men mainly. The member-makers would look, not for independence, but for
subservience--and they could hardly be blamed for so doing. They are
agents for the Liberal party; and, as such, they should be guided by
what they take to be the wishes of their principal. The mass of the
Liberal party wishes measure A, measure B, measure C. The managers of
the registration--the skilled manipulators--are busy men. They would
say, "Sir, here is our card; if you want to get into Parliament on our
side, you must go for that card; it was drawn up by Mr. Lloyd; he used
to be engaged on railways, but since they passed this new voting plan,
we get him to attend to us; it is a sound card; stick to that and you
will be right". Upon this (in theory) voluntary plan, you would get
together a set of members bound hard and fast with party bands and
fetters, infinitely tighter than any members now.
Whoever hopes anything from desultory popular action if matched against
systematised popular action, should consider the way in which the
American President is chosen. The plan was that the citizens at large
should vote for the statesman they liked best. But no one does anything
of the sort. They vote for the ticket made by "the caucus," and the
caucus is a sort of representative meeting which sits voting and voting
till they have cut out all the known men against whom much is to be
said, and agreed on some unknown man against whom there is nothing
known, and therefore nothing to be alleged. Caucuses, or their
equivalent, would be far worse here in constituency-making than there
in President-making, because on great occasions the American nation can
fix on some one great man whom it knows, but the English nation could
not fix on 658 great men and choose them. It does not know so many, and
if it did, would go wrong in the difficulties of the manipulation.
But though a common voter could only be ranged in an effectual
constituency, and a common candidate only reach a constituency by
obeying the orders of the political election-contrivers upon his side,
certain voters and certain members would be quite independent of both.
There are organisations in this country which would soon make a set of
constituencies for themselves. Every chapel would be an office for
vote-transferring before the plan had been known three months. The
Church would be much slower in learning it and much less handy in using
it; but would learn. At present the Dissenters are a most energetic and
valuable component of the Liberal party; but under the voluntary plan
they would not be a component--they would be a separate, independent
element. We now propose to group boroughs; but then they would combine
chapels. There would be a member for the Baptist congregation of
Tavistock, cum Totnes, cum, etc., etc.
The full force of this cannot be appreciated except by referring to the
former proof that the mass of a Parliament ought to be men of moderate
sentiments, or they will elect an immoderate Ministry, and enact
violent laws. But upon the plan suggested, the House would be made up
of party politicians selected by a party committee, chained to that
committee and pledged to party violence, and of characteristic, and
therefore immoderate representatives, for every "ism" in all England.
Instead of a deliberate assembly of moderate and judicious men, we
should have a various compound of all sorts of violence.
I may seem to be drawing a caricature, but I have not reached the
worst. Bad as these members would be, if they were left to
themselves--if, in a free Parliament, they were confronted with the
perils of government, close responsibility might improve them and make
them tolerable. But they would not be left to themselves. A voluntary
constituency will nearly always be a despotic constituency. Even in the
best case, where a set of earnest men choose a member to expound their
earnestness, they will look after him to see that he does expound it.
The members will be like the minister of a dissenting congregation.
That congregation is collected by a unity of sentiment in doctrine A,
and the preacher is to preach doctrine A; if he does not, he is
dismissed. At present the member is free because the constituency is
not in earnest; no constituency has an acute, accurate doctrinal creed
in politics. The law made the constituencies by geographical divisions;
and they are not bound together by close unity of belief. They have
vague preferences for particular doctrines; and that is all. But a
voluntary constituency would be a church with tenets; it would make its
representative the messenger of its mandates, and the delegate of its
determinations. As in the case of a dissenting congregation, one great
minister sometimes rules it, while ninety-nine ministers in the hundred
are ruled by it, so here one noted man would rule his electors, but the
electors would rule all the others.
Thus, the members for a good voluntary constituency would be hopelessly
enslaved, because of its goodness; but the members for a bad voluntary
constituency would be yet more enslaved because of its badness. The
makers of these constituencies would keep the despotism in their own
hands. In America there is a division of politicians into wire-pullers
and blowers; under the voluntary system the member of Parliament would
be the only momentary mouth-piece--the impotent blower; while the
constituency-maker would be the latent wire-puller--the constant
autocrat. He would write to gentlemen in Parliament, and say, "You were
elected upon 'the Liberal ticket'; and if you deviate from that ticket
you cannot be chosen again". And there would be no appeal for a
common-minded man. He is no more likely to make a constituency for
himself than a mole is likely to make a planet.
