THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA
Comparative novelty of constitutional government as understood to-day, and of real parliamentary representation during the first years of the Queen’s reign. Dissatisfaction with, and defects in, Lord Grey’s Reform Act. The new Chamber for the Commons nearly contemporary with the reformed House. Retrospect of different places in which the Commons have sat. Growth of social conveniences at Westminster. Recent changes that after half a century would most strike the visitor to Westminster. The ladies in Parliament. Discomforts of their earlier parliamentary position as compared with its luxuries and ascendancy to-day. Changes in the House itself. The day of the youthful M.P. Modifications in the procedure of the House of Commons. Obstruction. Its origin and prevention. Influence of the House to-day.
Comparative novelty of constitutional government as understood to-day, and of real parliamentary representation during the first years of the Queen’s reign. Dissatisfaction with, and defects in, Lord Grey’s Reform Act. The new Chamber for the Commons nearly contemporary with the reformed House. Retrospect of different places in which the Commons have sat. Growth of social conveniences at Westminster. Recent changes that after half a century would most strike the visitor to Westminster. The ladies in Parliament. Discomforts of their earlier parliamentary position as compared with its luxuries and ascendancy to-day. Changes in the House itself. The day of the youthful M.P. Modifications in the procedure of the House of Commons. Obstruction. Its origin and prevention. Influence of the House to-day.
Constitutional Government and a popular legislature, did on Her Majesty’s accession, both exist in England. Neither of them was more than four or five years old. Each therefore had arrived only at the experimental stage. The Reform Bill of ’32 had scarcely begun to be operative when its imperfections made themselves felt. For the first time indeed in English history popular constituencies had been organized by that Measure. But while all householders rated at £10 and upwardshad a voice in the national Government, various old historic franchises had been abolished. At Preston, for example, the suffrage had previously been in practice universal; so that there, and at Windsor like Preston, the Reform Act had a disfranchising effect.[51]All sections of the middle class were enfranchised by the Measure of 1832.
With some show of reason it was complained that, while numbers were now supreme, opinions and interests were, as in the case of pocket boroughs, better able to make themselves felt under the nominally exclusive régime which had been swept away. The new constitution was not the only parliamentary novelty that signalized the opening of the Victorian epoch. In addition to a new parliament returned by fresh constituencies there had recently risen at Westminster a new Palace containing of course a House of Commons comparatively fresh from the workmen’s hands. The old structure had been burnt down in 1834. The pile of buildings designed by Barry as its architect which is now so familiar a feature in the London landscape did not assume its present proportions in all their completeness till the reign had entered upon its second decade. During the six years between 1834-40 the Houses sat in a temporary building which had been run up with miraculous rapidity. As nearly as possible ten years after Her Majesty received the early visit of her Chancellor at Kensington Palace, more exactly on April 13, 1847, the Peers took possession of their new Chamber.
Three years later, May 30, 1850, the Commons met for the first time beneath the roof that shelters them to-day. Since the People’s Representatives and the Barons were constituted into separate Assemblies, the building which the famous Clock Tower surmounts is in fact the fourth meeting place that has been assigned to the Commons of England. It was not till 1547, the first year of Edward VI. that the chapel of St Stephen in Westminster Palace was prepared for the Commons. Before that date they had assembled in the Chapter House.
The Speaker’s Chair was then the former seat of the Abbot. Beneath this roof were passed the Statute of Provisors 1350, the Statute of Præmunire, the Act of Supremacy, and the Act of Submission. Until St Stephen’s became the synonym for the Popular House, party government can hardly be said to have been, even rudimentarily, established. Government by groups, the rule in the French Chamber theoretically held to be so mischievous in England, but in whose direction we seem to be making further progress each year, was practically the rule in the pre-St Stephen’s period. Nor would it be easy to exaggerate the influence favourable to a hard and fast dichotomy into parties exercised by the structural arrangements of the secularized shrine.
What are the points of contrast in the economy of the Commons’ House of Parliament and its precincts to-day which would most strike the shadowy observer revisiting the place by the glimpses of the moon after half a century’s absence.
The accommodations of comfort, study or pleasurethat now make the House of Commons not perhaps the best but a really good club, are only the fulfilment of undertakings which our imaginary spectator would remember as having been begun when he was last there. Neither would he be much surprised by the increase in the occupants of the Strangers’ Gallery; nor in the greater conveniences enjoyed by the reporters. Long before the necessity for Barry’s new building had arisen these improvements in the internal fittings of any House of Commons were anticipated. When in 1847 the Hereditary legislators were about to settle in their new home, they were much exercised by the conditions under which, and the exact places where, their wives and daughters should view the progress of their debates. The first suggestion of appropriating to the peeresses the gallery that runs above the Ministerial Bench elicited from the late Lord Redesdale the blunt remark: ‘It will make the place like a casino.’ To-day the bright toilettes lit up by the sun pouring through the multi-coloured glass, and blending with the bright tints of the decorated walls form nearly the most picturesque feature in the afternoon of a London season.
Amazement, approbatory or the reverse, at this spectacle is the beginning of surprises which the spectral visitor would find in store. Descending into the hall which separates the two Houses, he would meet a commoner acting as a squire of dames, escorting detachments of ladies to points whence they could best see the House of Commons celebrities of the hour. Looking through the swing door of theRepresentative Chamber, the parliamentary Rip Van Winkle would for the first time in his experience note the flutter of muslins and silks through the grating that bars the compartment just above the reporters’ benches, and that is known to-day by the name of the Ladies’ Cage. In 1834 this was a novelty as yet undreamed of. The germs of it may perhaps first be detected during the opening year of the present century.
