Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day Part 4

When the history of the House of Lords is studied, it will be found that during the past century it has initiated no great measure for the public good, and a hundred times has wantonly mutilated or impotently opposed the reforms the people asked. The mischief it has done touches every department of public life. Whether it was to throw out a bill abolishing the penalty of death for stealing in a shop to the value of five shillings, on the ground stated by one of the bishops in the majority that it was "too speculative to be safe;" to again and again vote down every proposal to relieve Roman Catholics and Jews from civil disabilities; to pander to the will of George IV. in the prolonged persecution of his wife; or to defeat measures calculated to place the electoral power in the hands of the people--the House of Lords has always been one of the main forces in the army of darkness and oppression. Remember that every one of the reforms the Liberals have secured within the last 50 years has been distasteful to the House of Lords, and calculate the worth or wisdom of that inst.i.tution.

It does not add to the estimation of either the worth or the wisdom that the Lords have ultimately accepted what they have bitterly opposed, for if they have consistently been a stumbling-block in the path of every reform which the people now cherish their tardy repentance is of little avail as long as they pursue the same obstructive course. And it is not merely measures which they throw out, but measures which they mutilate, that render them a power for harm. For the Lords are like rabbits; it is not so much what they swallow as what they spoil which makes them so destructive.

Those who defend the inst.i.tution as it exists should, therefore, be called upon to point to some one definite case in recent history in which it can be said, "Here has the House of Lords done good." Mere talk about the admirable administrators and the dexterous debaters it contains is no argument; for if the legislative functions of the peers were abolished to-morrow, those among them who were worthy a seat in the House of Commons would have no difficulty in securing it. What Liberals object to is the being subjected to the caprices, the pa.s.sions, and the prejudices of some five hundred men, the majority of whom are not merely unskilled in legislative faculty and unqualified in administrative experience, but are drawn from a single cla.s.s out of touch and sympathy with the ma.s.s of the people.

It is not the least of the evils of the present system that the attendance at the sittings of the Lords is of so perfunctory a nature.

Even during the discussion of important measures not more than sixty or seventy peers, out of over five hundred, are commonly present, while ten or twelve is not an unusual number to deal with Bills. As Erskine May has pointed out, "Three peers may wield all the authority of the House.

Nay, even less than that number are competent to pa.s.s or reject a law, if their unanimity should avert a division, on notice of their imperfect const.i.tution." And he furnishes an instance where an Irish Land Bill, "which had occupied weeks of discussion in the Commons, was nearly lost by a disagreement between the two Houses, the numbers, on a division, being seven and six."

Adding to their number does not improve the average attendance, and yet the pace at which that number is growing is a scandal. In 1885, the first time since 1832, the total membership of the House of Commons was enlarged, not without trepidation and despite the fact that every member would be directly responsible to a const.i.tuency. The increase was only twelve, and a Premier often creates within a year as many legislators on his own account, who, with their successors, are responsible to no one for their public conduct. Is it not an absurdity to speak of ourselves as freely governed and ruled only by our own consent when a Prime Minister can make as many legislators as he chooses, and there be none to gainsay him?

If it were only that under the present system the drunken and the dissolute, the blackleg and the debauchee are allowed to sit in the Lords and make laws for us and our children, we should have a right to demand that the inst.i.tution should be "mended or ended." The former process has now distinctly been adopted as a plank in the Liberal platform, and the question of reform can, therefore, no longer be put on one side.

There are many Radicals who say that as the House of Lords, if it agrees with the Commons, is useless, and if it disagrees is dangerous, its abolition as a legislative body should at once be made a plank in the party programme. They argue further, that to reform will be to strengthen it, and that, by the reasoning just given, this is undesirable. But the main point is to secure the best legislative machine we can, and there is much to be said for the improvement of the House of Lords into a Senate which shall be in fact what the present inst.i.tution is in theory--a body of sage statesmen, experienced in affairs, and elected for a specified term, so as to be directly amenable to the people, and not removed from obedience to public opinion.

