CLERGYMEN IN PARLIAMENT.
rrHE Bill brought in by Sir Gabriel Goldney and Mr. Thorold Rogers to repeal the Act which, under the engaging plea of removing doubts respecting the eligibility of persons in Holy Orders to sit in the House of Commons, for- bade them to do so for the future, has not much chance of getting debated this Session, But the subject, though not urgent, is still important, and it becomes those who sympathise with the object which the authors of the Bill have in view not to let it be postponed sine die, without repeating the reasons which make the proposed change desirable,
The main argument in favour of the Bill is the folly of keeping any class of persons out of the House of Commons, unless something is plainly to be gained by so doing. The object for which the House of Commons exists is to represent the Electors, and any rule which prevents the Electors from being • perfectly represented is to that extent a bad rule. There may be reasons on the other side which outweigh the primd ,facie argument against exclusion, but until they are brought forward, the force of the pima facie argument is un- impeachable. If the Clerical Disabilities Act were repealed, a clergyman could not it in Parliament without first finding a constituency to return him, and he would not find a con- stituency to return him, if lie were not the candidate whom the particular electors which compose that constituency think 'best qualified to express their views and wishes. So long as the Act is not repealed, they are driven to return the candidate who holds the second place in their preferences, and to that extent they are not as perfectly represented as they might be. The House of Commons and the country are as much or more injured by the arbitrary exclusion of a particular class of candidates as the constituency. The more complete the sym- pathy is between electors and Member, the more sensitive the House of Commons becomes, and the better qualified to fulfil its function in the State. The Meteorological Board might as well exclude a particular station from the field of their obser- vation, as the State refuse to allow a particular class of persons to be returned to Parliament. The first use of the House of Commons is to be an index to what is passing in the con- stituencies, and any restrictions imposed upon the choice of the Electors is so much deducted from the value of the index.
To this it may be said, by way of reply, that in the case of the Clergy, there is the great counterbalancing consideration that if they are to spend their time in the House of Commons, they cannot do their proper work properly. This objection breaks down upon two material points. In the first place, it states a hypothesis as universally true which is not universally true. There is a considerable per-centage of clergymen who have no regular clerical work, or only enough to occupy a part of their time. The retired parson, and the parson who has a canonry which only binds him to residence for three months out of the twelve, are neither of them unknown animals. As regards the London Clergy, they might sit in the House of Commons just as well as the London Bar. Indeed, the life of the majority of clergymen is less harassing and exhausting than that of a barrister in full practice, and there is conse- quently no reason why the one, if he were in Parliament, should neglect his parishioners any more than the other neglects his clients. In the second place, if the law is to inter- fere to keep a clergyman to his work, why should it not do the same service to every other class of Members ? A country squire may be led to neglect his estate by having to spend six months of the year in London, but no one has ever proposed to disqualify country squires for sitting in the House of Com mons. Yet his tenantry and his labourers are really more help- less by a great deal than a clergyman's parishioners, inasmuch as the latter have at least a Bishop to appeal to, while the teatntry or labourers have no one. Nor would the ordinary parson of a parish be likely to be elected, for the simple reason that ho might fail to get a licence of non-residence, and so would, in many cases, be forced to decline the honour. Any- how, the House of Commons is not the keeper of the clergy, any more than of the landlords or the tenant-farmers. If they can find constituencies to return them and Bishops to make their double work easy to them, there is no need for Parlia- ment to interfere.
So far, we have only considered the constituencies who might be directly represented by clergymen. But there is another constituency which would be indirectly represented by there, and might be largely the gainers thereby. There is a great deal of this indirect representation in the House of Commons. Railway Companies, for example, do not return Members in that character, but every director is in some sort a representative of the Railway interest. Just so, though the Clergy, as such, would not return Members, every clergyman would be in some sort the representative of the Clerical interest. It would be a decided advantage to the public that the Clergy should be thus represented in the House of Commons. Parliament is forced from time to time to legislate on eccle- siastical matters, and it sometimes gets into difficulties from not knowing what the clerical view of ecclesiastical matters is. There can be little question that it under-estimated the dislike the Clergy would feel towards the Public Worship Regulation Act, and the discredit into which the law has been brought by the working of that Act is largely the result of this miscalculation. It is impossible, of course, to say with any certainty that if the Clergy had been allowed to sit in the House of Commons, this result would have been prevented. There might have been no clergymen in the House at the time, or those who were in it might not have expressed the minds of their brethren on this particular question. But had the Clerical Disabilities Act been repealed, there would have been at least an additional chance of Par- liament's becoming aware of what it was proposing to do, and thinking twice before doing it. It is sometimes alleged that the Bishops represent the Clergy. Whether this was true in the pre.Tractarian days we cannot say, but certainly it has never been true since. There is a degree of antagonism now between the Bishops and the Clergy which quite unfits the one for representing the other. The Clergy seldom feel that the Bishops either understand them or sympathise with them, and a representative who neither understands nor sympathises with his constituents is their representative only in name. In this case, indeed, he is not even that, for as the Clergy have no voice in electing the Bishops, what the latter express in their places in Parliament is not the opinions which the Clergy really entertain, but the opinions which the Prime Minister who appoints the Bishops would like the Clergy to entertain.
There is one more reason in favour of allowing the Clergy to sit in Parliament, and that is that their presence would be a benefit to themselves and a benefit to the House of Com- mons. The Clerical Members would come in contact with the actual world of affairs, and they would see how different it is from that world as it is imagined to be in country parsonages. It is to the circumstances of their having seats in the House of Lords, perhaps, that the Bishops owe the superior good-sense which, in comparison with the Clergy, they occasionally dis- play, and in this respect the House of Commons would afford much better training than the House of Lords. On the other hand, the House of Commons would from time to time have the benefit of a valuable addition to its speaking powers. The Upper House is distinctly the richer as regards the eloquence of its debates by the presence of the Bishop of Peterborough, and there is no reason why Dr. Liddon should not win as great an oratorical triumph at St. Stephen's as he has already won at St. Paul's.
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