Art. 13. SOME RESULTS OF THE PARLIAMENT ACT. THE opening of the session of 1913, if it has served no other object, has at least concentrated attention upon the profoundly unsatisfactory plight into which our whole constitutional machinery has fallen. The House of Commons, listless and disheartened, is sitting down to register, for a second time, measures of the most farreaching character, which it knows it will barely be allowed to discuss, and certainly not allowed to alter by a single line. It has already registered them once, after due observance of the tiresome ceremony of debates and divisions, the result of which was always a foregone conclusion. It is condemned to register them a third time next year. The House of Lords has rejected these measures once. It will be allowed to reject them again this summer. That formality being accomplished, it passes out of existence as far as these particular measures are concerned. The public regards with apparent indifference, not only the process of registration, whether accompanied by speeches or summarily ‘gagged,' but—and this is far more serious-the actual measures which in a few months' time it will awake to find clad with the full authority of law. Except a few whole-hearted partisans, no one will be found to deny that our parliamentary constitution is grievously out of gear. What is worse, it seems to have lost all power of readjustment. Hitherto our constitutional difficulties have been solved ambulando; the settlement of particular issues or controversies has, incidentally, served to keep the constitution abreast of the needs of the time. But the most recent experience would suggest that the only outcome of our party controversies is to give an increasing impetus to the process of degeneration, which, unless effectively checked in time, is bound sooner or later to mean the end of free parliamentary government in this country.

The causes which have brought about the present condition of Parliament are by no means altogether new. In a sense they were implicit in the Reform Act and Catholic emancipation, and only required the social and economic transformation of the last eighty years to bring them into operation. First and foremost among them

comes the ever-increasing power of what may, for convenience, be called the party 'machine.' It was inevitable that a highly centralised national organisation should gradually replace the loose body of independent local representatives of similar views and traditions which formerly constituted a political party. A similar process in the field of war substituted national armies for feudal levies, and, in the field of industry, is to-day replacing the small manufacturer or dealer by the combine and the trust. The successive extensions of the franchise have steadily accentuated the importance of organisation and discipline as factors of success. The ever-increasing facility of travel and the growth of the Press have immensely strengthened the power of the party leaders and organisers at the expense of the individual member or candidate. The speeches of a dozen prominent men, the organising work of a dozen wholly obscure ones, the writings of a dozen journalists, and, last but not least, the interests and preferences of a dozen men of substance, whose money supports the party funds or the party newspapers-these, and not the 670 members and candidates, constitute the essential elements of one of the great political parties to-day. The ordinary member, whether in the House of Commons or outside, must keep in line. If he endeavours to assert his independence be finds he has to deal, not only with the party Whips, and all that they can offer or withhold, but with his local executive and local press, with arrangements made for other speakers of more orthodox views to speak in his division, with subventions from the central office of the party to his local organisation. It is a nine days' wonder when an immensely popular local candidate succeeds, even in remotest Westmorland, in getting into Parliament without the direct blessing and assistance of Party Headquarters. Zealous partisans bewail the awful spectacle of disorganisation, while opponents gloat triumphantly over the unofficial character of their own candidate's defeat.

The growth of the party' machine' in the country has had its counterpart in the progressive absorption of all power in the House of Commons by the Government, and in the ever-lessening independence and scope of the private member. The same tendency, which, in the

country, has superseded the views of the individual member or candidate by that of the party caucus, has compelled governments more and more to take upon themselves the whole credit and the whole responsibility for legislation. Dr Redlich, in his work on the Procedure of the House of Commons, sums up all the changes between 1832 and 1879 as comprised in the gradual application of the principle that the day's programme should be fixed in favour of the Government and protected against the free initiative of private members. The period since 1879 has seen the Government of the day steadily claiming more and more time, and inventing progressively more drastic means for riding roughshod over opposition. In thus extending its powers it rarely, at any particular step, lacked justification for its procedure. The relentless obstruction of Biggar and Parnell, who practically put Parliament into a state of siege, first led, in 1881, to the introduction of the closure. Further Irish obstruction in 1887 led to the previously fixed closure or guillotine,' subsequently developed into the guillotine by clauses or compartments, and still more recently modified by the 'kangaroo,' or selection by the Chairman of Committee of the amendments to be discussed. At the outset the closure, like the wilful obstruction which had evoked it, was a rare and extreme instrument of political warfare. It has gradually become the normal rule. No one contemplates the possibility that any seriously contested measure can be carried through without it. When it was suggested by Mr F. E. Smith the other day, after the collapse of the Government's Franchise Bill, that the next Female Suffrage Bill should be in charge of an informal non-party committee, the question that at once presented itself to members was whether such a committee would have power to set up the guillotine. Without such power its impotence was treated as a foregone conclusion. Protests, earnest and eloquent, have been raised against every fresh encroachment upon the liberty of Parliament. But those who raised them have invariably, in their turn, succumbed to the temptation, or the necessity, of asking for a further extension of Cabinet tyranny. Mr Balfour's use of the closure seems now comparatively mild. Yet, in March, 1905, a critic described one of his closure resolutions as