As a first step to any reform, the creation of hereditary peerages, conferring a power to legislate, ought to be stopped. "The tenth transmitter of a foolish face" ought no longer to be able to transmit with the foolishness a power over the lives and liberties of his fellow-men. If there is any one who continues honestly to believe that because a man has secured a peerage by his brains (and the proportion of creations upon that ground is exceeding small) his successors are likely to prove good legislators, he would do well to procure a list of those peers who are descended from "law lords;" and he would find that while not one of them is distinguished for great political or administrative skill, there are various notorious instances, which will occur to every reader of the daily newspaper, of those distinguished for exactly the reverse.

One minor reform in the const.i.tution of the House of Lords ought to be pressed at once, and that is the removal of the bishops from their present place within it. Not only has no one section of religious persons the right to a State-created ascendency over others, but all parties are agreed in the most practical form that bishops as bishops have no inherent right to legislative power. In 1847, when the bishopric of Manchester was created, it was provided that the junior member of the episcopal bench for the time being should not have a seat in the Lords, and thirty years later, when the Government of Lord Beaconsfield made further new bishoprics, it similarly did not venture to add to the number of spiritual peers; there are consequently always four or five waiting outside the gilded chamber until the death of their seniors shall let them in.

What Liberals, therefore, demand is that the House of Lords shall be thoroughly reformed. The bishops must be excluded, no more hereditary legislators created, and a system devised by which the House shall become a Senate so chosen as to be directly responsible to the people, whose interests it is a.s.sumed to serve. A sprinkling of life peers would aggravate instead of lessen the difficulty. An hereditary legislator may, for the sake of his successors, be careful not too grievously to offend the people; an elected legislator, for his own sake, will be the same; but a legislator who was neither one nor the other would have no such check, and all experience has shown that corporations elected for life become cliquish or even corrupt, for want of the frequent and wholesome breeze of public opinion.

XII.--IS THE HOUSE OF COMMONS PERFECT?

There was a time, and that not far distant, when the question "Is the House of Commons perfect?" would have been considered by many well-intentioned and easy-going persons to be impertinent, even if not actually irreverent. But we live in days when every inst.i.tution has to submit to the test of free discussion, and its usefulness and efficiency have to be proved, if it is to retain its place in the political system.

And as there can be little doubt that, for many reasons, a feeling has been widely growing within the past few years that the House of Commons is neither as useful nor as efficient as it ought to be, the popular reverence for that great a.s.sembly has somewhat diminished; and it behoves all who wish to preserve parliamentary government in its fullest and freest form to examine the causes of apparent decay and to suggest methods of amelioration.

The preservation intact of the powers and privileges of the House of Commons must be the desire of every lover of freedom; but the conduct of its business must be brought into harmony with modern methods, and the mechanical side of the a.s.sembly made as perfect as possible. Not from me will fall one word derogatory to the venerable "mother of free parliaments." The House of Commons has done too much for England, its example has done too much for liberty the wide world through, to allow any but the ribald and the unthinking to speak lightly of its history or scornfully of its achievements. For the People's Chamber is not merely the most powerful portion of the High Court of Parliament; it is not alone the central force of the British Const.i.tution, to which kings and n.o.bles have had, and may again have, to bow; it is the directly elected body before whose gaze every wrong can be displayed, and to whose power even the humblest can look for redress. It deals forth justice to the myriad millions of India as to a solitary injured Englishman; it is a sounding board which echoes the claims of a single peasant or an entire people; and it practically commands the issues of peace and war, involving the fate of thousands, and of life and death, involving that of only one. No policy is vast beyond its conception, no person insignificant beyond its sight. It is a mighty engine of freedom, responsive to the heart-throbs and aspirations of a whole people, which has baffled tyrants, liberated slaves, and raised England to that position among the nations which our children and our children's children should be proud to maintain.

Such is the a.s.sembly which needs reform. Often enough and with much success has there been raised a cry for "parliamentary reform," but this has meant an amendment of the method of electing members, not of the manner of conducting business; and it is this latter which now is urgently required. The stately ship which has sailed the ocean of public affairs for six centuries has naturally attracted weeds and barnacles which cling to its hull and r.e.t.a.r.d its progress. These must be swept away if the vessel is to pursue a safe and speedy course; and as little irreverence is involved in the process as in cleaning and repairing the old _Victory_ herself.

