English Constitution — The House of Commons, part 3

On the whole, I think it indisputable that the selecting task of Parliament is performed as well as public opinion wishes it to be performed; and if we want to improve that standard, we must first improve the English nation, which imposes that standard.

Of the substantial part of its legislative task, the same, too, may, I think, be said.

The manner of our legislation is indeed detestable, and the machinery for settling that manner odious.

A committee of the whole House, dealing, or attempting to deal with the elaborate clauses of a long bill, is a wretched specimen of severe but misplaced labour.

It is sure to wedge some clause into the Act, such as that which the judge said "seemed to have fallen by itself, PERHAPS, from heaven, into the mind of the legislature," so little had it to do with anything on either side or around it.

At such times government by a public meeting displays its inherent defects, and is little restrained by its necessary checks.

But the essence of our legislature may be separated from its accidents.

Subject to two considerable defects I think Parliament passes laws as the nation wishes to have them passed.

Thirty years ago this was not so.

The nation had outgrown its institutions, and was cramped by them.

It was a man in the clothes of a boy; every limb wanted more room, and every garment to be fresh made.

"D-mn me," said Lord Eldon in the dialect of his age, "if I had to begin life again I would begin as an agitator."

The shrewd old man saw that the best life was that of a miscellaneous objector to the old world, though he loved that world, believed in it, could imagine no other.

But he would not say so now.

There is no worse trade than agitation at this time.

A man can hardly get an audience if he wishes to complain of anything.

Nowadays, not only does the mind and policy of Parliament (subject to the exceptions before named) possess the common sort of moderation essential to the possibility of Parliamentary government, but also that exact gradation, that precise species of moderation, most agreeable to the nation at large.

Not only does the nation endure a Parliamentary government, which it would not do if Parliament were immoderate, but it likes Parliamentary government.

A

sense of satisfaction permeates the country because most or the country feels it has got the precise thing that suits it.

The exceptions are two.

First.

That Parliament leans too much to the opinions of the landed interest.

The Cattle Plague Act is a conspicuous instance of this defect.

The details of that bill may be good or bad, and its policy wise or foolish.

But the manner in which it was hurried through the House savoured of despotism.

The cotton trade or the wine trade could not, in their maximum of peril, have obtained such aid in such a manner.

The House of Commons would hear of no pause and would heed no arguments.

The greatest number of them feared for their incomes.

The land of England returns many members annually for the counties; these members the Constitution gave them.

But what is curious is that the landed interest gives no seats to other classes, but takes plenty of seats FROM other classes.

Half the boroughs in England are represented by considerable landowners, and when rent is in question, as in the cattle case, they think more of themselves than of those who sent them.

In number the landed gentry in the House far surpass any other class.

They have, too, a more intimate connection with one another; they were educated at the same schools; know one another's family name from boyhood; form a society; are the same kind of men;

marry the same kind of women.

The merchants and manufacturers in Parliament are a motley race--one educated here, another there, a third not educated at all; some are of the second generation of traders, who consider self-made men intruders upon an hereditary place; others are self-made, and regard the men of inherited wealth, which they did not make and do not augment, as beings of neither mind nor place, inferior to themselves because they have no brains, and inferior to lords because they have no rank.

Traders have no bond of union, no habits of intercourse; their wives, if they care for society, want to see not the wives of other such men, but "better people," as they say--the wives of men certainly with land, and, if Heaven help, with the titles.

Men who study the structure of Parliament, not in abstract books, but in the concrete London world, wonder not that the landed interest is very powerful, but that it is not despotic.

I believe it would be despotic if it were clever, or rather if its representatives were so, but it has a fixed device to make them stupid.

The counties not only elect landowners, which is natural, and perhaps wise, but also elect only landowners OF THEIR OWN COUNTY, which is absurd.

There is no free trade in the agricultural mind; each county prohibits the import of able men from other counties.

This is why eloquent sceptics--Bolingbroke and Disraeli--have been so apt to lead the unsceptical Tories.

They WILL have people with a great piece of land in a particular spot, and of course these people generally cannot speak, and often cannot think.

And so eloquent men who laugh at the party come to lead the party.

The landed interest has much more influence than it should have; but it wastes that influence so much that the excess is, except on singular occurrences (like the cattle plague), of secondary moment.

