MR. HORSMAN AND LORD HARTINGTON'S MOTION.
IN the present House of Commons, Mr. Horsman is in his element. He finds a contented audience ; for the apathy of the Liberals rather inclines them to listen with pleasure to the disaffected personages of their own party :—and he finds a sufficient number of occasions for appearing on the stage as a deus ex machincl who is to rebuke his friends and magnani- mously pour consolation upon his foes. Thus he can avoid, as he has ever done, debates bristling with difficult detail, debates on local taxation and savings'-banks or friendly societies, and yet find ample occasion for reciting questionable history and pass- ing high moral judgments from which men may gather the degeneracy of the present political age, and the wisdom of that generation of giants amongst whom as his tone seems to imply, he was not the hindmost. On Monday night he was in his most historic and patronising mood. The resolutions of Lord Hartington gave him an opportunity of posing in a position of vast superiority to the degenerate politicians of to-day,—in the position of one who recalled the days of ancient time, when questions of Privilege were treated with that grave impartiality in which party feeling had no share, and settled by consultations between the Government and the leader of the Opposition, — when the head of the Government pointed out to the House the best course to be taken, not as head of the Government, but only as leader of the House of Commons, and when he was seconded in advising that course by the leader of Opposition. Nor was Mr. Horsman content with recalling the grander memories of the past. He specially rallied his unworthy leader —Lord Hartington—on the folly as well as the want of dignity in the recent Liberal proceedings. He related how, during the minutes when Lord Harlington was promising Mr. Sullivan to
take up the question of the Privileges of the House in relation to the rights of the Press, he watched Mr. Disraeli's face, and ob- served that for thirty years back it had never worn a more mischievous expression. Further, according to Mr. Horsman, nothing could be more absurd than the present rules on these subjects, except any proposal to deviate from them, —a sufficient testimony, one would suppose, to the practical wisdom of the rules, if it did not unfortunately happen that the House has itself been compelled to deviate from them within the last few weeks, and found itself still more seriously embar- rassed by them when on another occasion it was unable, without inaugurating a very dangerous precedent, to deviate from them. However, the re'sume' of recent events on which Mr. Horsman based the severe criticisms passed by him on his party, had the single defect that it was a dream,—hardly even founded on fact. In the first instance, when Mr. 0. Lewis moved that the publication of the Report of the Foreign Loans Cotumittee's proceedings was a breach of Privilege, the head of the Govern- ment at once gave his countenance to Mr. Lewis, instead of ask- ing the advice of the Opposition, and this although the course taken was so hasty and injudicious that Mr. Disraeli had him- self subsequently to confess that he was taken by surprise, and had not sufficiently considered what he was about. The sin, therefore, of not placing the question of Privilege above party, was, in the first instance, not that of Lord Hartington, but of the head of the Government himself, who plunged headlong into the difficulties before him without taking counsel of any one. As to the pledge of Lord Hartington to take up the sub- ject, on which Mr. Horsman was so caustic, it was given, as the House very well knows, after Mr. Disraeli had rashly declared the intention of the Government to propose no change in the matter, and after Mr. Sullivan had threatened to force that position by availing himself freely of the right of espying "strangers." Every one knows that Mr. Sullivan was ex- pected to use this right on occasion of Dr. Kenealy's motion concerning the Tichborne trial,—that such a use of the right was viewed with great alarm on both sides of the House, as one that was likely to confirm most dangerously the popular delusion on the subject of the Tichborne trial, —and that the Government no less than the Opposition were eager for some mode of diverting Mr. Sullivan from his unwise purpose. When Lord Hartington intervened with the promise to propose some remedy for the anomaly, on condition that Mr. Sullivan should forego his purpose, Mr. Disraeli was probably much more relieved than any other Member of the House, and the expression of transcendental mischief which Mr. Horsman discovered on his face was most likely nothing but the gleam of a lightened heart passing over that im- passive mask which he usually wears. On the first occasion, on which Mr. Biggar actually put on the screw by "espying" strangers, while the Prince of Wales was waiting to hear the debate on the deterioration of the breed of English horses, Lord Hartington actually did second Mr. Disraeli's motion for the suspension of the Standing Orders ;—a step which, taken as it was, without notice, was, by the way, a very drastic measure, even though the Heir to the Crown was in attendance; and when the debate on Lord Hartington's Resolutions was interrupted, within a few minutes of Mr. Disraeli's elaborate apology for the unwritten law of the House of Commons, there was no possibility of united action as between the Treasury Bench and the leader of Opposition, since the Treasury Bench was giving the cue to the House to declare Lord Hartington's proposals superfluous and dangerous. Moreover, Mr. Horsman's array of authorities to show the danger of Lord Hartington's course applied, so far as it applied at all, only to the resolution about the exclusion of strangers, and not at all to the resolutions as to the right of the Press to report debates to which the Reporters are, by the desire of the House, admitted. Hence every element in the picture drawn by Mr. Horsman's speech was in some way distorted and misleading. It was not any fault of Lord Hartington's that no consultation was held behind the Speaker's chair on the question of Privilege when it first started up. It was not any fault of Lord Hartington's that Mr. Disraeli by his optimist admiration for the admitted anomalies of the old practice, provoked Mr. Sullivan into threatening to espy strangers when Dr. Kenealy got up to move on the Tichborne case. It was Lord Hartington's spontaneous move which induced Mr. Sullivan to abandon his design. It was by Lord Hartington's aid that the Standing Order was suspended after a very revolutionary fashion, when the Heir Apparent was waiting to hear a debate interrupted by Mr. Biggar. And it was only because Mr. Disraeli gave so unqualified a resistance to Lord Harlington% Resolutions,—a resistance which he was soon compelled to withdraw as regarded one of them,—that Mr. Sullivan's threat took effect at the moment when Mr. Gathorne Hardy rose to support the un- reasonable policy announced by his leader.
