METROPOLITAN ELECTIONS.
THE true charge against the London constituencies is not exactly that of electing inferior representatives. Some of them are bad enough no doubt, but the majority would, if they sat for other boroughs, pass muster very well in the crowd. Three at least of the City members are far above the average, Mr. Craufurd being as able a specimen of the mer- chant prince as it would be easy to find, Mr. Goschen a man who will be a Cabinet Minister, and Baron Rothschild the fitting representative of the plutocracy whose capital has made the City the pivot of all the world's monetary affairs. Then Finsbury, though it elects Mr. Cox, sends up also Sir Morton Peto, the very type and model of the prosperous Noncon- formist, and decidedly useful besides, and though few men have heard of Mr. C. Salisbury Butler, of the Tower Hamlets, Mr. Ayrton still adds a flavour to the Parliamentary punch. South - svark sent us Sir William Molesworth, thereby doing more for the colonies than most of the statesmen of England, and now finds a place for Mr. Layard, who, though sadly given to rhodomontade, possesses a special knowledge which the House of Commons would regret to miss. Besides it is creditable to
any constituency to consider that the discovery of Nineveh bulls is a qualification for Parliament. Mr. Doulton's elec- tion, sity for Sheffield, would not excite a remark, and poor Mr. Williams, whom Punch makes such fun of, tried very hard to perform a very much-needed function,— that of wife to the House of Commons. Westminster has seated one of the very few Radical generals in England, and a Radical general is a most useful person, a type of character which in a House full of Whig captains and Conservative colonels adds a new element to debate. The metropolitan boroughs, too, are exceedingly faithful to their men, never change them if they can help it, and recognize experience as a qualification more openly than any other electors. A county will keep on its member as long as he keeps his property, but a London borough will stick to him, as in Mr. Duncombe's case, long after he has ceased to be able to pay for his own elections. The Tories are very fond of talking about their constancy, but we shall compare with some interest the treat- ment of Mr. Duncombe by his Radical followers and of Major W. Beresford by the Church-and-State farmers of Essex under circumstances very nearly identical.
The apparent failure of the London boroughs is due, we believe, to the dissonance between their position and what they themselves think that position is. They consider them- selves mere boroughs, with vast local interests no doubt, but with no special position, while the world looks to them to be model boroughs, the best instead of the average among con- stituencies. They have never caught the idea of their true function in the Parliamentary scheme, which is to place in the House of Commons the men who ought to be there, but who, precisely representing no constituency, can never obtain a seat. This function belongs to them not only from the imagi- nary headship conferred by locality, but from the fact that alone among English boroughs they can never be represented. They are not entities at all, not even so much so as English cities, the least vital of all municipalities, but are simply dis- tricts covered with houses filled with men who know for the most part nothing of each other, care nothing for each other, are totally apart even in their local interests. Nobody dreams of saying, " I inn a Marylebonian, or a Finsbury man, or a Southwarker," even a name to express such identities still waits to be invented, and nobody living in one of these encamp- ments feels any the closer to another man because he lives in the same one. The voters arc 'Englishmen merely, not con- sciously members of any municipal organization. England they care about perhaps more than most constituencies, Lon- doners of all grades being keen politicians, and very apt to support Government in great acts about which other cities are more than doubtful, but nobody tries to beautify Finsbury at his own cost, or leaves money to Marylcbone, or feels humiliated because Lambeth as Lambeth does some- thing silly or mean. There are no means, either, under the present organization of creating municipal feeling, and the only local pride must arise from some benefit conferred by the locality upon the nation. Finsbury cannot make of itself a true city in the sense in which Bristol, or Liverpool, or par excellence Paris is a city, but it can if it likes make of itself an electing body of very marked and emphatic value to the Empire. We can hardly imagine a greater addition to the working force of the Constitution than would be added to it were London in the habit of seating eminent men of all kinds who must otherwise be absent from the national deliberations, great jurists, great scholars, great colonists, great Indians, great English Catholics, any one who by general consent can benefit the State, yet has no local connec- tion or power of swallowing shibboleths, or it may be funds to stand the expense attendant on a borough election. This is the idea which Westminster has caught in proposing Mr.
John Stuart Mill, and it ought at the next election to be extended over the whole body of metropolitan boroughs. Not that we would ask them for the self- sacrifice involved in any neglect of their local interests, whatever they consider them to be. Let the second member be, if they like, a local notability, a mere business man, a person who can give an opinion on Mr. Thwaites's conduct, or argue for the right of swimming in the Regent's Canal, or fight improvement bills which threaten whole streets of shopkeepers with ruin,—it is odd, by the way, how shamefully this class is treated, and how little anybody remonstrates,—but a borough dues not require both
members to do work of this kind. The man who " works" will find his task all the easier and more effective because his colleague who " talks" has the ear both of the House and the Government bench.
The possibility of achieving some such result is the true and in our eyes almost the only merit of the reheme
duced by Mr. Hare to the Law Amendment Society on Monday night. He proposes to adapt his scheme, drawn np originally for all England, to the metropolitan constituencies, with Surrey and Middlesex thrown in, giving twenty-two members in all. The whole body of electors would vote for all these in the order of their preference, and each candidate who had a twenty-second part of the number of persons actually voting would be declared elected. If, for example, there are 140,000 electors, and 88,000 vote, then every man who obtains 4,000 votes will be one of the " members for —." what are they to be called, Mr. Hare ? It is clear that under such a system a man known to the immense mass of voters for his great services would stand the best chance, local claims being altogether eliminated. That would for a group of boroughs so peculiar as the metropolitan be a great good, but it is secured by a very cumbrous and, as it seems to us, needless machinery. We quite agree with Mr. Mill that living under the Constitution we do, with its exquisitely-balanced forces, it is rather late in the day to talk about simplicity, which we nowhere either seek or obtain, but Englishmen are wise in preferring to build upon their old foundations. Not to mention the absurdity of throwing in Middlesex and Surrey, that is, of destroying two very special and useful constituencies, to increase a mass already enormous, Mr. Hare's plan would throw the election inevitably into the hands of a " caucus." One or two celebrated men would get in,—Mr. Mill, for example, would have a chance, and so would Sir John Lawrence have had—but for eighteen out of twenty- two the voters would trust to the decision of some club or committee which told them how to throw their votes to the best effect. The " Liberal list " would be the guide, and the Liberal list would be drawn up by the most astute, most active, and least scrupulous of mankind, clever electioneer- ing agents, whose interest is to put in nominees or political partizans, and not men whom they can neither control nor guide. No such man, for example, would nominate Mr. Mill if he thought it safe to avoid it. Besides localism in a consti- tution like ours a real and sound principle, if only it is not pushed too far, and we do not see why Westminster is to give it up entirely any more than any other constituency. Under Mr. Hare's plan the second member would be entirely eliminated, and the members elected would represent only classes and not places at all. If the same end could be attained without attacking the existing system at its root the gain would be very much greater, and if Londoners will but once recognize what their function in the Constitution is we do not even yet despair. The boroughs are wearying evidently of the dictation of cliques, and the pride of seating men who are valued by the whole nation may well compensate even greengrocers for the absence of one of their members from the Vestry Hall.
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