I
ON PROCEDURE IN PARLIAMENT
(A Letter to _The Times_, March, 1914.)
I am moved to speak out what, I am sure, many are feeling. We are a
so-called civilized country; we have a so-called Christian religion; we
profess humanity. We have an elected Parliament, to each member of which
we pay £400 a year; so that we have at least some right to say: “Please
do our business, and that quickly!”
And yet we sit and suffer such barbarities and mean cruelties to go on
amongst us as must dry the heart of God. I cite at random a few only of
the abhorrent things done daily, daily left undone—done and left
undone, without a shadow of a doubt, against the conscience and general
will of the community:—
(1) Sweating of women workers.
(2) Insufficient feeding of children.
(3) Employment of boys on work that to all intents ruins their
chances in after-life.
(4) Foul housing of those who have as much right as you and I to
the first decencies of life.
(5) Consignment of paupers (that is, those without money or
friends) to lunatic asylums on the certificate of one
doctor—the certificate of two doctors being essential in the
case of a person who has money or friends.
(6) Export of horses worn out in work. Export that, for a few
pieces of blood-money, delivers up old and faithful servants to
wretchedness.
(7) Mutilation of horses by docking, so that they suffer, offend
the eye, and are defenceless against the attacks of flies.
(8) Caging of wild things, especially wild song-birds, by those
who themselves think liberty the breath of life.
(9) Slaughter for food of millions of creatures every year by
methods that can easily be improved.
(10) Importation of the plumes of ruthlessly slain wild birds,
mothers with young in the nest, to decorate our women.
Such as these—shameful barbarities done to helpless creatures—we
suffer amongst us year after year. They are admitted to be anathema; in
favour of their abolition there would be found at any moment a round
majority of unfettered parliamentary and general opinion. One and all
they are removable, and many of them by small expenditure of
parliamentary time, public money, and expert care. It is pitiable that,
for mere want of parliamentary time, we cannot get manifest sores such
as these treated and banished once for all from the nation’s body;
pitiable that due machinery cannot be devised to deal with these and
other barbarities to man and beast, concerning which, in the main, no
real controversy exists; scandalous that their removal should be left to
the mercy of the ballot, to private members’ Bills—for ever liable to
be obstructed; or to the hampered and inadequate efforts of societies
unsupported by legislation.
Rome, I know, was not built in a day. Parliament works hard, has worked
harder during these last years than ever perhaps before; all honour to
it for that! It is an august assembly of which I wish to speak with all
respect. But it works without sense of proportion, or sense of humour.
Over and over again it turns things already talked into their graves;
over and over again listens to the same partizan bickerings, to
arguments which everybody knows by heart. And all the time the fires of
live misery that could, most of them, so easily be put out are raging,
and the reek thereof is going up.
It is I, of course, who will be mocked at for lack of the senses of
proportion and humour. But if the tale of hours spent on certain party
measures be set against the tale of hours not yet spent on measures of
health and humanity, the mockers will yet be mocked.
I am not one of those who believe we can do without party; but I do see
and I do say that party business absorbs far too much of the time that
our common sense and common humanity demands for the redress of crying
shames. And if laymen see this with grief and anger, how much more
poignant must be the feeling of members of Parliament themselves, to
whom alone remedy has been entrusted!