It may indeed be said that against a septennial Parliament such
machinations would be powerless; that a member elected for seven years
might defy the remonstrances of an earnest constituency, or the
imprecations of the latent manipulators. But after the voluntary
composition of constituencies, there would soon be but short-lived
Parliaments. Earnest constituencies would exact frequent elections;
they would not like to part with their virtue for a long period; it
would anger them to see it used contrary to their wishes, amid
circumstances which at the election no one thought of. A seven years'
Parliament is often chosen in one political period, lasts through a
second, and is dissolved in a third. A constituency collected by law
and on compulsion endures this change because it has no collective
earnestness; it does not mind seeing the power it gave used in a manner
that it could not have foreseen. But a self-formed constituency of
eager opinions, a missionary constituency, so to speak, would object;
it would think it its bounden duty to object; and the crafty
manipulators, though they said nothing, in silence would object still
more. The two together would enjoin annual elections, and would rule
their members unflinchingly.
The voluntary plan, therefore, when tried in this easy form is
inconsistent with the extrinsic independence as well as with the
inherent moderation of a Parliament--two of the conditions which, as we
have seen, are essential to the bare possibility of Parliamentary
government. The same objections, as is inevitable, adhere to that
principle under its more complicated forms. It is in vain to pile
detail on detail when the objection is one of first principle. If the
above reasoning be sound, compulsory constituencies are necessary,
voluntary constituencies destructive; the optional transferability of
votes is not a salutary aid, but a ruinous innovation.
I have dwelt upon the proposal of Mr. Hare and upon the
ultra-democratic proposal, not only because of the high intellectual
interest of the former and the possible practical interest of the
latter, but because they tend to bring into relief two at least of the
necessary conditions of Parliamentary government. But besides these
necessary qualities which are needful before a Parliamentary government
can work at all, there are some additional prerequisites before it can
work well. That a House of Commons may work well it must perform, as we
saw, five functions well: it must elect a Ministry well, legislate
well, teach the nation well, express the nation's will well, bring
matters to the nation's attention well.
The discussion has a difficulty of its own. What is meant by "well"?
Who is to judge? Is it to be some panel of philosophers, some fancied
posterity, or some other outside authority? I answer, no philosophy, no
posterity, no external authority, but the English nation here and now.
Free government is self-government--a government of the people by the
people. The best government of this sort is that which the people think
best. An imposed government, a government like that of the English in
India, may very possibly be better; it may represent the views of a
higher race than the governed race; but it is not therefore a free
government. A free government is that which the people subject to it
voluntarily choose. In a casual collection of loose people the only
possible free government is a democratic government. Where no one
knows, or cares for, or respects any one else all must rank equal; no
one's opinion can be more potent than that of another. But, as has been
explained, a deferential nation has a structure of its own. Certain
persons are by common consent agreed to be wiser than others, and their
opinion is, by consent, to rank for much more than its numerical value.
We may in these happy nations weigh votes as well as count them, though
in less favoured countries we can count only. But in free nations, the
votes so weighed or so counted must decide. A perfect free government
is one which decides perfectly according to those votes; an imperfect,
one which so decides imperfectly; a bad, one which does not so decide
at all. Public opinion is the test of this polity; the best opinion
which with its existing habits of deference, the nation will accept: if
the free government goes by that opinion, it is a good government of
its species; if it contravenes that opinion, it is a bad one.
Tried by this rule the House of Commons does its appointing business
well. It chooses rulers as we wish rulers to be chosen. If it did not,
in a speaking and writing age we should soon know. I have heard a great
Liberal statesman say, "The time was coming when we must advertise for
a grievance".[6] What a good grievance it would be were the Ministry
appointed and retained by the Parliament a Ministry detested by the
nation. An anti-present-government league would be instantly created,
and it would be more instantly powerful and more instantly successful
than the Anti-Corn-Law League.
[6] This was said in 1858.
It has, indeed, been objected that the choosing business of Parliament
is done ill, because it does not choose strong Governments. And it is
certain that when public opinion does not definitely decide upon a
marked policy, and when in consequence parties in the Parliament are
nearly even, individual cupidity and changeability may make Parliament
change its appointees too often; may induce them never enough to trust
any of them; may make it keep all of them under a suspended sentence of
coming dismissal. But the experience of Lord Palmerston's second
Government proves, I think, that these fears are exaggerated. When the
choice of a nation is really fixed on a statesman, Parliament will fix
upon him too. The parties in the Parliament of 1859 were as nearly
divided as in any probable Parliament; a great many Liberals did not
much like Lord Palmerston, and they would have gladly co-operated in an
attempt to dethrone him. But the same influence acted on Parliament
within which acted on the nation without. The moderate men of both
parties were satisfied that Lord Palmerston's was the best Government,
and they therefore preserved it though it was hated by the immoderate
on both sides. We have then found by a critical instance that a
government supported by what I may call "the common element"--by the
like-minded men of unlike parties--will be retained in power, though
parties are even, and though, as Treasury counting reckons, the
majority is imperceptible. If happily, by its intelligence and
attractiveness, a Cabinet can gain a hold upon the great middle part of
Parliament, it will continue to exist notwithstanding the hatching of
small plots and the machinations of mean factions.
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.