The cardinal defect of the existing system is that it strives to do modern work by ancient modes, an attempt which is as certain to fail in public concerns as it would be if any one were sufficiently ill-advised to try it in private. And when there is contemplated on the one side the vast and growing ma.s.s of affairs cast upon the consideration of Parliament, and on the other the rusty and creaking machinery employed to cope with it, little wonder can be felt that much needful work is left undone, and a deal of that which is accomplished is done badly.

By granting to Ireland the right to manage her domestic affairs, and by providing some system by which England, Scotland, and Wales can in local a.s.semblies each deal for herself with her own concerns, much will be accomplished in the way of real parliamentary reform. But even then more will remain to be done. The multiplied stages of each measure laid before the House of Commons must be lessened. It is possible to-day to have a debate and a division upon the motion for leave to introduce a bill, upon the first reading, the second reading, the proposal to go into committee, the report stage, the third reading, and the final proposition "That the bill do pa.s.s," while financial bills have even more stages to go through; and although, of course, all these opportunities for almost unlimited obstruction are not often made use of, they exist and should be diminished.

Another fruitful source of wasted parliamentary time is the provision that if a bill is dropped at the end of a session, however far it may have progressed short of actual pa.s.sing, it has to be started afresh when the House re-a.s.sembles, and every stage has to be as laboriously again gone through as if the measure had never been heard of before. One can understand why a new Parliament should start with a clean sheet, for no decision of a previous one in favour of the principle of a certain measure can bind it to pa.s.s that measure into law. But within the limits of the same Parliament, a decision once given should be so far binding that it should not be necessary for a bill to pa.s.s the stage of second reading four or five years running, because effluxion of time had prevented it pa.s.sing into law during any of the sessions.

Against such waste of time as this--waste which is imposed by the very rules under which Parliament works--the closure is no remedy. It is a weapon with which it is right that the majority should be armed, but it requires great skill in the wielding lest the legitimate efforts of the minority be stifled. What is wanted is the better ordering of the whole machine. When private bills and purely local business are taken elsewhere, when the stages of each measure are lessened, and when bills which have pa.s.sed their second reading are not killed at the session's end, but allowed to remain in a state of animated expectancy, even then other means will have to be sought to make the machine move more surely and with greater expedition.

Something has been done to this end by the earlier hour of a.s.sembling and fixed hour of adjourning which the House has now adopted. But why should not the process be carried further, and the affairs of the country be settled by day instead of by night? The first answer is that it would not be possible for a legislative body to do its business during the day; and a sufficient answer should be that the French a.s.sembly and the German Reichsrath do theirs during that period. The next is that Ministers could not get through their work if the hours of meeting were made earlier; the reply is to the same effect--that what French and German Ministers can accomplish, English Ministers must be taught to do. A further contention is that such barristers and business men as are members would not be able to attend sooner than at present; and the answer of many as to the barristers would be that it were well for the country if three-fourths of those in the House never attended at all, for it is largely owing to the number of lawyers in Parliament that the law is a complicated and costly process, often proving an engine of injustice in the hands of the rich, and a ruinous remedy for the injured poor; while as to the business men who cannot attend earlier than now, their number is so exceedingly limited that their convenience ought not to be consulted to the detriment of parliamentary inst.i.tutions. There is one more argument which would be of greater weight than all the rest if present conditions were likely to continue, and that is, that it would be a serious hindrance to private bill legislation, because members would be loth to serve on committees during the time the House was deliberating; but it is obvious to all observers of the parliamentary machine that the greater portion of private business will have soon to be delegated to other bodies, and the main point of an undeniably strong argument will thus be destroyed.

But even such a reform in the hours of work would not expedite matters to a sufficient extent, if the present power of unlimited talk be preserved. Every member has the right of speaking once at each stage of a bill, and as many times as he likes during committee. If the number of stages be lessened, as they are likely to be, there will not be much to be objected to in the continuance of this right; but its retention should be contingent upon the shortening of each speech. This is a proposal which can be justified on "plain Whig principles," and has certainly a plain Whig precedent. For Lord John Russell, when Prime Minister, brought forward in 1849 a proposal to limit the duration of all speeches to one hour, except in the case of a member introducing an original motion, or a minister of the Crown speaking in reply. The proposal fell through, but that it was made by so cautious a Premier is a proof that there is much to be said in favour of compulsorily shortening speeches.