In 1800 the admission of the Irish Members after the Act of Union involved structural alterations in the Chamber. Among other things a chandelier was fixed in the centre of the ceiling. At the same time a round hole was cut for the escape of the hot air. The top of the orifice was protected by a balustrade. From above this chandelier ladies were permitted surreptitiously to peep over. In that extremely uncomfortable and rather perilous position they saw what they could of the speakers and heard murmurs of the debate. The first subsequent novelty was the introduction of a few chairs. The temporary structure for the Commons after the 1834 fire was in the old House of Lords formerly known as the Court of Requests, occupying as it did much, if not all, of the site of Edward the Confessor’s palace. The Lords themselves at that time met in the present St Stephen’s where the Commons meet to-day. Nor was it till after the first Reform Bill that the domiciles of the two Assemblies were exchanged.
In the building which served the Commons between 1836-40, no provision was made for ladies. By thereport of the select committee of 1836 this fresh accommodation was suggested. On the 3d of May in that, or in the following year, the House ordered[52]that a place should be provided where, with less discomfort, and more dignity than from the lamp balustrade, ladies could listen to the speeches, and catch an occasional glimpse of those who delivered them. In the temporary structure the exact spot thus allocated to them seems to have been behind the Speaker’s chair, if not actually beneath the floor. Experts at least have discovered no alternative situation as possible. The Ladies’ Gallery of to-day as it exists just above the Reporters’ box is divided into three parts. The western third is reserved for Mrs Speaker. It is called by that lady’s name. Here she receives as her guests personal friends or semi-official personages of her own sex. The two eastern thirds of the compartment now spoken of are at the disposal of Members for their wives and friends. There is a ballot for the Ladies’ Gallery a week in advance. Certain representatives of the people have been favoured, as the result of consummate dexterity or rare luck, with singularly uniform success in this ordeal. During the earlier period to which reference has been made, there are believed to have been instances in which ladies clandestinely found a place not only in the balustrade above but in the ventilating chamber beneath the floor. Thus, when they did not flutter as angels above, they burrowed like moles below. Nor, as we have seen, was it till Barry’s plan had become an architectural fact that the wives and daughtersof the people’s elect were delivered from these two predicaments.
To-day a lady visiting the House of Commons during debate has her 5 o’clock tea as comfortably as in her own drawing room. If the weather be sultry, or the debate tedious, she can refresh herself during the interval between tea and dinner with strawberries and ice as luxuriously as at Gunter’s in Berkeley Square. During the more monastic period of the modern House of Commons, there occurred a short interval in which a very few ladies on the floor of the House itself on the same side as the Treasury Bench were stationed on chairs so placed that their occupants could hear without being seen. One day a sudden witticism of an orator upset the gravity of the listening stateswomen, and scandalized the Speaker. That laugh proved fatal. Henceforth Members were forbidden expressly by the House to secrete ladies in any part of the Chamber, either above or under the floor. To-day in the interior of the Chamber itself ladies are not more visible than formerly. The proposal to remove the grille that converts their gallery into a cage is still made periodically; but with as yet no great appearance of success.
Outside but still beneath the parliamentary roof, or within the parliamentary precinct, the sex that is no longer ‘suppressed,’ pervades the place at all hours. The Members’ dining room, where male strangers can be invited, is not yet open to guests of our newecclesiazusæ. All other parts of the premises are already pervaded by them. In the basement a room has been discoveredin which the fair guests of Members can be entertained when the debate is over by a supper which may well repair the omission of a dinner. The river frontage of the Westminster Palace during some years has been surrendered at discretion to the politicians of the petticoat. Lord Redesdale foresaw the coming resemblance of the interior of the Peers’ Chamber to a music and dancing saloon. Even his alarmist imagination never pictured at the height of the London season an assembly of ladies upon the Terrace just outside the Chamber, enjoying as the guests of the elected of the democracy ices, strawberries and cream, all the other modish adjuncts of 5 o’clock tea. This they have done since 1888. More recently there have been added waitresses attractively dressed in a black and white uniform. Some years ago Mr John Bright, a special habitué of the tea room, arranged a subscription for a wedding present to the young person who presided over the cups and saucers, when on her marriage she retired into private life. Even that statesman would not perhaps have undertaken his graceful and chivalrous task in the case of a whole regiment of tea room nymphs.
The lady M.P. has still to come into existence. Her sex controls votes and vicariously receives them. In New Zealand and other Colonies the same sex records votes directly as well as influences votes indirectly. If, as other precedents might suggest, the mother country is advancing towards the Colonial usage, is there any abiding reason why to their parliamentary influence already established beyonddoubt, the mothers and daughters of England should not add the responsibility to public opinion which a parliamentary seat would bring and which they now escape?
The personal changes in the composition of the House of Commons are only less striking than the innovations in its social life. Years have passed since Mr Disraeli’s oft reiterated remark that the future of English politics was to the English youth. In a sense different perhaps from that which the phrase was first intended to bear, this consummation seems in gradual process of fulfilment. In 1837 a chief amusement of visitors to the House of Commons was to count the number of bald heads in the Assembly. Those phenomena, as the legitimate results of age, are very nearly unknown to-day. During the first three decades of the Queen’s reign the average age of a Member was between 50 and 60. Now it is probably not much more than 40. Often it happens that senators are so fresh from school as to be unable to forget their schoolboy phraseology, and to address the Speaker in the exact terms they used but the other day to the master of their Form. Thus, ‘If you please, Sir, Mr Speaker, Sir!’ is the opening often heard of late years from a boyish senator who rises to address the House in response to the eye of its President. In other respects, the typical M.P. has changed not less conspicuously. Men of the social and political quality who followed the lead of Sir Robert Peel first, and of Mr Disraeli afterwards, who could be taken for nothing else than the country gentlemen that theywere, have been replaced by men whose antecedents and whose interests are not less manifestly commercial.
