DISINTEGRATION IN SCOTLAND AND WALES. T HE discussions of Tuesday and
Wednesday on separate Grand Committees for Scotland and Wales were singu- larly ill-timed. Just before the introduction of a Local Government Bill for Great Britain which ought to do a great deal for the relief of the local business of these sec- tions of Great Britain, it was very inopportune to raise the principle of local devolution in our legislation generally, when the House does not even know what the Government pro- pose to do in the direction of relieving the Central Assembly of a certain number of duties which now weigh upon it, but which might very well be settled in the special localities chiefly interested. The truth is, that Mr. Gladstone has given an impulse to the disintegrating forces always at work in any civilised country. And these are showing themselves now in Scot- land and Wales, though, of course, much less actively than in Ireland. If the tendency grows, we shall, soon have some- thing rather worse than a Heptarchy, though probably a clumsily federated Heptarchy, over again. Nothing can be clearer, than that if Grand Committees are to be of any real use, they can- not be formed on principles overlapping each other in every direction. If all the important authorities on Law are to be collected in one Grand Committee, and all the important authorities on Commerce and Agriculture in a second, and all
the important authorities on the wants of Scotland in a third, and all the important authorities on the wants of Wales in a fourth, either the great Scotch and Welsh lawyers must absent themselves from the first, and the great Scotch and Welsh merchants and agriculturists from the second, or the third and fourth will be left in no condition at all to give even a sound opinion on Scotch and Welsh demands. Bat if the Scotch and Welsh lawyers, merchants, and farmers are not to be found in any force in the Grand Committees on Law and Commerce and Agriculture, we shall have the general law reforms and commercial or agricultural reforms of the Government formulated in one Committee, and the local law reforms, and local commercial or agricultural reforms, formulated in another,—and a more hopeless confusion than this would give rise to, can hardly be imagined. What a Kingdom in such a condition as Great Britain wants is a general agree- ment amongst all her citizens as to the larger principles on which their public life shall be conducted, and then a local application of these principles on a small scale by local bodies subject to the laws laid down by the Central Legislature. But what we saw on Tuesday and Wednesday was an ill-digested attempt to maim the councils and spoil the deliberations of the representatives of the larger interests in all parts of the Kingdom, only in order to expedite local measures which, if they were expedited, and not greatly delayed by the process, would be expedited at the cost of being ill-conceived and uncriticised by those members who are best able to shape them successfully and to criticise them in a large spirit. One of two things is certain,—that if this cross-division for the Grand Committees were adopted, either the House would lose an immense deal of time in reconsidering, by the light of the wider view, the local suggestions of the Local Grand Committees, and in reconsidering, by the light of the local view, the larger suggestions of the General Grand Committees,—or, if that were not so, we should have a lot of ill-digested measures in conflict with each other, some elaborated by able lawyers and economists without sufficient local knowledge to mark adequately the limits within which they should be applied, and others elabo- rated by more or less ignorant local personages without being properly imbued with the wider principles to which all needs, however urgent, must be taught to conform. What made the suggestion of Local Grand Committees par- ticularly inopportune, was that the Government had already agreed to go as far as it would be at all wise to go, by con- senting that, whenever a Scotch Bill might be referred to a Grand Committee (on Law or Commerce), the Committee of Selection might add to the Grand Committee fifteen new members, who would in that case probably be all Scotchmen ; while in the same circumstances, if a Welsh Bill (say on Agri- culture) were referred to the Grand Committee on Commerce and Agriculture, the Committee of Selection would add the same number of Welsh authorities to the Committee for the purpose of considering that special Bill. This seems to us ample satisfaction for the purely local element. What is wanted as regards provisions of any general importance and effect,— provisions on any subject not so purely local that they might be left to the Local Councils which are to be established under the Local Government Bill,—is their consideration by men of competent knowledge and experience in all divisions of the Kingdom, subject to the check of those who know the par- ticular circumstances of the locality which is in immediate need of the provision, so that the pinch and peculiarity of local exigencies shall not be overlooked. This can be secured, and can only be secured, by a Grand Committee constituted out of the men in the House who are most competent to deal with the special subject of the measure, in conjunction with special local authorities added to prevent the measure from being too general, and too little fitted to the difficulties of an exceptional case. On the other hand, the proposal to have overlapping Grand Committees would introduce confusion of the worst kind. To which Committee, for instance, should a Bill for authorising a new Scotch railway be submitted,—to the Committee on Commerce and Agriculture, or to the gommittee on Scotch Bills If to the former, would not the Scotch Grand Committee be so indignant, that its members would traverse all the recommendations of the Grand Committee on Commerce and Agriculture when it came back to the House ? And if to the Scotch Committee, would not the Grand Committee on Com- merce and Agriculture find a hundred flaws in it on account of
the exclusively local considerations which had governed the report!. We cannot even conceive the smooth working of overlappmg Committees appointed on this slovenly double principle.
The truth, doubtless, is that Tuesday and Wednesday were given up to the spirit of disintegration which has been stimu- lated in Scotland and Wales by the recent Irish proposal. Yet Scotland and Wales would lose a great deal more by being excluded from their fair share in the consideration of English measures, than England would lose by being ex- cluded from her fair share in the consideration of Scotch and Welsh measures. It is for the interest of all parts of the King- dom that we should be more thoroughly welded together, instead of falling more and more apart ; but if the Scotch and Welsh proposals of Tuesday and Wednesday meant anything, they meant sectionalism,—falling apart into loosely connected fragments of a Kingdom. We should all lose by this, and lose greatly, because greatness and sectionalism are mutually inconsistent. But certainly the greatest losers of all would be the Welsh and Scotch peoples, for England would remain considerable, even if she were made to feel that Wales and Scotland no longer identified themselves with her interests ; but Wales and Scotland would hardly feel themselves consider- able any longer, if they had once succeeded in alienating England from them. In that we trust they will never succeed. Indeed, we suspect that they will never seriously try.
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