It is almost another side of the same matter to say that the structure of Parliament gives too little weight to the growing districts of the country and too much to the stationary, In old times the south of England was not only the pleasantest but the greatest part of England.

Devonshire was a great maritime county when the foundations of our representation were fixed; Somersetshire and Wiltshire great manufacturing counties.

The harsher climate of the northern counties was associated with a ruder, a stern, and a sparser people.

The immense preponderance which our Parliament gave before 1832, and though pruned and mitigated, still gives to England south of the Trent, then corresponded to a real preponderance in wealth and mind.

How opposite the present contrast is we all know.

And the case gets worse every day.

The nature of modern trade is to give to those who have much and take from those who have little.

Manufacture goes where manufacture is, because there and there alone it finds attendant and auxiliary manufacture.

Every railway takes trade from the little town to the big town because it enables the customer to buy in the big town.

Year by year the North (as we may roughly call the new industrial world) gets more important, and the South (as we may call the pleasant remnant of old time) gets less important.

It is a grave objection to our existing Parliamentary constitution that it gives much power to regions of past greatness, and refuses equal power to regions of present greatness.

I think (though it is not a popular notion) that by far the greater part of the cry for Parliamentary reform is due to this inequality.

The great capitalists, Mr. Bright and his friends, believe they are sincere in asking for more power for the working man, but, in fact, they very naturally and very properly want more power for themselves.

They cannot endure--they ought not to endure--that a rich, able manufacturer should be a less man than a small stupid squire.

The notions of political equality which Mr. Bright puts forward are as old as political speculation, and have been refuted by the first efforts of that speculation.

But for all that they are likely to last as long as political society, because they are based upon indelible principles in human nature.

Edmund Burke called the first East Indians, "Jacobins to a man," because they did not feel their "present importance equal to their real wealth".

So long as there is an uneasy class, a class which has not its just power, it will rashly clutch and blindly believe the notion that all men should have the same power.

I do not consider the exclusion of the working classes from effectual representation a defect in THIS aspect of our Parliamentary representation.

The working classes contribute almost nothing to our corporate public opinion, and therefore, the fact of their want of influence in Parliament does not impair the coincidence of Parliament with public opinion.

They are left out in the representation, and also in the thing represented.

Nor do I think the number of persons of aristocratic descent in Parliament impairs the accordance of Parliament with public opinion.

No doubt the direct descendants and collateral relatives of noble families supply members to Parliament in far greater proportion than is warranted by the number of such families in comparison with the whole nation.

But I do not believe that these families have the least corporate character, or any common opinions, different from others of the landed gentry.

They have the opinions of the propertied rank in which they were born.

The English aristocracy have never been a caste apart, and are not a caste apart now.

They would keep up nothing that other landed gentlemen would not.

And if any landed gentlemen are to be sent to the House of Commons, it is desirable that many should be men of some rank.

As long as we keep up a double set of institutions--one dignified and intended to impress the many, the other efficient and intended to govern the many--we should take care that the two match nicely, and hide where the one begins and where the other ends.

This is in part effected by conceding some subordinate power to the august part of our polity, but it is equally aided by keeping an aristocratic element in the useful part of our polity.

In truth, the deferential instinct secures both.

Aristocracy is a power in the "constituencies".

A man who is an honourable or a baronet, or better yet, perhaps, a real earl, though Irish, is coveted by half the electing bodies; and caeteris paribus, a manufacturer's son has no chance with him.

The reality of the deferential feeling in the community is tested by the actual election of the class deferred to, where there is a large free choice betwixt it and others.

Subject therefore to the two minor, but still not inconsiderable, defects I have named, Parliament conforms itself accurately enough, both as a chooser of executives and as a legislature, to the formed opinion of the country.

Similarly, and subject to the same exceptions, it expresses the nation's opinion in words well, when it happens that words, not laws, are wanted.

On foreign matters, where we cannot legislate, whatever the English nation thinks, or thinks it thinks, as to the critical events of the world, whether in Denmark, in Italy, or America, and no matter whether it thinks wisely or unwisely, that same something, wise or unwise, will be thoroughly well said in Parliament.

The lyrical function of Parliament, if I may use such a phrase, is well done; it pours out in characteristic words the characteristic heart of the nation.

And it can do little more useful.