Long after the abolition of the Corn Laws the description of the Conservative party given in the Life of Lord George Bentinck continued to be true. A glance sufficed to show that these ‘men of metal and of acres’ were the products of their native soil. Specimens of this class lingered at times pretty plentifully after Household Franchise was added to the Statute Book. The tall erect figure of Mr Newdegate, broadened, but not bent, by age, still retaining much of the elasticity of youth; the less rugged and angular, but physically not less well developed, presence of Sir Rainald, afterwards Lord, Knightley; these were specimens of Members not uncommon within the memory of the present generation. To the same order, in spite of a very different appearance, belonged the parliamentary Cato of those days, Mr J. W. Henley, the veteran Member for Oxfordshire. If the wisdom of the House, its occasional intolerance, and its hereditary good sense, were ever incarnate in an individual, they resided surely beneath the compact sturdy figure with the countenance, seamed and gnarled as of an ancient oak, of that remarkable man. Before Quarter Sessions had given place to County Councils, Mr Henley and others of his class ceased to be known in their places.
These were the men, contemporaries of Disraeli and Northcote, brought up in the same parliamentary, often in the same social, school as them. These, too, were they who for his mastery of parliamentary law, his excellence of parliamentary manner, and hismaintenance of historic standards in parliamentary debate, could almost tolerate the Liberalism of Mr Gladstone. With a pang they anticipated the day when his withdrawal would rob the Assembly of the last surviving monument of the eloquence and bearing which used to be the familiar attributes in the first assembly of gentlemen in the world. Already debating of the old stately order had begun to go out of fashion. Thirty years after the Queen’s accession, in the Reform discussions of 1867, Mr Lowe had made one of the latest and happiest hits ever secured by a familiar phrase from Virgil. In 1881, after the death of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone pointed a reference of the same kind with not less felicity when he applied to his rival on returning from Berlin the words by which the Latin poet indicated the commanding presence of Marcellus among the winners of thespolia opima.
With these exceptions, there is no recent record of signally successful quotation in the House of Commons from classical authors. Not indeed for want of classical scholars. Professor Jebb, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir M. W. Ridley, are at least the equals in this respect of their seniors.[53]The simple reason is that Latin and Greek quotation which were once held to be, as Mr Disraeli said of invective, an ornament of debate, have passed into the heritage of outworn words and faces. To-day if honourable gentlemen illustrate their meaning by a metaphor or clench an argument by an epigram, they go fortheirtropesand ideas, not to the library, but to the laboratory. Thus one of them not long since was heard to compare the mind of an opponent to a series of condensing chambers. The masters of the grand style in parliamentary oratory, as it may be called, cannot be said to have passed away while David Plunket, Lord Rathmore, lives. But the business of the House of Commons is done in Committee. A Committee of the House of Commons is like a committee of any other gentlemen professedly met together to transact the greatest amount of work in the shortest space of time. Telling arrangement of ideas, clearness of thought, conciseness of phrase, dexterous support of special views by figures and facts; these are the qualities bred in the parliamentary atmosphere to-day. In such categories are the ideals consciously aimed at to be found. No competent person seriously supposes the average of intellectual power in Parliament to have declined. Mr Gladstone and other experts have testified that it has increased, and that the 1893 Parliament contained more men of first rate capacity than any within modern memory.
The interest taken by the nations in the doings of the House of Commons has not permanently abated, nor is likely to do so, seeing that its attraction resides less in the letter of its debates than in the circumstance of its being a continuous commentary on the social as well as political history of the day, a concentration, epitome, and amalgam of the human nature of the period. The vicissitudes of human affairs, thesudden growth, the not less sudden rupture, of human friendships; the involuntary perjuries of political allies surely as laughable in the sight of Jove as the perjuries of lovers; the sworn confidants and colleagues in one Administration transformed into the mortal antagonists of the next; these are the episodes of everyday life reflected upon the stage of the Theatre Royal St Stephen’s. Can they then, fail to be more full of dramatic charm than the entertainments provided in any other playhouse of the realm? The parallel between the theatrical and parliamentary stage might be made still closer. As on the former, so on the latter there are certain stock parts always sure to be enacted, whatever the title of the play, or the nature of the discussion.
The Mr Henley already named, pre-eminently representative as he was of the hard good sense and rugged honesty of the Tory squire, was not a novelty in the Chamber. He had his forerunner in the ‘down-right’ Shippon, as Pope calls him, of a Georgian House of Commons. He it was who, as a Jacobite opposed to Sir Robert Walpole yet said of himself and his adversary, ‘He is for King George; I am for King James. We differ on most things; but Robin and I are the two most honest men in Parliament.’ The theatrical and parliamentary analogy might be illustrated much further. One or two more instances will suffice. The stage character whose chief function is to keep the audience smiling and to enliven dulness by a laugh has his exact analogue in the parliamentary humorist, whose very rising isthe signal for a burst of anticipatory merriment. In the nineteenth century the name of that humorist has been, during its first half, Sir Charles Wetherell. He relieved the severity of the 1831-2 Reform Bill discussions by convulsing his hearers with laughter at the farcical absurdity of his sallies, or by the ludicrous incongruity of the metaphors with which he pointed his invective.
