TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY. THE House of Commons did right in deciding unani- mously, or at any rate without a division, to adopt Mr. Asquith's motion in favour of passing into law in the present Parliament the great and far-reaching scheme of electoral and Constitutional reform which was drawn up by the Speaker's Conference. The course followed by the House was, in our opinion, inevitable. The conditions being what they are, something has got to be done to put our electoral house in order before an appeal is made to the country. Of that there can be no doubt. The moment the war is over there must be a Dissolution, and the new Parlia- ment must at once deal with the thousand-and-one problems of reconstruction. But if nothing is done by this Parliament in the way of electoral reform, instead of the House of Commons being able to " get down " at once to the work of reconstruction, it will have to begin with a long, arduous, and exciting party wrangle over such problems as One Man One Vote, One Vote One Value, Minority Representation, Female Suffrage, and the rest. That is unthinkable. If electoral reform must be undertaken by this Parliament, as we believe it must, and at once, then it is obvious that the best plan is to take up and pass into law the elaborate and very carefully thought out system put together by the Speaker's Conference. But if the Speaker's Conference scheme is to be adopted, then it is obvious that we must adapt to it the formula which the Spectator coined in the days of the great Reform Bill. It must be—The Conference settlement, the whole Conference settlement, and nothing but the Conference settlement. We say this, not because that settlement is perfect, but because if any attempt is made to pick and choose among its clauses, it will cease to be a compromise. As it has been put together it balances like a cantilever structure. Knock off one of the arms, or cut away four or five of the girders at the base, and the whole thing will topple over. That is a rough way of summarizing all the speeches by responsible persons in the House. Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister, Mr. Walter Long, Mr. Boner Law, all in effect told the same story and reached the same conclusion. No doubt there was an amendment which was based upon a perfectly sound aspiration, the securing of their proper electoral weight to our soldiers and sailors, but it was one which, in truth, did not help to ease the existing situation or to end the deadlock. We may put the position in a nutshell. Everybody is saying that something must be done. But as we know from Lord Melbourne's warning, when people say that, it means that there is danger of their doing something foolish—unless, of course, their vague and general restlessness and willingness to act can be directed into a specific channel. The specific channel is the Conference plan. As democrats we want the will of the people to prevail, and we want it to be the true will of the people and not a sham caucus-made thing which is merely labelled " the popular will." Now, there are four chief ways of making sure that the popular will shall prevail, and of giving the boon of finality, the sense that we have got to rock-bottom. These four ways may be described as : A vote for every man ; One Man One Vote ; One Vote One Value ; and the right of veto over the acts of the people's representatives and servants by means of the Referendum or poll of the whole electorate. The Speaker's Conference goes a very long way towards giving us this true and democratic basis for our system of government. We get Universal Suffrage, One Man One Vote—the remnant of plural voting is too small to bother about—and One Vote One Value. Further, we get an attempt, though an attempt on a very small scale, to mitigate the worst evils of the caucus and party system through the representation of minorities. Proportional Representation for certain purposes may be regarded as a kind of Referendum substitute. We are well aware that the fiercer opponents of Proportional Represen- tation maintain that it can be manipulated by the caucuses— that is, by the party organizations—quite as successfully as can the single-Member system. We do not agree, though we cannot argue the matter here. But though we are in favour of Proportional Representation, we would far rather have had the Referendum, could we only have had one of these two anti-party, anti-caucus safeguards of the popular will. We regard the Referendum as absolutely essential to a sound democratic system. At the same time, we recognize that it would be very difficult to introduce it now since it was not discussed and has no place in the Conference resolutions. Yet, curiously enough, the essential need for it just now stares us in the face. The Prime Minister pointed out that we must settle the reconstitution of the House of Lords ; but by far the best and easiest way of dealing with the House of Lords problem is to leave the Parliament Bill alone, but to side-track it by giving a reformed House of Lords the power to insist that the people as a whole shall be consulted through the Referendum on any Bill in regard to which the popular will is not clear.
We have left the question of Woman Suffrage over to the end. It may be remembered that proposals for enfranchise- ment were not agreed upon in the Conference, or at any rate only agreed upon conditionally. For the reasons which we have expressed before in these pages, and which were so well put by Mr. Asquith in his speech, we have come to the conclusion that the vote must be given to women. At first we were of opinion that the final settlement of the matter must be left over till a new Parliament had been elected. Things, however, have moved so fast in the last few months that we hold now that if, as seems likely, a general agreement to tackle the question can be reached in the present House, it had better be tackled, and the ground be cleared for reconstruction. The problem is eminently one which should be handled while proposers and opponents of the measure are in a chastened mood, as they are lust now. The golden opportunity for agreement should be seized. It may never return. Here, however, we should like to point out that the proposal not to give women votes till they are twenty-six might well be modified by making all persons come of age politically at twenty-six, but with the proviso that any man who had served in His Majesty's Forces, naval or military, during the war should be given a vote whatever his age. There can be no better basis for a vote than such service for the State. Those male persons who from the impediment of • ill-health or engagement in a special trade failed to join the combatant forces should not enjoy the suffrage till twenty- six. Those who have gone through the fire of war or prepared themselves to go through it deserve to come of age politically at twenty-one. We admit that this may be described as " tinkering " with the compromise, but this does not matter if it can be accepted by all parties, and we do not see why it should not be so accepted.
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