TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. GLADSTONE AND THE CLOSURE.
IT is admitted by the Prime Minister that the Government did contemplate making that very unfortunate and, as we think, unwise concession to "the two-thirds Liberals," which we criticised last week. We hope they contemplate it no more. If the Liberals of England have got a single deep belief in them, it is that the House of Commons needs reform a great deal more than the Constituencies themselves,—nay, that the Resolutions on Procedure err not by being too strong, but by being too weak. Nothing can exceed the mortification and dismay with which the English Liberals see the waste of time deliberately incurred night after night in the House of Commons ; and the postponement, month after month, and Session after Session, of the most urgent legislative reforms. What the country desires is not to have the first Resolu- tion on Procedure weakened, but to have it a good deal strengthened, to put it on the Government, as one of the first of their administrative duties so to apportion the time given by the Legislature to any subject, that at least its most important business shall be transacted, and not deferred from month to month, from Session to Session, and from Parliament to Par- liament. This could be effected, and would be effected, if, instead of leaving it with the Speaker to declare the evident wish of the House in relation to the closure of debate, it were to become the duty of the Leader of the House to pro- pose the closure of debate, whenever, in his opinion, having regard to the exigencies of the public service, as much time had been given to a special subject as the Legis- lature could properly spare it. Of course, that in- volves a very great responsibility. Nothing would be easier than for the Leader of the House to forfeit the confidence of the House, by either hurrying it needlessly over difficult or anxious discussions, or weakly yielding to the pressure of noisy and obstructive politicians. But though it involves the necessity of burdening the Leader of the House of Commons with one more delicate and difficult task, it is, in our belief, the only possible way out of the labyrinth of difficulties in which a great number of very dif- ferent but co-operating causes have unfortunately involved the Legislature of the United Kingdom. If there is to be nobody on whose judgment the House can rely to elicit a vote on the most important of all questions, the question how to apportion the brief time at its disposal for the weightiest purposes, it is simply impossible that our present condition of legislative impotence can be removed. The Speaker is a good judge of what the House in a particular debate may happen to wish ; but, in the first place, the House may, in a par- ticular debate, wish to devote more time to that debate than, considering the other urgent affairs pressing on it, it can safely give ; and in the next place, one of the most im- portant elements in determining what the House would seri- ously wish, must always be the knowledge of the other duties pressing upon it, and their relative importance. No wise man of business gives an hour even to a matter which might fairly occupy an hour, if some other much more urgent matter appeals to him for consideration during at least half of that hour. The due economy of the time of the Legislature is about the most important condition for an efficient Legislature, and the Speaker is not in a position to weigh that matter at all, even if the first resolution, as it stands at present, em- powered him to weigh it, which it does not. Indeed, this is a duty which clearly belongs to the Administration as an Administration ; and the Conservatives, though they might possibly feel the agony of such a crisis as the present somewhat less than the Liberals, simply because there are fewer changes which they wish to make, would feel the agony of it quite sufficiently, whenever they next return to office, to make them exceedingly grateful for the stronger form of the first resolution which we have always advocated, if by chance the Liberals can only manage to carry it before they return. Such a confession as Mr. Gladstone made to the deputation of the Scotch agriculturists this week, is humiliat- ing not merely to the Government ; it is humiliating to the nation at large ; it is the sort of confession which makes us all feel, and ought to make us all feel, that the due ordering of the time of the House of Commons is the first of all duties, if we do not want the British Parliament to sink into imbecility, and to become as unpopular and contemptible as it has once been great. No one can be trusted with the responsibility of advising the House how to economise its time, except the Leader of the House ; and his advice, whenever accepted by a majority of the House,—unless in very small houses,—ought to be final. No one need fear that such a provision would foster an arbitrary temper in the Leader of the House, for which it did not also provide a very speedy and very trenchant remedy. We can imagine no mistake that any Parliamentary leader of the last thirty years would have been more careful to avoid, than the mistake of being guided by his own caprice, or his own mere volition, in proposing to the House to cut short a discussion in which the Members were deeply interested, and which they felt to be of the highest moment to the country. If Parliamentary experience teaches anything, it teaches too much rather than too little caution, in any attempt to suggest to a great Representative Assembly that it has talked enough, and should come to the point of action at once.