Half a century later the name of the performer is changed. The function discharged is identical. In the place of a Wetherell there sits now a Bernal Osborne, now a Patrick Boyle Smollett, now a William Gregory, and again a Wilfried Lawson, or a Labouchere. In any case the wag is indispensable to the proceedings of the House. In every new Parliament he makes his appearance, if not quite so early, yet with the same regularity as the Queen’s Speech, or the Debate on the Address.
Other rôles are equally familiar, and with the same undeviating regularity are forthcoming. High or Low Church, dry or Evangelical, the different champions of the Church, each in their own era and from their own point of view, come forward to defend the national Establishment. These are the gentlemen whom in once addressing a deputation of them Mr Disraeli characteristically styled ‘the children of the Church.’ Of this section, during the earlier decades of the reign, Sir Robert Inglis was a chief. Round him were grouped a little band in which Mr Spooner, and thereafter the intrepid Mr Newdegate, and poor Mr Whalley, with his jaded, hunted look, had a place. The burlypresence of Sir John Mowbray, the less robust, but wiry figure of Mr Talbot, both Members for Oxford University, belong to a later date. When these may have disappeared, successors are already visible to take their place. The stalwart form and patriarchal beard of Sir John Kennaway, the less athletic and more sensitive figure of Mr Stanley Leighton are even to-day powers in that ecclesiastical faction. The two sons of Lord Salisbury, Lord Cranborne and Lord Hugh Cecil belong to another generation, but to the same category of ecclesiastical defenders.
During the Queen’s earlier years, Chartism, that is to-day only a name, was an active force. Most of the points of the Charter itself have quietly become law. The Septennial Act has not indeed been repealed; but practically the term of parliamentary life has been shortened. The ballot has quietly superseded the hustings. Payment of Members is seriously discussed. Election expenses have been much reduced. By the Redistribution Bill of 1884, an appreciable step towards equal electoral districts has been taken. The Georgian House of Commons, indeed the House till the full effects of the first Reform Bill were felt, was so small, its members so preponderantly came from the upper class of society as to give the Assembly the air rather of a family party than of a national forum.
From 1707 to the beginning of this century, the English, Welsh and Scotch numbered 558. The Act of Union at the beginning of the century added 100 to the House of Commons of 1801. The additions tothe House made by the Reform Bill of 1832 in the case of Wales and Ireland 5 each, of Scotland 8, were exactly compensated by the reduction of English Members. The Measure, therefore, which created popular constituencies and with them a popularly representative Chamber left St Stephen’s numerically unaltered. As to quality, it socially modified rather than, as is sometimes said, revolutionized the Assembly. Nor, as to figures, did the Household Franchise Bill of 1868 enlarge the Chamber. The 7 fresh representatives to Scotland, and the 1 to Wales were balanced exactly by the disfranchisement of 8 English constituencies. The House of Commons remained therefore 658. An increase began with the Reform Bill of 1885. The emancipation of the agricultural labourer by the franchise on the same conditions as his urban brother involved the sole increase since the Irish union to the numbers of the House of Commons. Even that is only represented by 12. The whole of this increase was for the benefit of Scotland. Two new Members were indeed received by England under the latest franchise re-arrangement. Two were also lost by Ireland. Thus the Irish disfranchisement balances the English enfranchisement. The sole nett profit in the transaction accrued therefore, as has been said, to Great Britain beyond the Tweed.
While the House of Commons as to arrangements, occupants and visitors has changed more than once during the period comprised in this survey, there has been in the opinion of experts like Mr Gladstoneno diminution of ability in its general debates. The amount of varied and accurate knowledge displayed during discussions in Committee by the rank and file of its members has increased appreciably since the Derby-Disraeli Reform Act. But, it is said, as our constitution has become more democratic, our popular legislators have grown unmannerly. Those who know the volumes of parliamentary history summarizing debates in the House during the French Revolutionary epoch of 1793-5 may be disposed to doubt the justice of this censure. The violent personality of the recriminations between individual members of the two Whig sections at this period; the revolting grossness of the metaphors and the epithets by which the intellectual majesty of Burke stooped to express his loathing for the new Radicals on both sides of the Channel; the personal menaces exchanged by competitive debaters of smaller calibre; leave no room for doubt on the point. Two years after the first Reform Act, Church rates and other ecclesiastical topics gave rise in the debates upon them to scenes and noises, cockcrowing amongst them, that scandalised the parliamentary decorum of the period, as disgraceful beyond all precedent. These incidents were attended by a degree of parliamentary disorder which was habitually in excess of the ebullitions however scandalous, provoked during the session of 1893 by the Second Irish Government Bill of Mr Gladstone. The great change of recent years in parliamentary methods is of course the organized obstruction on frivolous and irrelevant pretexts raised during debate. Even this is not the novelty thatsome have seemed to suppose. During that distant era when no chandelier hung over the heads of Members, the only illuminants known in the Chamber were candles. A formal motion was made that these should be brought in. The early practitioners of obstruction seized upon this issue to delay the discussion. Motions for adjournment became effective instruments for delay during the Reform discussions of 1832. They were then employed with success generally, and with humour sometimes by the popular Sir Charles Wetherell, and in case of unpalatable amendments by Mr Sheridan. While motions for adjournment have thus always been used as methods of delay, they naturally have had different aspects at various times. Thus when employed for fighting a Bill to which conscientious objection was entertained, these motions differed entirely from those to the same ostensible end made by the feigned opponents of perfectly harmless Measures. Mr Pope Hennessy was practically the founder of this later and indiscriminate opposition to all attempts to legislate.