Now that free government is in Europe so rare and in America so distant, the opinion, even the incomplete, erroneous, rapid opinion of the free English people is invaluable.

It may be very wrong, but it is sure to be unique; and if it is right it is sure to contain matter of great magnitude, for it is only a first-class matter in distant things which a free people ever sees or learns.

The English people must miss a thousand minutiae that continental bureaucracies know even too well; but if they see a cardinal truth which those bureaucracies miss, that cardinal truth may greatly help the world.

But if in these ways, and subject to these exceptions, Parliament by its policy and its speech well embodies and expresses public opinion, I own I think it must be conceded that it is not equally successful in elevating public opinion.

The teaching task of Parliament is the task it does worst.

Probably at this moment, it is natural to exaggerate this defect.

The greatest teacher of all in Parliament, the head-master of the nation, the great elevator of the country--so far as Parliament elevates it--must be the Prime Minister: he has an influence, an authority, a facility in giving a great tone to discussion, or a mean tone, which no other man has.

Now Lord Palmerston for many years steadily applied his mind to giving, not indeed a mean tone, but a light tone, to the proceedings of Parliament.

One of his greatest admirers has since his death told a story of which he scarcely sees, or seems to see, the full effect.

When Lord Palmerston was first made leader of the House, his jaunty manner was not at all popular, and some predicted failure.

"No," said an old member, "he will soon educate us DOWN to his level; the House will soon prefer this Ha!

Ha!

style to the wit of Canning and the gravity of Peel."

I am afraid that we must own that the prophecy was accomplished.

No Prime Minister, so popular and so influential, has ever left in the public memory so little noble teaching.

Twenty years hence, when men inquire as to the then fading memory of Palmerston, we shall be able to point to no great truth which he taught, no great distinct policy which he embodied, no noble words which once fascinated his age, and which, in after years, men would not willingly let die.

But we shall be able to say "he had a genial manner, a firm, sound sense; he had a kind of cant of insincerity, but we always knew what he meant; he had the brain of a ruler in the clothes of a man of fashion".

Posterity will hardly understand the words of the aged reminiscent, but we now feel their effect.

The House of Commons, since it caught its tone from such a statesman, has taught the nation worse, and elevated it less, than usual.

I think, however, that a correct observer would decide that in general, and on principle, the House of Commons does not teach the public as much as it might teach it, or as the public would wish to learn.

I do not wish very abstract, very philosophical, very hard matters to be stated in Parliament.

The teaching there given must be popular, and to be popular it must be concrete, embodied, short.

The problem is to know the highest truth which the people will bear, and to inculcate and preach that.

Certainly Lord Palmerston did not preach it.

He a little degraded us by preaching a doctrine just below our own standard--a doctrine not enough below us to repel us much, but yet enough below to harm us by augmenting a worldliness which needed no addition, and by diminishing a love of principle and philosophy which did not want deduction.

In comparison with the debates of any other assembly, it is true the debates by the English Parliament are most instructive.

The debates in the American Congress have little teaching efficacy; it is the characteristic vice of Presidential government to deprive them of that efficacy; in that government a debate in the legislature has little effect, for it cannot turn out the executive, and the executive can veto all it decides.

The French Chambers[7] are suitable appendages to an Empire which desires the power of despotism without its shame; they prevent the enemies of the Empire being quite correct when they say there is no free speech; a few permitted objectors fill the air with eloquence, which every one knows to be often true, and always vain.

The debates in an English Parliament fill a space in the world which, in these auxiliary chambers, is not possible.

But I think any one who compares the discussions on great questions in the higher part of the press, with the discussions in Parliament, will feel that there is (of course amid much exaggeration and vagueness) a greater vigour and a higher meaning in the writing than in the speech: a vigour which the public appreciate--a meaning that they like to hear.

[7] This of course relates to the assemblies of the Empire.

The Saturday Review said, some years since, that the ability of Parliament was a "protected ability": that there was at the door a differential duty of at least 2000 pounds a year.

Accordingly the House of Commons, representing only mind coupled with property, is not equal in mind to a legislature chosen for mind only, and whether accompanied by wealth or not.

But I do not for a moment wish to see a representation of pure mind; it would be contrary to the main thesis of this essay.

I maintain that Parliament ought to embody the public opinion of the English nation; and, certainly, that opinion is much more fixed by its property than by its mind.

