors as a serious demand. If adopted, and adopted in the American form—that is, by treating Members as average professionals— it would, we fear, prove an evil, mitigated only by one gain. The rush for seats would be as terrific as the rush for any paid appointment given by votes—as, for instance, a Coronership, or a living which belongs to the ratepayers,—
almost always is. Not only working-men, but entirely
new classes, such as small country attorneys—cultivated in a way, but ignorant of politics—would contend for every seat, and would in all human probability buy many of them with nearly impracticable promises—rubbish about the abolition of all taxes, and the like. The struggle would be infinitely fiercer and more embittered, and despite the example of the French Chamber under Louis Philippe, we cannot but doubt whether the class returned would be equally good, equally exempt from bribery, or equally ready to resist the pressure of some organised clique devoted to an ism. They would vote better and more steadily, considering this their "work ;" but they would talk to the outside world, and not to the House, to the people who had paid them, and who having obtained that vantage-ground would be impu- dently pertinacious. We have heard of a Dissenting clergyman who, after giving, as he thought, full satisfaction to his flock, suddenly found himself dismissed. The vicar of the parish, who had liked him, was curious about the dis- missal, and asked one of the deacons' wives what the charge was against the forsaken pastor. " Oh ! nothing, Sir, that you'd consider ; but he won't preach about Dan'l and the types, and as we pay him, he shell!" There would be a good deal of that spirit, we fear, in letters to "our Member," when he was once paid, just as there is already a good deal of it in the curious annoyance felt by voters in great boroughs if the candidate distributes no cards. He wants something of them, it is thought, and he should ask for it civilly. We do not suppose that in England the rich would be quite ostracised, but the plan would help to ostracise them, by arousing the very kindly and very odd instinct of Englishmen to help men because they want help, not because they, of all others, deserve help. Dickens's idea of electing the man who had eight children and no lungs for Town Crier was, though ex- aggerated, a keen stroke of humorous observation, and is the secret even now of scores of elections to offices accompanied with salary. What with this feeling, the tendency of paid Members to become delegates only, the excessive fear of disso- lution or resignation, and the perpetual competition for seats, payment, even if heavy, would in England probably be most pernicious. If light, it might be almost ruinous.
And yet there is another side to the question which should not be overlooked. It is impossible to deny that payment does in America leave the people free to choose from among the whole population—the real restriction being the residence law—while in England choice is limited to a section of the community comparatively very small in numbers, and of a somewhat unduly uniform type. There never probably was a time when it was more difficult for a poor but cultivated man,—say a man of £500 a year—to enter the House of Commons. The legitimate expenses have nominally been cut down, and bribery may be avoided by a little firmness ; but still at every borough election there is a sum to pay varying from £250 in small boroughs to £2,000 in very large boroughs, where the mere expense of sending cards is sometimes £1,000. When this has been paid off, there are subscriptions, which you can avoid as Mr. Trollope's hero, Phineas Finn, did, by boldly pleading poverty, but which can be avoided in no other way ; while avoidance pro- bably produces the impression that you are not quite solvent. It is nearly impossible for a Member to live at all on £500 a year in London, for his expenses are sure to rise with his rank ; but even if he does, if he has the moral courage to take cheap chambers, stump into the House with an umbrella, and generally behave as if his virtue were sufficient wrapping, he will still be at a disadvantage among his colleagues. Not that they will care, in any personal way, twopence about his poverty. If he is able, and can speak, or suggest, or help on the machine in any way, they will remember his poverty just as little as, being amusing, they will avoid him at dinner, but they will, for all that, think him something of an ad-venturer. Phineas Finn has the luck to fascinate all the women, but most of the men at heart think of him as of a man -whose profession is political life. They will never believe that he does not want office, except as everybody else does ; that he is not "hungry ;" that he is not trying to conciliate his chiefs. Very likely he is doing none of these things, though Phineas certainly was hungry ; but they will fancy it, and the Clubs will fancy it still more, because they have a little less of the knowledge that leads to a conclusion. And the poor Member will find that an impression of his poverty will spread and will seriously militate against him, hampering
him in all sorts of ways, and reacting against his credit with his constituents. The effect of such a position, except in very rare cases, is disastrous to the Member himself. He begins to hate the rich imbeciles whom before he regarded with only a faint contempt, to make comparisons, to feel not uneasy, but conscious, and usually slightly bitter. If office does not fall to him, he gets worried with small debts ; if it does, it becomes too valuable to him, and he either sinks into a regular hack—the usual fate—or a regular rebel, asserting his points of difference for fear he should be some day wanting to himself. In America an aspirant has none of this trouble, because office is given to men outside Congress, but in England it is so well understood, that no wise statesman would recom- mend a poor man to enter Parliament, that a poor Peer avoids his House, that entire classes retire voluntarily from the contest, and leave Government as a business almost exclusively to the rich or, at all events, the independent. There is no harm in that whatever—Mr. Gladstone says that there is much goad —except this harm—that the reservoir of force to draw upon is apt to be too. small, that any form of intellect will sometimes do for a Cabinet, that the young are excluded, and that genius is scarcely ever found in place except, as has happened, in the ranks of the aristocracy. Heavy pay to Members would alter much of that, would at least widen and deepen the reservoir, but at a price which a sound political instinct has hitherto forbidden this country to pay. It dreads corruption more than it dreads stupidity, and it entertains, on the whole, the wiser dread of the two. The stupid man can at least trust some one who is not stupid, but bribe-taking is the Anglo-Saxon temptation, and the bribe-taker's in- tellect only makes him a little more dangerous to the commonwealth. Whether a large salary would give us able men without introducing bribe-takers into the House may be an open question, and is certainly the subject of much con- flicting evidence, One serviqe seeming to become pure from large salaries, while another becomes less and less rigid in its pecuniary morals. But we should say, on the whole, that the salary is a poor protection, that its best result is to secure educated competitors, and that England, in resolving as it does to elect only the rich or the aristocratic, suffers, and that as yet only in a moderate degree, from want of brain. Rockingham to secure Burke to the country had to pay him £2,000 a year, and the man who now enters the House with less, and that tolerably secure, runs a risk which only complete success can thoroughly excuse.
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