The late Mr Parnell extended that system to routine business such as the nomination of Committees, also to unobjectionable votes in supply, and finally in 1877 to private Members’ Bills as well as Government Bills, with the avowed aim of paralysing the whole machinery of Statute law. The late Sir Stafford Northcote, who more than any other statesman of our time resembled, in his conscientious caution and chivalrous devotion to principle, Mr Perceval, dealt perhaps too gently with this abuse of forms, norsaw fit to employ the new rule that was suggested to him by the consummate experience of the late Sir Thomas May. Mr Gladstone’s management of this matter in 1881-2 was more drastic; it would have been successful but for the tactics of the late Lord Randolph Churchill and the present Sir John Gorst. After this came in 1888 the leadership of Mr W. H. Smith, resulting as it did in 15 new Rules. The practical result of the latest changes in House of Commons procedure may be summarized popularly and briefly as follows. The French principle of closure already adopted in all other Popular Assemblies is now part of the law of the English Parliament. This instrument can be moved for at any time. It depends wholly on the Speaker or, if the House be in Committee, on the Chairman, whether the motion for it be put to the House. If put it is generally opposed. Then follow debate and division. For its adoption there must be not only a majority but one composed of not less than 100 Members.
With its larger numbers, the representative character of the House of Commons has been increased also. The steps by which it has acquired control of the executive as well as the legislative machinery of government need not be recapitulated here. Its moral, educational and social influence in the country is probably not proportionate to its actual power. The theory of delegacy so indignantly repudiated by Conservative speakers during the first Reform Bill debates is to-day accepted and actively illustrated by a majority of Members. More and more the tendency is for theconstituencies to call into existence a Government to undertake a specific task of legislation whose scope is defined by the individual possessing for the moment the national confidence. To support in that special work that particular statesman, or, if he falls into disfavour, to thwart him, the householders send to St Stephen’s men whose discretion is restricted within very narrow limits.
This arrangement immensely increases the authority of the democratic favourite of the moment. It is less favourable to the prestige or usefulness of the Chamber as containing the collective wisdom of the nation. The aptitude for business talk that shall be to the point in Committee has not, when the House has a mind to it, declined. The great speeches, no sooner delivered than they constitute national text-books, are less frequent than the display of excellence in debate. Afraid of boring the Assembly, dreading the imputation of mere rhetoric, the Member who has something to say usually prefers delivering it to his constituents at his periodical reunion with them, or upon some other extra parliamentary occasion. The terse diction and urbane gravity of manner of Sir Charles Dilke made him, during his Foreign Under-Secretaryship, a parliamentary model. Such oratorical efforts as he sometimes made, were reserved for the meetings with his electors. The clever young politician, being on his promotion, speaks when he can that he may give his future chief a taste of his quality. Popular meetings therefore, and the periodical press have detracted from the House of Commons as a schoolof eloquence, or as a national educator. On the other hand the House of Lords has no constituencies in the background. Its time is less preoccupied. It is to-day far more representative of the English people than was the House of Commons a few years before the Queen’s accession. It does indeed chiefly consist now of men whose station and whose antecedents are not very dissimilar from those of the House of Commons before that Chamber had been thrice Reformed. Hence some of those debates, especially on foreign policy, or grave points of constitutional procedure that used to mark epochs in the Elective Chamber are now almost confined to the Hereditary House.
Outbursts of periodical petulance against the Peers will doubtless continue. Such Radicals as may be left in England to-day are at heart far more tolerant of a second Chamber, composed as that at Westminster is, than were the ‘root and branch’ men not merely of Cromwell’s day, but of half a century ago. Something therefore may perhaps be said on behalf of the opinion that any movement which may be successful against the House of Lords is likely to affect the House of Commons as well.[54]
CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS
Comparative youth not the only point of difference between the House of Commons to-day and formerly. Its reflection of social characteristics of the time shown in the disappearance of the old County Member extinct in the country as well as in Parliament. Modifications inpersonnelof the Liberal party since the great fortunes made in trade and since the first Reform Act; also in that of the Conservatives. Mr Gladstone’s opinion and experience on this subject. The obstacles in the way of oratorical efforts or success in the House of Commons, have increased under new conditions. Rivals to House as representative of national feelings. The press, the House of Lords and local debating societies.
Comparative youth not the only point of difference between the House of Commons to-day and formerly. Its reflection of social characteristics of the time shown in the disappearance of the old County Member extinct in the country as well as in Parliament. Modifications inpersonnelof the Liberal party since the great fortunes made in trade and since the first Reform Act; also in that of the Conservatives. Mr Gladstone’s opinion and experience on this subject. The obstacles in the way of oratorical efforts or success in the House of Commons, have increased under new conditions. Rivals to House as representative of national feelings. The press, the House of Lords and local debating societies.