The "too clever by half" people who live in "Bohemia," ought to have no more influence in Parliament than they have in England, and they can scarcely have less.

Only, after every great abatement and deduction, I think the country would bear a little more mind; and that there is a profusion of opulent dulness in Parliament which might a little--though only a little--be pruned away.

The only function of Parliament which remains to be considered is the informing function, as I just now called it; the function which belongs to it, or to members of it, to bring before the nation the ideas, grievances, and wishes of special classes.

This must not be confounded with what I have called its teaching function.

In life, no doubt, the two run one into another.

But so do many things which it is very important in definition to separate.

The facts of two things being often found together is rather a reason for, than an objection to, separating them, in idea.

Sometimes they are NOT found together, and then we may be puzzled if we have not trained ourselves to separate them.

The teaching function brings true ideas before the nation, and is the function of its highest minds.

The expressive function brings only special ideas, and is the function of but special minds.

Each class has its ideas, wants, and notions; and certain brains are ingrained with them.

Such sectarian conceptions are not those by which a determining nation should regulate its action, nor are orators, mainly animated by such conceptions, safe guides in policy.

But those orators should be heard; those conceptions should be kept in sight.

The great maxim of modern thought is not only the toleration of everything, but the examination of everything.

It is by examining very bare, very dull, very unpromising things, that modern science has come to be what it is.

There is a story of a great chemist who said he owed half his fame to his habit of examining after his experiments, what was going to be thrown away: everybody knew the result of the experiment itself, but in the refuse matter there were many little facts and unknown changes, which suggested the discoveries of a famous life to a person capable of looking for them.

So with the special notions of neglected classes.

They may contain elements of truth which, though small, are the very elements which we now require, because we already know all the rest.

This doctrine was well known to our ancestors.

They laboured to give a CHARACTER to the various constituencies, or to many of them.

They wished that the shipping trade, the wool trade, the linen trade, should each have their spokesman; that the unsectional Parliament should know what each section in the nation thought before it gave the national decision.

This is the true reason for admitting the working classes to a share in the representation, at least as far as the composition of Parliament is to be improved by that admission.

A great many ideas, a great many feelings have gathered among the town artisans--a peculiar intellectual life has sprung up among them.

They believe that they have interests which are misconceived or neglected; that they know something which others do not know; that the thoughts of Parliament are not as their thoughts.

They ought to be allowed to try to convince Parliament;

their notions ought to be stated as those of other classes are stated;

their advocates should be heard as other people's advocates are heard.

Before the Reform Bill, there was a recognised machinery for that purpose.

The member for Westminster, and other members, were elected by universal suffrage (or what was in substance such); those members did, in their day, state what were the grievances and ideas--or were thought to be the grievances and ideas--of the working classes.

It was the single, unbending franchise introduced in 1832 that has caused this difficulty, as it has others.

Until such a change is made the House of Commons will be defective, just as the House of Lords was defective.

It will not LOOK right.

As long as the Lords do not come to their own House, we may prove on paper that it is a good revising chamber, but it will be difficult to make the literary argument felt.

Just so, as long as a great class, congregated in political localities, and known to have political thoughts and wishes, is without notorious and palpable advocates in Parliament, we may prove on paper that our representation is adequate, but the world will not believe it.

There is a saying in the eighteenth century, that in politics, "gross appearances are great realities".

It is in vain to demonstrate that the working classes have no grievances;

that the middle classes have done all that is possible for them, and so on with a crowd of arguments which I need not repeat, for the newspapers keep them in type, and we can say them by heart.

But so long as the "gross appearance" is that there are no evident, incessant representatives to speak the wants of artisans, the "great reality" will be a diffused dissatisfaction.

Thirty years ago it was vain to prove that Gatton and Old Sarum were valuable seats, and sent good members.

Everybody said, "Why, there are no people there".

Just so everybody must say now, "Our representative system must be imperfect, for an immense class has no members to speak for it".

The only answer to the cry against constituencies WITHOUT inhabitants was to transfer their power to constituencies WITH inhabitants.

Just so, the way to stop the complaint that artisans have no members is to give them members--to create a body of representatives, chosen by artisans, believing, as Mr. Carlyle would say, "that artisanism is the one thing needful".

NO.

VI.