PARLTAMENTARY REPORTING. T HE Debate of Friday week on Parliamentary Reporting
is not a pleasing one to read. The subject is of extreme importance, great personages intervened in the discussion, the House was seriously interested, and there was a sufficient vote ; but still the debate reads "small." Members were so avowedly thinking of themselves alone. This was partly the fault of the mover, Mr. Hanbtuy-Tracy, who made a most instructive and excellent speech from a wrong point of view. He wished for an inquiry in order to show that there should be an official "Hansard," giving verbatim and corrected reports of all speeches, and the objections to that plan are very numerous. Nobody, except for purposes of quotation, generally made to annoy a speaker who has changed his opinions, wants a verbatim record of all speeches. The bulk of such reports would be very great, they would be very late in appearing, they would interest very few people, and they would decidedly lower, so far as they were read, the popular estimate of Members' capacity. Set speeches would come out very well, and retorting speeches from a few Members • but the majority of speeches would seem prolix to a degree which a modern public, educated by newspaper-writing, and bred up to enjoy the modern style of conversation, the note of which is terseness, would find intolerable. The new "Gurney," as it would be called, would not be read, and would soon cease to be purchased even for private libraries, where "Hansard," with its condensed reports, is found to occupy an intolerable amount of space. The publication would be a mere record, and as a record " Hansard " does very well indeed ; and it would be far cheaper and wiser to give the firm which produces that excellent publication an extra £1,000 or so a year, in the form of subscription copies, than to create a new and possibly an expanding Reporters' Department. They conserve quite as much of Parliamentary eloquence as is needed either by Members or historians, and had much better —apart from their claims to the consideration of the House, which are admitted to be considerable—be let alone. Except for historic record, a verbatim report would be a mere nuisance. Nobody wants, as Mr. Beresford Hope hinted, to read many times over the thought which the speaker, perhaps wisely, con- sidered he could not repeat too often, and still less does any one want the inarticulatenesses, the hopeless jumbles of words with which allbut the best speakers—and some even of them, e.g., Lord Brougham—seek to recover the lost thread of their arguments or their narrative. Such a report might gratify the vanity of a few Members, but it is not expedient that it should be gratified or that the nation should pay for the record of their self-satisfied utterances at full length. Preserved prosing is not good diet for any man's intellectual stomach. The real reason for desiring an official report of Parlia- mentary proceedings is a very different one, and is shadowed out in the speech in which Mr. Gladstone endeavoured, but for some inexplicable reason partially failed, to express his thought. The practice of reporting debates is dying, to the great injury of political life in this country. The appetite of London—not of the provinces—for Parliamentary discussion has decreased, and the proprietors of newspapers are hampered by new diffi- culties in the way of satisfying what remains. Those who sell their papers at a penny want room for their much more profitable advertisements, and those who do not, know that their customers prefer pabulum of another kind. The Times, which is bought by income-tax payers all over England, still supplies decent reports, and the Standard has a great space to fill, and takes a pride in keeping a front place in this especial department ; but when we have named these two journals, we have named all which report with any sense of duty in the matter. Nobody in his senses would read the snippety conversations called debates in the Daily Telegraph ; the con- ductors of the Daily News pick and choose among discussions, reporting fully only on occasion, and the evening papers only attempt to give the drift of a great argument, and very often not even that. None of the papers report speeches made after 12.30 a.m., fearing to impede early delivery, and none of them—we write with deliberation, after the patient watch- fulness of thirty years—take anything like the trouble to report well which was taken, say, three-and-twenty years ago, a failure which we frankly acknowledge may be partly due to the increasing tediousness alike of speakers and of the subjects of which they speak. Even the Times' and Standard's reports are not so good as they have been, more especially in the effort to render peculiarities of style. To attach blame to the news- papers for the change, as one or two speakers did in the debate, is not altogether just, and is entirely unprofitable. Newspapers are businesses as well as pulpits, and their proprietors are no more bound to pay special income-taxes—which is the real demand made on them—by furnishing what Parliament wants, than any other useful class of caterers for the public. If they cannot find space for