The proposition that Parliaments should be chosen more frequently in order that they may preserve a closer touch with the people should be earnestly pressed forward. In the early days of the House of Commons annual Parliaments were practically the rule, an a.s.sembly being summoned to vote supplies and do certain necessary business and then dissolved.

When matters were put upon a more certain footing, after the Great Rebellion, Parliaments elected for three years were ordained, and this term was extended to seven years shortly after the Hanoverian Accession, in order to guard against a Jacobite success at the hustings, which might seriously have endangered an unstable throne. The time has now come to ask that a term adopted in a panic, and for reasons which have long pa.s.sed away, should be shortened. A four years' Parliament has been found to be long enough for France, Germany, and the United States; and as the average of the last half-century has proved a seven years' period to be unnecessarily long for England, the briefer should be enacted. Now that the suffrage is on so wide a basis, it is essential that members of Parliament should be in as close touch with the people as possible. Once elected, members frequently forget that they are not the masters of those who have chosen them, and that, though called in one sense to rule the country, there is another sense in which they are called to serve.

It is necessary that this truth should be enforced upon such members as are apt to ignore it, and shorter Parliaments would enforce it.

There are some who believe that by payment of members a better representation of the people would be secured. The example of other countries can certainly be quoted in favour of such a proposition, but there appears no necessity for any general payment in England. As, however, it is in the highest degree desirable that representatives of every cla.s.s in the community should appear at Westminster, some provision should be made by which members, upon making a statutory declaration of the necessity for such a course, would be able to claim a certain moderate allowance for their expenses during the session. There would be nothing revolutionary in this; the fact of members being paid would be merely a return to the practice which prevailed for close upon four centuries after the House of Commons was established upon its present basis.

XIII.--IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?

Many would be surprised if told that there remained serious deficiencies in our electoral system; and would ask, "How can that be? We now have the ballot at elections, household suffrage in both counties and boroughs, and a nearer approach to equal electoral districts than the most sanguine Radical ten or even five years ago would have thought possible?"

But has the suffrage really been extended to every householder? As a fact, it has not; it is largely a merely nominal extension; and tens of thousands of qualified citizens are disfranchised for years at a time by the needless restrictions and petty technicalities which now clog the electoral law. Registration should be so simplified that every qualified person would be certain of finding his name on the list; and the duty of compiling a correct register should be imposed upon some local public official, compelled under penalty to perform it.

The common belief is that a twelvemonth's occupation qualifies for a vote, but all that it does is to qualify for a place on the register, which is an altogether different matter, the register being made up months before it comes into operation. At the very least, a man must have gone into a house a year and a half before he has a vote for it, and it often happens that he has to be in it for two years and a quarter, and even more, before he possesses the franchise. Let me state such a case. A man goes into a house at the half-quarter in August, 1888; he will not be ent.i.tled to be placed on the register in the autumn of 1889, because he was not occupying on July 15 of the previous year; if he continues to occupy, he will, however, be placed there in the autumn of 1890; but it is not until January 1, 1891, that he will be able to exercise the suffrage. So that all taking houses from July 15, 1888, are in the same position as those who take them up to July 15, 1889, and will have to wait for a vote until 1891.

"But," it may be said, "when a man once has his vote he is able to retain it as long as he holds any dwelling by virtue of 'successive occupation.'" That is so only as long as he remains within the boundaries of the const.i.tuency wherein he possessed the original qualification. He may move from one division of Liverpool to another, or from one division of Manchester to another, or from one division of Birmingham to another, and retain his vote by successive occupation; but if he goes from Liverpool to Birkenhead, from Manchester to Salford, or from Birmingham to Aston, his vote is lost for the year and a half or the two years and a quarter before explained. The effect of this is most apparent in London, where thousands of working men are continually moving from one district to another, treating the whole metropolis as one great town, but by pa.s.sing out of their original borough they are disfranchised. And this is the more a grievance because the Redistribution Act, though dividing the larger provincial towns into single-member districts, left them as boroughs intact; while the old const.i.tuencies in London were not merely divided, but split up into separate boroughs. Lambeth thus became three boroughs--Lambeth, Camberwell, and Newington--each with its own divisions; Hackney was severed into the boroughs of Hackney, Sh.o.r.editch, and Bethnal Green; Marylebone into the boroughs of Marylebone, Paddington, St. Pancras, and Hampstead; and so throughout the metropolis. And the consequence of the purely artificial nature of the boundary lines thus created is that many a man who merely moves from one side of the street to the other, or even from one house to another next door, is disfranchised for a couple of years. The obvious remedy for this peculiar evil is that London should be treated as one single borough, like Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham; but the remedy for the whole evil is that when a man has once qualified for a place on the register, proof of successive occupation in any part of the country should suffice to give him his vote in the const.i.tuency to which he moves.