Under these circumstances Lord Hartington had a complete defence against attack, and might, if he had chosen, have exposed Mr. Horsman's airy history in very effective style. But the truth is that Lord Hartington cares almost as little about discharging effectively his duties as leader, as Mr. Horsman cares to see them so discharged. The noble Marquis gets through his part rather as a task than as a labour of love. What he says is very sensible, but there is very little heart in it. He says as much as is absolutely necessary, and no more. As are the followers, so is the leader. There never was a party that was less of a party than the Liberals at the present moment. There never was a party leader who was less of a party leader. Lord Hartington leads almost as if the whole business were a bore, about which the least said is soonest mended. He hardly cares even to give a rap to mutineers. The Liberal party, as he intimated in his speech at Lewes before he was elected leader, ought to regard itself for the present as a sort of Liberty Hall, where all sorts of views are welcome, and why not Mr. Horsman's? If any man chose to turn things so completely topsy-turvy as to maintain that Lord Hartington is a bitter partisan who carries the spirit of party into unheard-of extremes, why discourage so novel a view, which, after all, may actually persuade a few credulous Radicals that Lord Hartington cares more for the prospects of the Liberal cause than he actually does ? To our notion, a more comical conception of Lord Hartington was never suggested. But for that very cause, Mr. Horsman's picture of him probably gratified Lord Hartington, and made him think himself a much more formidable fellow than he had ever deemed himself before. Indeed in the glow of his probably plea- surable surprise, when he found himself credited with a thoroughly unscrupulous use of destructive weaponsnever before employed for party purposes, he found it quite impossible to be severe on an orator who had thus idealised him—the mild and temperate Monmouth—into the cruel, but dashing Claverhouse of the Liberal Army. Indeed, apprised for the first time by Mr. Hors- man of the fury of his onset, he fell somewhat below even his ordinary standard of tameness. There was something quite comic in the contrast between Mr. Horsman's fancy sketch of the violent and unscrupulous tactics of the leader of the Liberal party, and Lord Hartington's very meek demeanour, when he got up to reply on behalf of the Opposition, and roared "as gently as a sucking dove."
With regard to the question at issue, it is obvious that, in rendering it impossible for a single Member to eject the Reporters without a division of the House on the subject, Mr. Disraeli has done the very least that was necessary to avoid continual fiascos, and not nearly as much as the occasion required. Lord Hartington was quite. right in saying that if, in former times, the House was right in passing resolutions which made the publication of its debates a breach of Privilege, in quite other times like the present, when all the power of the House is due to publicity, the House would be right in avowing its wish for publicity, and reversing the now useless and mischievous resolutions of former days. As the matter now stands, the publication by any newspaper of proceedings in Parliament or Committees of the House may at any moment be declared a breach of Privilege, without even the allegation that such publication misrepresented any one, or that it was made against the wish of Parliament. That seems to us, we confess, perfectly ludicrous, as well as mischievous. Newspaper writers do not stand on their dignity,—probably, as newspaper writers, they never realised that they had a dignity to stand on,—or they would not consent to be merely permitted to violate Par- liamentary Privilege with impunity, when they are really lend- ing to Parliament almost all its influence and efficiency by this violation of its Privilege. The condition of the case is almost as absurd as if the law made it penal to attend church not with any view of preventing people from going, but only in order to have an easy means of keeping ill-behaved people out. Just as a Church would be a nullity without worshippers, so Parliamentary discussion would be a nullity without such reporting as virtually makes the constituencies a part of the audience ; and yet for the sake of the incidental advan- tage of having an easy remedy against abuses in particular cases, Mr. Disraeli defends the principle that Parliamentary reports of debates are to remain breaches of Privilege. It is hard t) conceive a more ludicrous devotion to the "unwritten law of Parliament" than this. Luckily for the Government, news- paper people are very busy and very indifferent to outward prestige, or they could compel a change in the law of Privilege quite as effectually as Mr. Sullivan has compelled a change in the rule about Strangers,—by omitting their Parliamentary reports till the right to report had been fairly admitted. How- ever, as newspapers have no self-love—of this kind, at least—the matter will rest over now, we suppose, till some individual Member of Parliament is again labouring under a sense of in- jury, and then we shall have the Privilege question all over again.
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