Mr. Gladstone tells us, with perfect frankness, that, what with the number of Representatives who really have something weighty to say on many subjects ; what with the number of Representatives who, having nothing weighty to say, still think they have something weighty to say ; what with the number who not only have nothing weighty to say, but are perfectly well aware that they are talking for the sake of saying something, and not because they have something to say,—the House of Commons cannot redeem even its most emphatic promises to the Constituencies, cannot even begin to redeem them, but is, more than two years after its election, still occupied with exigencies that have arisen since it was elected, and is compelled to expend every minute at its disposal on these exigencies. The reform of the land-laws was amongst the most emphatic of the promises made by the Liberals to the Constituencies, and so far from that subject having grown less important since these promises were made, everything that has happened since,—the bad har- vests, the vast increase in the importation of food from America and the Colonies, the Protection movements on the Continent, the collapse of the commercial negotiations with France,—have all tended to give these emphatic promises a vast deal more weight than they had even at the moment when they were first given. Nevertheless, Mr Gladstone, as every one knows, speaks the exact truth when he tells the Scotch farmers that he is perfectly helpless in the matter, that it would be simply idle to talk of reforming anything at all, before he has succeeded in reforming the Procedure of the House of Commons. English and Scotch farmers may go to the dogs, for want of better Land Laws, and the Government will not be to blame. It cannot alter the Land Laws without the concurrence of the House of Commons; and the House of Commons, as it is at present, can hardly get through the Votes in Supply and the one or two urgent measures needful to avert revolution in Ireland. It is the same with County Government. It is the same with the County Franchise. It is the same with Bank- ruptcy. It is the same with the reform of the Criminal Code. It is the same with the Bill for controlling those annual floods from which the country suffers so much. It is the same with the reconsideration of the Ballot,—which was intended for 1880. It is the same with the recast of the Legacy and Succession Duties and with the Bill for organising the government of London afresh. And yet we have not enu- merated nearly one-half of the pressing measures which are not merely delayed, but delayed beyond all hope, because the House of Commons cannot make time expand itself to meet the exigen- cies of talk, and can and does make talk expand itself so as to ignore the exigencies of action, however great these may be.
We say, then, that the country ought to press on the Govern- ment to demand for itself the responsibility of administering the time of the House of Commons, just as it possesses the responsibility of advising the Queen what foreign policy she ought to pursue. The one is just as much the proper func- tion of the Government,—so soon as it is discovered that the House of Commons has lost the clue to disposing effectively of its own time,—as the other. Nay, it is the more important of the two. With a feeble Legislature, foreign policy
itself, however good, must be nerveless. Prince Bismarck sneers at his "colleague Gladstone," just because he sees that the House of Commons is beyond Mr. Gladstone's control. You cannot have a strong policy of any sort in a Constitutional country without a strong Legislature, and you cannot have a strong Legislature without a firm hand over it regulating the distribution of its time. But with a strong Legislature, all our policy,—foreign or home —will have at least a fair chance of strength, which nothing could give it with a flaccid Legislature behind it.
Mr. Gladstone has confessed that in the belief that half a loaf was better than no bread, he had intimated to Sir Stafford Northcote his willingness to accept the two-thirds majority, for the sake of getting the Pro- cedure Resolutions out of hand. But he has told us that this applied only to a particular condition of things which never came about, and that the Government mast now reconsider the whole matter, with a view to a more final settlement. Let them not only take back their provisional concession, but recast the first resolution in a stronger form. Let them place formally on the shoulders of the Administration the most urgent and critical of its duties, the due economy of the time of the House of Commons, and the whole country will give them that enthusiastic support which would carty them even through a Dissolution, should that prove necessary. We are sick of the impotence of the House of Commons. We want to see the House of Commons again acting under that pressure of responsibility which not only economises labour and time, but gives thought itself a new significance. A flabby Legislature is a demoralising influence for the whole nation. And nothing can string the purpose of the House of Commons to the sticking-point, except the formal assumption by the Government of the duty of prudently ad- ministering its time and labour, under pain of dismissal if it performs the duty badly, but with the certainty of national gratitude and strong support, if it does it well.
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