When we pa.s.s from the household to the lodger franchise, we are faced by one of the hugest shams in the electoral system. There are certain const.i.tuencies which contain hundreds of lodgers, and of these not more than tens are on the register. The reason is twofold: it is not merely a trouble to get a vote, but there is a yearly difficulty in retaining it.

For a lodger, as for a household vote, a twelvemonth's occupation is necessary to qualify, and the purely nominal nature of this qualification is the same in both; but the lodger has the additional hardship of being deprived of even as much benefit as "successive occupation" gives the householder, for if he moves next door, though with the same landlord, he is disfranchised, while the landlord retains his vote. And, further, he has to make a formal claim for the suffrage every succeeding summer, an operation too troublesome for the vast majority of lodgers to undergo, and one from which the householder is spared. And thus this particular franchise is a mockery, and the proportion of lodger voters to qualified lodgers is absurdly small.

Of course, the term "householder," equally with the term "lodger,"

presupposes at present that the one who bears it is a man, and, equally of course, an agitation is on foot to give the franchise to women. This is a matter which is likely to be settled in favour of the other s.e.x, and the only question is as to how far it should go. The extreme advocates of female suffrage would give it to married women, but what appears the growing opinion is that spinsters and widows, qualified for the suffrage as men are qualified, should receive it; and this is a settlement which will probably soon be reached.

Much dissatisfaction would continue to be felt, even were these points granted, if "f.a.ggot-voting" were still suffered, or a single person allowed to possess a mult.i.tude of votes. The "forty-shilling freehold"

is a prolific source of bogus qualifications: abolished in Ireland by the Tories because it gave the people too much power, it ought to be got rid of throughout the kingdom by the Liberals because it leaves the people too little. For it is largely by its means that some men are able to boast that they can exercise the franchise in six, or ten, or even a dozen const.i.tuencies. Men of this type occupy themselves at a general election by travelling around, dropping a vote here and a vote there, and they ought to be restrained. That this can be done without violating any right is evident even under the present system. However many qualifications a man obtains, he can vote for only one of them in any const.i.tuency; and more, if he has qualifications in every division of the same borough he has, when the register is made up, to state for which division he will vote, and in that division alone can he claim a ballot paper. If it is right to prevent him from having more than a single vote in any one division--or, which is a still stronger point, in any one borough--it must be equally right to limit him to a single vote throughout the country. "One man, one vote," should be the rule in a democratic state. If a person possesses qualifications for various const.i.tuencies, let him be called upon to do what he is now compelled to do if he has qualifications for different parts of the same const.i.tuency--vote for only one of them; and that one should be the place in which he habitually resides.

An indirect method of practically securing the "one man, one vote,"

result would be to have all the elections throughout the country on the same day. Under the existing system, the polls drag on for weeks, and not only does this distract the attention of the nation and put a hindrance to business for a far longer period than is necessary, but it has the further evil effect of causing many voters in the const.i.tuencies which are later polled to waver until they see whither the majority elsewhere are tending, and then "go with the stream." The only instance in recent electoral history when the later polls reversed the verdict of the earlier was at the general election of 1885, when the boroughs, speaking broadly, voted Tory and the counties Liberal; but that, owing to the recent extension of the county franchise, was an abnormal period, and the rule is that the stream gathers as it goes, and the waverers are swept into the torrent. That it is possible for a great country to be polled on the same day is evident from the examples of Germany and France, and it is only adherence to worn-out forms which prevents its accomplishment here.

The remedy, therefore, for the anomalies caused by the defective "successive occupation," the presence of "f.a.ggot voters," and the prolongation of the pollings, is simply to treat the kingdom as one vast const.i.tuency, in which a man once on the register remains as long as he has a qualification, in which no one has more than a single vote, and in all the divisions of which the poll is taken on the same day.