'another stage on the journey which has marked and is marking the degradation of the House of Commons from a deliberative to a dependent body, and which, if it is allowed to go on, will transform the House into a mere automatic machine for registering the will of the executive."

A few months later the same critic summed up the situ tion as amounting to 'nothing more or less than a progressive paralysis of the parliamentary organism That critic was Mr Asquith.

But if the closure has become normal, it is largely because obstruction has become a no less normal and integral part of parliamentary life. Each has created and, indeed, facilitated the other. Unreasonable restriction of debate inevitably provokes a deliberate effort on the part of the Opposition to make that unreasonableness still more manifest. Small points are argued at length, and frequent divisions are taken, mainly in order to let the country know that great issues have never even been discussed. The struggle over the time-table is to-day the real key to the political situation. The main interest in every subject which comes before the House of Commons lies in the time which it may consume. It is not the excessive amount of business, nor even the loquacity of members, that accounts for the chroni congestion in Parliament. Obstruction, conscious of unconscious,' is, as Mr Asquith said in the recent debate on parliamentary procedure, the real secret of the difficulty under which we labour.' But, after all, if argument ceases to be effective against party discipline, what other resource is left to an Opposition but the determined exploitation of the forms of parliamentary procedure in order to impede and finally exhaust the majority? And what more obvious answer is there for a Government, at any given moment, than to cut the Gordian knot by changing that procedure to its own advantage?

So far we have dealt broadly with the main features of a development which has been almost inevitable. It is now necessary to consider some of the particular causes which, during the last three decades, have modified and in some directions accelerated, that development. For a generation after the Reform Act the party-struggle expressed the conflict between the definite, systematic

and actively proselytising creed of individualist Liberalism and the Tory opposition, traditional or intellectual, against which it made its way. By 1880 the battle was really over. Liberalism had achieved its practical work. Its intellectual foundations were being undermined. The moral force behind it was rapidly slackening. The phenomenon was not confined to England. All over Europe the triumphant Liberalism of the sixties and seventies was beginning to break up. In England this natural disintegration was arrested by two factors: the high efficiency of the Liberal party organisation and the dominating personality of Mr Gladstone. At this point there came into play a fresh and decisive influence. A new party machine,' more efficiently organised than any which had yet been seen, and sufficiently strong in numbers to turn the scale under certain conditions, was called into being by Mr Parnell. The objects of the Nationalist party had nothing to do with Liberalism. But its votes counted, and after the election of 1885 were able to decide the issue in Parliament. Mr Gladstone yielded to the temptation. A bargain of profound import for the future course of our constitutional development was struck between the leaders of the two 'machines.'

The principle of 'log-rolling,' thus introduced in its most naked form in 1886, is one fatal to the success of free constitutional government. The immediate effect was a tremendous revulsion of feeling which excluded the Liberal party from power for the best part of twenty years. But in the crisis of 1886 it had managed to preserve the party' machine' almost unimpaired. If it had lost many of its strongest elements, it still retained an abundant supply of men of ability and ambition. While the Nationalist entanglement was gradually allowed to recede into the background, the principle of log-rolling' was skilfully exploited in various directions to supplement the general attack upon a Government exhausted by long administration, out of favour with the electorate, and grievously at sea over the question of Tariff Reform. In 1906 the Liberal machine, the Trade Union machine, and the no less effective organisation of the Nonconformist chapels, by a combined effort swept the electoral field. The completeness of the victory left the Irish for the moment a negligible factor,