The average age of its members is not the only respect in which, during the Queen’s reign, the House of Commons has been gradually transformed. If the country squire of the old school of Mr Henley has disappeared from it, that is because he is now as unknown in his own county as in Pall Mall. The social composition of the Whig, or Liberal, party was finally and entirely altered about the period of the first Reform Bill. The change had indeed been going forward from the earlier epoch when the middle class of commerce began to be, as from the days of the Edwards it was tending to become, the greatest power in the country. The replacement of the old Whig, with his territorial associations, by the new Liberal,like Mr Cobden, was only the last stage in the development of self-government in England. In truth, however, the kind of progress now spoken of was not limited to any single political connection. The Nestorian experience of Mr Gladstone testifies it to have been not less noticeable among Tories than among Whigs. There were not, he thinks, in 1835 five members of the Conservative party owing their seats to commercial or industrial influences. The change which has come about in the composition of the party since then is ‘simply marvellous.’[55]The specific legislation that has surrounded the English Crown by a democracy, is the extension of the lodger franchise to boroughs in 1867, to counties in 1884, and the cheapening of elections by the Corrupt Practices Bill of Sir Henry James in 1883. Notwithstanding these advances, the blend between authority and freedom has never been more fortunately conspicuous nor more wisely active in this country than since the period of its self-government began. Before 1870 it used to be said that the Pope, shorn of his temporal power, would exercise a prerogative not weaker, but stronger than when he was sole lord of Rome. Whether thatprediction has, or has not been fulfilled, the influence that a constitutional Sovereign can exercise in the United Kingdom has increased rather than diminished since the days of absolute monarchy were over. Whatever in the way of political initiative the Sovereign has surrendered has in the department of social ascendancy and civic influence, been restored with interest to the Crown. The late Sir Henry Maine, differing in that respect from earlier political theorists, has in that very suppleness and elasticity which his predecessors praised discovered a source of weakness to the English constitution. So shrewd an observer as Mr Goldwin Smith bitterly complains of the fickleness of popularly elected Parliaments, and their quickness to reflect the external influences of the moment, as of the chief dangers to our political stability. Into that controversy it is needless to enter. It may seem strange to those who have had more than half a century’s experience of her loyalty to constitutional principles; but in 1837 no one certainly knew whether the young Queen would not insist upon her technical right to nominate and dismiss her Ministers at will. Less than four years had passed since her uncle William IV. had practically exercised that prerogative. In 1834 Lord Althorp was called by his father, Lord Spencer’s, death to the Upper House. Lord Grey had long wished to resign the Premiership. His unsatisfactory relations with the King made him seize this opportunity of doing so. The Sovereign accepted the resignation of the Cabinet with more than alacrity. Substantially therefore, andmorally, there would seem something in the statement that William IV. dismissed the Whigs to please himself.[56]As Mr Gladstone in one of his essays has shown, the principle giving cohesion as well as joint and separate vitality to the members of a Cabinet independently of the personal pleasure of the Sovereign had been established before then. First actively applied if not discovered by Sunderland, the son-in-law of the great Duke of Marlborough, the Cabinet system, as Mr Gladstone has shown, can scarcely be said definitively to have triumphed till 1828, when George IV. reluctantly accepted Canning for Prime Minister. William IV., Mr Gladstone’s first Royal master, is, it may be noticed in passing, admitted by his early servant to have used his prerogative unwisely; but is defended from the charge of having used it unconstitutionally. So great is the distance in political thought traversed since 1834 by the statesman as well as by others.
No thought of reverting to this family precedent has ever probably occurred to her present Majesty. The comparison of the position voluntarily occupied by the Sovereign to-day to that of the permanent head of a great department of the State unchanged by Ministerial or electoral vicissitudes, roughly but not altogether inaccurately conveys some idea of the practical influence of the Crown upon the politics of the period. Continuous experience of public affairs is not however the sole source of the influence uponthem which a constitutional monarch may be enabled or obliged to exercise. The familiar Bedchamber Plot, presently to be mentioned more in detail, and the momentary friction between the Sovereign and her responsible statesmen that followed it, is now known to have originated in a misapprehension. The Minister only desired that a few ladies should give up their places in the Household. The Sovereign resisted the dismissal of her entire suite. If, indeed, a solution of the difficulty had not been found; if, that is, the Queen had pressed her personal wishes to the point of the Premier’s retirement, it is by no means certain that she would have lacked constitutional arguments justifying her course. A sort of plebiscite in 1841 had been given to Sir Robert Peel. On some national issues of broader import, the popular feeling at this time notoriously had not been expressed with convincing clearness. On all sides there seemed balance and consequently confusion of public opinion. From the altitude of her throne, and by the light of her ancestral knowledge, the Queen might have argued that she saw the situation more correctly than her Ministers in Parliament or her people outside, and so have vindicated the dissolution of the House had she chosen to adopt that course. This prerogative of sanctioning the recourse of a Minister to the constituencies is one of which the Crown can never finally divest itself. In the last resort, however much he may wish to abdicate his power, the first magistrate of a State must be prepared on that point for a definite individualresponsibility. The latest indubitable illustration of this truth was given in 1868. In that year Mr Gladstone’s Irish Church resolutions secured the defeat of the Disraeli Government. The Conservative Premier did not, as precedent for doing even then existed, resign immediately. He placed before the Queen the alternative of a dissolution then, or six months later, leaving absolutely to the Crown the responsibility of the choice. If that situation has not since exactly repeated itself, obviously from the very nature of things it is one which may at any moment recur. Thus it will be seen that under parliamentary government, the self effacement of the Sovereign is an impossibility. Years have passed since the sense of popular disappointment at the visible results of the Grey Reform Act found expression inConingsby, and since the Sidonia of that romance ridiculed to his young disciple the imperfect vicariate of a House of Commons. However essential a part of our institutions it may be, its power and popularity are not to-day without competitors in popular favour. These rivals to the House of Commons are in their way as much as itself integral parts of the national life. If, notwithstanding all the gibes against it, the House of Lords, composed as it is to-day, be not a representative body, nothing which exists in England can deserve that epithet. Socially the peers of the later Victorian epoch are as a whole indistinguishable from the Commoners at St Stephen’s of an earlier epoch. They reflect at least as faithfully the variety, the interests, the pursuits, and the convictions of thenation. The great difference between election to the Lower and promotion to the Upper House is that the former generally goes by local interest. The latter depends usually on political service, on personal merit, or individual achievement. That distinction was unknown before the present generation. Macaulay, a great writer and the best informed man of his day, received a peerage. His personal claims to the honour were admitted by reason of his place in the party which from 1832 he had continuously served in Parliament. His pretensions to a peerage were emphasized by his services as a State official. He had occupied Cabinet rank; he had been Secretary at War when that office was equivalent to a Secretaryship of State. No coronet was ever given to literary genius alone before that conferred upon Lord Tennyson.