advertisements, they cannot engage good writers, or pay for early and voluminous information ; and Parliament has no right to ask them to surrender their own judgment of what is im- portant or interesting to their readers. Its business, if it thinks the debates useful reading, is to publish the debates in a form in which they can be read, and this is what it will ultimately be compelled to do. The House discussed on the 20th inst. what Members wanted, but did not discuss what the country wants, which is a full but condensed report of all Parliamentary proceedings to be drawn up as good newspaper reports were once drawn up, and to be published in the after- noon of the following day, in a daily edition of the London Gazette, which everybody who wanted it could buy in the streets for twopence. That publication would not compete with the newspapers, for it would be too late, but it would be purchased by all who had any special interest either in the subject-matter or in Parliamentary debating, would be for- warded into the country, and would attract, of all others, the class whom it is most beneficial to keep informed,— the conductors of the provincial press, who do not hear the debates or the conversation of those who have heard them. Their difficulty is to get political facts first-hand, and a debate is very often a repertoire of political facts, the fifty best-informed persons on the subject in hand adding each his contribution. Of course if Members deny that, the argument for official reporting ends ; but they will not deny it, more especially when they remember that the only way in which Englishmen out of London can study the men who are to govern is by reading their speeches, now scarcely circulated, or circulated in a form so imperfect as to give no adequate conception of their views. Debates do instruct, and the in- struction is wanted, and as private individuals have ceased for a variety of reasons, good and bad, to provide it, the State should provide it for itself.
The usual objections as to the difficulty of securing sueh a report are, we believe, quite futile. Any man like the late Mr. Dod, with the national purse behind him, could in a week secure a staff of reporters who would produce fair and full, but condensed reports of the daily proceedings, which could be thoroughly revised and issued to the public in the ordinary form of a newspaper at three o'clock. The reporters could be trusted to report fairly, just as easily as the Times' reporters are trusted, and would be as much under supervision as the clerks at the table, or those who perform silently and unno- ticed the work of facilitating private Bill business. They would be a little more full, and would, of course, report every- body, but that would be the only difference. There is plenty of room for them, as Mr. Hanbury-Traky showed, on the floor of the House, and they could be relieved at intervals, limited only by the money it was intended to extend. That would not be much, and would be almost entirely recouped by the sale of the paper, which would be in demand for every library, read- ing-room, newspaper office, and political club in the country, and on great occasions might obtain a very extensive sale. The plan would not interfere with existing London jour- nals; it would greatly facilitate the work of the provincial Press, and it would at least enable the people, if they chose, to see what their representatives were saying, and by what arguments the leaders of political opinion professed themselves convinced, a privilege which at present they do not possess, or at least not so completely as is desirable. We can conceive of only three serious objections to the scheme. Members may say that they desire to correct the reports of their speeches, • and there would not be time ; but the reply to that plausible argument is clear. They have no business to correct their speeches. A reporter is not a publisher, nor is a speech a book. The object is not to record what a speaker thought he had said or wished he had said, but what he actually did say ; and a faithful reporter can manage that, without any corrections from the speaker. Then it will be alleged that the certainty of a report will tempt men to speak who might otherwise have remained silent ; but we are not sure of that. There is a good deal of human nature in a Member of Parliament, and we fancy the Member who makes a big speech makes it with the strongest conviction that he shall produce effect enough to secure a good report. The Biggars and Parnells are not influenced by the hope of reports, but by the hope of either wearying the House into attention to their views, or by natural and incurable "cussedness," as the Americans call it. And finally, there is force in the fear expressed by Sir Staf- ford Northcote, lest the House should be bored and impeded by continual complaints of the Reporters' work. They would be servants of the House, and might be censured by it. That is a real danger, but then it is one which it is easy to correct. Let it be for the first year a Standing Order that the work of the Reporters shall not be complained of without the Speaker's permission.
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