This suggested single const.i.tuency would, of course, resemble the great county and borough const.i.tuencies of to-day in having divisions, but it would not be single in the sense proposed in Mr. Hare's original scheme of "proportional representation," by which the possessor of a vote could cast it where and for whom he liked. Those who have adopted Mr. Hare's ideas, while modifying his methods, have not been successful in discovering any feasible plan for representing public opinion in the proportion in which it is held, the sort of Chinese puzzle proposed by Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Courtney having failed to commend itself to any practical politician. It is wrong, however, to imagine that the present system of single-member districts roughly secures that the minority shall be duly represented while the majority retains its due share of power; for it was proved in some striking instances, the very first time it was put in operation, that, so far from retaining, it often sacrifices the rights of the majority. At the general election of 1885 the Liberals of Leeds cast 23,354 votes, and the Tories 19,605, and yet the latter gained three seats and the former only two; the Sheffield Liberals won but two seats with 19,636 votes, while the Tories secured three with 19,594; and the Hackney Liberals could win only one seat with 9,203 votes, and the Tories two with 8,870; while, on the other side, the Southwark Tories, with 9,324 votes, returned one member, and the Liberals, with 9,120, returned two. The reason is obvious: a party with overwhelming majorities in one or two districts is liable to be beaten by narrow majorities in most of the divisions, and the minority thus elects a majority of members. The present system, therefore, is evidently imperfect. It was adopted in haste and without due discussion; it has failed in France, Switzerland, and the United States; and in at least the divided boroughs it ought to give place to double or triple member districts.

The question of having second ballots, so as to provide that, as in Germany and France, where there are several candidates and none secures an absolute majority of votes given, another ballot shall be held, is not an immediately pressing one, though much may be said in its favour; but that of the payment of election expenses out of the rates ought to be dealt with at once. It is highly unfair that a candidate should be fined heavily, by the enforced payment of the official expenses, for his desire to serve the country in Parliament; and it is the more unfair because the official expenses of elections for town councils, school boards, and boards of health and of guardians are paid by the public.

This fine helps to keep men of moderate means out of the House, though their abilities might prove to be most useful there; and another method by which the wealthy have the advantage in parliamentary contests ought equally to be attended to. People are forbidden by law to hire conveyances for carrying voters to the poll, but they are allowed to borrow them, with the result that const.i.tuencies on an election day swarm with carriages of peers and other rich people, who have nothing whatever to do with the district, and who yet affect by this influence the voting. The use of carriages should not be prohibited, for the aged and infirm ought not to be disfranchised; but no importation of vehicles should be allowed, and while an elector, and an elector only, should be ent.i.tled to use his own, it should, as a means of identification, be driven by himself. Such a provision would largely diminish the present interference of peers in elections. They may address as many meetings as they like; but, as long as they have a legislative a.s.sembly of their own, they must not be allowed to use their wealth and position to interfere with the voters for the Commons House of Parliament.

XIV.--SHOULD THE CHURCH REMAIN ESTABLISHED?

From the great concerns of the State it is natural to come to the Church, and when that point is arrived at, the problem of disestablishment at once arises. "_Can_ the Church be disestablished?"

is a question sometimes put, and the answer is plain, for that answer is "Most certainly," and a further question "Where is the Act establishing the Church?" as if the non-production of such an enactment would prevent Parliament from severing the link which binds Church and State, may be replied to by another. Supposing one asked, "Where is the Act establishing the monarchy?" would the non-production of that measure prove that it is not a parliamentary monarchy under which we live? By the Act of Succession, Parliament "settled" the monarchy; by various Acts in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Elizabeth, and Charles II., Parliament has "settled" the Church. There is no authority in this realm higher than Parliament; and if Parliament chooses to "unsettle"

either monarchy or Church, it can do so.

This is no new-fangled Radical idea; it is an old Whig principle.

Charles Fox, in a debate just a century since, observed, while favourable to the principle of religious establishments, "If the majority of the people of England should ever be for the abolition of the Established Church, in such a case the abolition ought immediately to follow." Macaulay, in his essay on Mr. Gladstone's youthful book on "Church and State," was clearly of the same opinion. And Lord Hartington, in his declaration a few years ago that if the majority of the people of Scotland desired disestablishment their desire ought to be satisfied, completed the chain of Whig traditional opinion.