TOPICS OF THE DAY.
TILE DILEMMA OF THE GOVERNMENT.
WHETHER it be more or less deliberate obstruction, or more or less undeliberate obstruction, which has reduced the Government to their present awkward strait, there can be no doubt that it is obstruction all the same. Whether a cartload of bricks be accidentally overturned in the middle of a street, or whether it be overturned on purpose to serve as a barricade, the result is the same,— that the road is obstructed. And whether it be, as Mr. John Morley contends, the legitimate resistance of the Opposition to unwelcome proposals and its legitimate criticism of unwelcome administrative acts, or its fixed resolve not to permit a single inch of undisputed progress as the Unionists think, that wastes evening after evening in the House of Commons, the result is the same,—that complex legislative measures approved by the majority cannot be passed through the Lower House, even in the smallest numbers, without either very exhausting efforts or some very material change in the course of procedure. Now, the worst of any very material -change in the course of procedure is that the mere proposal of such a change at once challenges legitimate criticism, and so necessitates a loss of the scant supply of time for pressing legislation. This, no doubt, was one of the grounds of the objection evidently felt in the Conservative Party to the proposal, otherwise so plainly reasonable, made by the Government to take power to resume Bills passed as far as the Com- mittee stage, in any subsequent Session, without again going over the whole dreary procedure already spent upon them. As Lord Salisbury said long ago, and as Mr. John Morley evidently thinks, no more irrational proceeding can be imagined for a man short of time, than to tear up all the MS. which he has prepared in any one day only because he is not able to finish it on that one day, and must postpone its completion to the next day. The argument that such a rule, if he makes it irrevocably, is a great spur to him to sit up late and finish what he has begun before he goes to bed, is only good for anything if he has not already spur enough to drive him on into getting the business finished without this additional motive for desperation. But if there be much more than sufficient spur to industry and expedition without that, if the addition of that extraneous spur has no effect but to increase the pressure to achieve what is impossible, then nothing can be imagined more unreasonable than to deprive yourself of additional opportunities for doing what there is the utmost eagerness to do, but no time to do. It is like spurring an utterly worn-out horse, to tell the Government that unless it carries a measure which has taken up whole weeks of its time in one Session, it shall lose all the time so taken up absolutely, and must go over all the same ground again next Session. The Conserva- tives who objected to the Government's proposal do not seem to have insisted most on the obvious and rational objection that to carry the new rule would involve another long debate, but rather to have dwelt on the danger of giving private Members so much additional advantage for plying the House with fads of their own. But that is really a very trivial objection. In the first place, the faddists rarely get their pet measures past the second reading. The House is not very favourable to fads, and they rarely reach the Committee stage at all. In the next place, the Government did not propose to extend their new rule to all measures, but only to those which the House thought so important that the time spent upon them in any one Session ought not to be lost by their post- ponement to another Session. We suspect that a good deal of the ill-humour shown in the meeting at the Carlton on Thursday was not of a very rational kind, but rather proceeded from that dislike of novelty which some of the Conservatives indulge perhaps now, more than ever, on any subject on which they do not think that the con- stituencies are likely to be deeply interested. They com- pensate themselves for having to support so many Liberal measures by cavilling at every proposal which is not forced upon them by the voice of the constituencies.
What these cavillers do not seem to have remembered, when they advocated an autumn Session as the right alternative in the present emergency, is that an autumn Session, unless supplemented either by a Closure of that imperious kind which Mr. Gladstone twice adopted,. and the present Government once, in passing Irish Crimes Bills, would be of no use for the purposes of the Irish Land Bill. Nothing would be easier than for the Obstructionists to consume the whole of the autumn Session in debating the clauses of the Land- Purchase Bill. To make an autumn Session of any use for that purpose, the Tories must either pledge themselves: to support a stringent Closure of this special kind,—a step as yet unexampled, except where there was urgent need of it in order to put down moral anarchy,—or else to supplement it by the very Standing Order to which they are now objecting,—namely, that the Bill, if not passed this Session, may be taken up next Session at the point at which it is left when this Session closes. Which of these alternatives do the objectors prefer ? Lord Salisbury himself has so grave a constitutional objection to cutting short deliberation on matters of such weighty practical importance as those which are raised by the clauses of the Land-Purchase Bill, that he has expressed the utmost reluctance to accept that alternative at all. Yet surely the objectors will hardly wish, to carry the autumn Session first, and then to engraft upon it the proposal of the Government afterwards. Yet that is what we firmly believe that they must do unless they wish to have a wasted autumn Session as well as a wasted spring and summer Session, and to meet again next year with exhausted energies, and the whole business to begin afresh..
It will no doubt turn out that the Liberal Unionist meetingfixed for yesterday,—of the proceedings of which we know nothing at the present moment,—has given a hearty support to the reasonable proposal of the Government.. But we are not sure that that support will avail the Government very much with its own restive supporters. Indeed, many of those supporters are apparently a little• jealous of Lord Hartington's influence with the Govern-. ment, and are anxious to show that they are not willing to be dictated to by their Liberal Unionist allies. The real question for them, however, is how far they are likely to be supported by their constituents in deserting their leaders on a matter so obviously one of practical judgment as the best course to be pursued under such an emergency as the present. Can it be reckoned a popular course to insist on an autumn Session, which is all but certain to be insufficient for its purpose without a tardy and hasty con- cession of the very plan which the Government now pro- pose in good time for the adjustment of all necessary arrangements ? We do not think that it would be a popular course at all. The people would prefer taking Lord Salisbury's advice at first, if it must be taken in the end; and certainly they would not approve of forcing on the House a sort of closure which even the Tory leader thinks wholly inappropriate to so complex and difficult a measure as the Irish Land-Purchase Bill. As to its being a Con- servative course not to deviate from the customary pre- cedents, that might be very well to urge, if it could be called a Conservative course to give up all useful legislation to the objections of a minority, and not to assert the power of the majority at all. But we can hardly imagine a line of action less Conservative than that. The truth, no doubt, is that the grumblers have not realised that their favoured remedy, an autumn Session, will be quite in- adequate to the emergency. When we see the Opposition wasting two nights of debate on an amendment so pre- posterous as Mr. Arthur Acland's to the Local Taxation Bill, we can form some idea of how easy it will be, without giving rise to any scandal, to waste six weeks on discussing only a few pages of the amendments to the Irish Land- Purchase Bill. The autumn Session, taken alone, will only make the House ridiculous, unless it is backed up by one of two supplementary suggestions, of which the first seems even to Lord Salisbury unconstitutional, and the second is distasteful to the Tory malcontents. But we suspect that these malcontents will not be willing to take the responsibility of rejecting Lord Salisbury's and Lord Hartington's advice, and so precipitating a premature dissolution.
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