The younger Pitt is reported to have said that any man with £40,000 a year had a right to a seat in the House of Lords. Some of his creations notably that of Lord Carrington gave effect to that opinion. These peerages, however, did but foreshadow faintly the elevations of men actually engaged in commerce as in the case of Lord Armstrong, vicariously through his widow in that of Mr W. H. Smith, and many more. The press, too, is not less representative than the House of Commons. Nor in all probability is Lord Glenesk the last representative of journalism, as he has been the first to receive a seat in the Hereditary legislature. Under any circumstances, the well placed English newspaper is likely to be not less expository of public opinion than any body of gentlemen, by whatever mode elected,sitting at Westminster. Special tendencies of the time make the press an exceptionally lifelike measure of the thoughts and wishes in every department of life of every section of the English people. Newspaper proprietorship has in fact become not less a fashion of the day than theatrical lesseeship was a few years since. A number of men agreed on certain points such as the development or exploitation of particular enterprises, are seized with the conviction that ‘an organ’ is essential to their success. They combine, therefore, to buy or to press into their service by subsidies some printed sheet which may yet have the ear of the nation but which happens just now to have fallen upon evil times. If no such opportunity as this present itself, newspaper starting has become a recognized industry of commerce. After a time, therefore, a new literary champion of the Empire enters the lists. Its real object may be narrow and even personal. Its managers know that if their end is to be accomplished it must be veiled by a programme of more disinterested generalities, and that popular sentiment should form the first study of its conductors. In this way therefore, apart from the great newspaper oracles of the time which in all but name are national enterprises, the press has increasingly an inducement, that never fails, to hold up the mirror to the convictions, prejudices and sentiments into which public opinion can be analysed. The reptile press of Germany is, upon any considerable scale, not known in England. The connection between most journals whose support is envied, or whose opposition is dreaded, and some or more of the leading public men of theday, has been often very close[57]and is perhaps, still not quite unknown.
The newspaper, however, is but a single agency for the literary influence exercised upon the public life of the day. Of late years periodicals, appearing at less frequent intervals, have among politicians themselves competed in attractiveness with the national assemblies at Westminster. In proportion as parliamentary reports have been in the daily press reduced to a few columns and in the case of all but speakers of the first rank to a few paragraphs or sentences; parliamentarians themselves have substituted the monthly Review for the stenographer or for Hansard as the depository of their views. Technically the presence of reporters in the gallery is even to-day connived at rather than constitutionally sanctioned. Yet the leader of the House of Commons, not very long since, reminded his hearers that those who were not present at his speech might master his points by referring to the parliamentary reports next day. Members with a taste for writing, having some carefully thought out message to deliver on an intricate topic of foreign or domestic policy are increasingly inclined entirely to pretermit the parliamentary stage of their exposition. By reserving their remarks for the monthly periodical, they can be sure of fixing popular attention more conspicuously. Their signatures are appended to their effusions. The editor incurs no responsibility either for the substance or the form of the opinions delivered. The reciprocityof the arrangement is, between him and his contributor, complete. On the one hand the literary impressario secures the advertisement of a familiar if not a famous name, good as he knows it to be for the sale of a certain number of copies, each one of which represents a clear if a small profit. On the other hand, assuming the senator to deserve an audience, he is more likely to secure one when his views are placed before the public for the first time with all the advantages of good type and paper, when they are read comfortably in library or club, not listened to with an effort, and even then but partially heard in the exhausted atmosphere of the House of Commons. Again if the Popular Chamber still be of the same intellectual calibre as of old, it has grown also more manifestly fastidious and more demonstratively intolerant of speakers who do not hit its taste. As Sir James Mackintosh and Lord Macaulay in different words both said, it was always a Chamber whose tastes and verdict were incalculable. Since, under a democratic franchise, it has become an Assembly primarily of business gentlemen, the chances of failure to satisfy it are so alarmingly numerous as to prevent all but the most self assured and impassive from making the effort. It prides itself above all things on its business-like tastes. Therefore, it abhors any approach to rhetoric. It fails not to remember its traditions of eloquence, or the ascendancy over itself which to a master of words and phrases, to a Disraeli, a Gladstone, a Lowe, a Canning, a Peel, it was proud to accord, like a horse that knows, and that takesa pleasure in, its rider. Therefore the House expects from those who address it something more than the bald, business talk of the Board room; an aptitude for clothing sound original reasons in diction which shall be without pretentiousness, but that shall not lack felicity and point always, and epigram sometimes. If these conditions be forthcoming; if the Chamber be in a good humour; if it be neither too long nor too soon since it lunched nor too near the hour when it dines; then the elective legislators will perhaps for a short time give their ear to one who rises at the right moment and in favour of whom they are predisposed. The conditions are obviously severe. It is therefore not to be wondered at that candidates for oratorical honours at St Stephen’s tend steadily to diminish.
There is another kind of rivalry to which of late years the House of Commons has been exposed, which may excite a smile, but which is in its way a reality to be reckoned with. This is not that of the provincial platform, of the public meeting room, or of the debating society in its older development. These latter have always, among the lower middle classes, fulfilled a function like that of the University Unions among the classes somewhat better to do. Coger’s Hall was the school of discussion in which the late Charles Bradlaugh acquired great power of direct and incisive utterance as well as a perfect control over his temper. London and all the great provincial towns have as many of these places as ancient Rome possessed of gladiatorial schools. A really new growthof the last quarter of the nineteenth century is the local Houses of Commons. These sprung up in and for every quarter or suburb of London, and in many provincial districts as well. They are still known, and sometimes much in vogue. They are not of course recognized by the legislature. Nor, as in the case of the municipal bodies which we have already seen at work, is their machinery controlled by the Local Government Board. A seat in them has been known to be as much an object of rivalry among an increasing class, as a place on the green leather benches of Westminster. The member for Kennington or Lavender Hill in the south of London, for Westbourne Grove or Shepherd’s Bush in the west, for Haverstock Hill in the north, may even be as considerable a personage with his immediate friends in the district as the member for Westminster in the Imperial Parliament. The leader in the Hampstead House of Commons, or the Chancellor of the Exchequer in that which meets on Richmond Hill is not certain that he would change his place with his titular equivalents at St Stephen’s. These are considerations that may explain why the House of Commons, whose supremacy was unchallenged under a Peel, a Stanley, a Palmerston, a Disraeli, a Gladstone, is regarded no longer with awe, sometimes with the familiarity that breeds contempt.
As yet this diminution of parliamentary prestige, if such there really be, is indicated only by a floating sentiment. It finds expression chiefly in social chatter or in newspaper flippancies. Nor in the present decade of the Victorian epoch are there many positive signs of our representative system being superseded by thecontrolling will of an individual autocrat for whom the late Mr Froude thought the time was steadily approaching. The same remark might with equal truth probably be made of every part in our national polity. It is certainly true of the House of Lords not less than of the monarchy. The position practically occupied by the Crown to-day, is that which the Prince Consort many years ago marked out for it. Some of these functions he was himself able to assist the Queen in discharging. To him there seemed to devolve upon the monarchy duties analogous to those discharged by the permanent officials in the great departments of State. Amid the vicissitudes of party, the rise and fall of Ministers, the changes of popular opinion, the Crown was in his judgment the one guarantee for continuity in policy, domestic not less than foreign. The occupant of the Throne took, as Ministers of State, those whom parliamentary majorities and public opinion indicated. The Sovereign however had other functions than merely to register and sanction the wish of subjects and the decisions of Commons. Chief among these, as every other page of Sir Theodore Martin’s book during the Peelite and Palmerstonian periods clearly shows, was to judge of the quarters whence a stable Administration could be formed; whether, in fact, Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, or Lord Derby, in a balanced state of parliamentary feeling, had the best chance of carrying on the Queen’s government to the welfare of the realm and the confidence of its representatives. The most familiar aspects of the political and parliamentary situation have ceased to be now what in thePrince Consort’s day they habitually were. The doctrine that Ministers are the free choice of the Sovereign was never propounded absolutely by the husband of the Queen. The doctrine was rather assumed by him in the interests of the national convenience than expressed in any terms defining the Royal prerogative. The slow process of absorption of the Peelites into the Liberal ranks; the lifelong rivalry of Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston produced, during much of the Prince Consort’s time, a condition of unstable equilibrium in party organization, which in these later days of popular mandates, general elections which are plebiscites and of overwhelming majorities which amount to commissions of the democracy, it is not easy to realize.
Some there were who thought that the Liberal disruption of 1886 might reproduce in English politics the precarious and fluctuating relations of parties and statesmen that seemed between 1852 and 1865 to have become permanent. Had that forecast been fulfilled, the Sovereign to-day might be confronted with personal responsibilities of Ministerial selection which would have recalled the duty devolved upon her during earlier portions of her reign. Nothing of the kind has happened. The event of ten years ago has resulted not in party instability, but in fresh fixity of tenure to the political conglomerate that the constituencies have as yet shown no wish to dismiss. Of course in time the same conditions as of old must recur. The national organization of which Liberals as well as Conservatives are constituent parts, will at some day or other uponissues perhaps now unsuspected resolve themselves into their elements. Ancient lines of demarcation will again declare themselves. A cycle of government by groups may yet be opened.[58]People and Parliament may still wait for the Royal choice to close an interval of confusion and of doubt. In whatever form this reversion to an older order may present itself, whatever the exact contingencies in store, the occupant of the Throne as has been shown above cannot divest himself of the right, therefore of the duty, of giving a casting vote when his officers of State hesitate, as Mr Disraeli did in 1868, as to the exact moment when the appeal to the constituences most advantageously can be made.
ROYALTY AS A SOCIAL FORCE