{185}
When the question is asked: “Can a dying institution be revived?” it is in the whole tendency of modern learning to answer that it can not.
The House of Commons has ceased to be an instrument of Government. Its ancient functions have been killed under the prolonged and continuous action of hypocrisy. It affords to-day (if we except the three Irish parties, which have a definite political object and pursue that object) no more than an opportunity for highly lucrative careers. That career is founded upon the bamboozlement of the public (whose faculty for being duped these professionals hope to prey upon indefinitely), with the complicity of nobodies content to write M.P. after their name as a sufficient reward for supporting the Party System: to whom, of course, must be added the lawyers and business men for whom Parliament offers definite financial rewards, and that in proportion to their indifference to their representative duties.
All modern scholarship, we repeat, would tend {186} to say of any institution which had fallen into such a condition that it was past praying for; and history is there with a hundred examples to support this modern conclusion.
We have in history case after case of a national institution falling into contempt and some other more vigorous organ supplanting it. The greatest case of all is, of course, the slow substitution of the Empire upon the ruins of the ancient Roman system of government.
It is here precisely that the crux of our problem comes in. Nothing is appearing that can take the place of Parliament. In its decay and futility it still makes our laws, and makes them and unmakes them at a greater rate than ever it did before. True, most of those laws are the work of the permanent officials; but some of them, or some parts of them, are due to the professional politicians. [Note 186.1]
In other words, the House of Commons, though fallen into a universally recognised decay, is still our only instrument for making laws. Nothing is rising to take its place, and in its decay it continues to work very appreciable evil.
The progress of the disease is now so rapid, its probable future effect so menacing, that, desperate as it must always be to attempt to revive a dying {187} institution, it is the business of every man who cares for his country in the crisis through which it is passing to ask whether some remedy might not be devised.
Electoral changes will do nothing. A mere extension of the franchise, if the party machine were left as it is, would make little or no difference. Where to-day ten thousand apathetic men are seized by the paid agents of the machine and worried to the polls in groups as nearly equal as can be arranged by the managers of the show, to-morrow twenty thousand would be similarly drilled and run. The abolition of plural voting is common sense, but it would go nowhere near the root of the trouble. If it gave to one of the two teams a permanent preponderance over the other, the honour which obtains among gentlemen would compel the two in combination to devise some cry which should make the parties more nearly equal again.
To forbid canvassing would have the effect of course of enormously reducing the number of voters, the vast majority of whom vote under a sort of moral compulsion, and after several days of heavy badgering, concluded by a forced march to the polls. The bulk of men can never really care for the issues, either false or unimportant, which the bosses provide them with: nay, in the last election there was no issue at all, and the people were too weary to invent one for themselves, as they had done in the Chinese Labour Agitation in 1906.
{188} But this decrease in the actual number of voters, though it would show up the nonsense, would have no practical effect: the game would still be played just as it was played before, and the actors would be of the same general competence in human affairs.
Payment of election expenses and payment of members are measures obviously desirable in themselves, but they would do little to break the Party System now, though they might once have done much to prevent its coming into existence in its present form. The official expenses of an election are a very small fraction of what the candidate has to find, so that their payment by the State would still leave the independent at a grave disadvantage as compared with the party hack, who could draw without limit on the Party Funds. The payment of members might make it easier for an honest man to remain independent, but it would in no way restrain the Front Benches from corrupting members by the promise in the future of pecuniary rewards larger and of a far more stable character. To the contractor, the merchant, the newspaper owner who enters politics with an eye to their corruption, the little sum thus guaranteed is insignificant. The great press of lawyers are looking for posts, the least of which will be a matter of £800 a year, the highest of £10,000 and £15,000. The professional men, to whom this or that permanant job as an inspector or departmental chief is the bribe, would not be the less {189} eager to take money because he had already received it.
It has been suggested that the auditing of the secret Party Funds might undermine the Party System. To inaugurate such a practice would certainly deal the Party System a heavy blow, but the success would not be final. Side by side with the officially audited Party Fund another secret fund would at once spring up. A drastic penalty might indeed be attached to any such form of secret bribery.
But the law would tend to be a dead letter in the absence of an alert public opinion behind it; for secret bribery, when it has become a national custom, is not so easy to eliminate. Nothing is less easy to prove, since all parties to the crime are concerned in defending it and in hiding it, and no one person can feel himself aggrieved. It may further be urged that the very high expenses of an election remaining what they are, the depletion of the Party Funds, which would probably follow the publication of their accounts, would advantage the wealthy candidate as against the poor one. The independent candidate would indeed benefit, for his funds would be no less than now, while those of his official opponents might probably be reduced; but the poor man financed by the Party System would probably suffer. Whether or no this would be an advantage—in other words, whether the direct rule of the rich is better or worse than the rule of their hired dependants—{190}may be an open question. In any case, with the payment of official election expenses by the State, and the stricter limitation of unofficial expenses, this tendency might be checked.
A law which we are inclined to think would be even more to the purpose would be one whereby the duration of Parliament should be limited within a certain short fixed period (four years at the very most), and should be indissoluble within that period.
The effect of this reform, were it made law, would be immediate. A vote of censure upon the executive of the day (the King, as our forefathers called the thing) would not entail upon those who passed it the expense, disturbance, and personal peril of a general election. They would be free to vote; and the executive, that is the two Front Benches, would have to bow to their will.
The mere appearance of an adumbration of independent voting made the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and the other professional politicians give way in the matter of the Trades Disputes Bill. The principle has already entered the House of Commons, and all that is necessary is to seat it firmly by forbidding the professional politicians the right to dissolve Parliament.
In this connection it may be well to mention the suggestion made by Mr Jowett, M.P., in his excellent pamphlet, “What is the Use of Parlia-{191}ment?” [Note 191.1] Mr Jowett would abolish the Ministry with its collective responsibility altogether, and substitute a number of Departmental Committees of the House, similar to those that transact business on local councils. All parties would be represented on these, and to them the permanent officials would be responsible. The Minister would presumably be retained, but only as chairman of the Committee, where he might on any given question be outvoted by his colleagues, and the decision of the Committee might be reversed by the House. Neither of these events would, under Mr Jowett’s scheme, lead to any political “crisis”; the Ministry would not resign, neither would there be any dissolution. This last condition is essential, for otherwise the Minister could always secure a majority both on the Committee and in the House by threatening resignation or dissolution; and the Party System would remain almost unaltered. If, therefore, Mr Jowett’s plan is to succeed, it must be accompanied by the provision already {192} discussed of fixing by law the duration of Parliament, and taking from the Front Benches the right of arbitrarily forcing a dissolution.
With this reservation, it may at once be allowed that Mr Jowett’s scheme, if freely and honestly carried out, would not only smash the Party System, but provide a proper working machinery for a free deliberative assembly.
But, as things stand, what chance is there of honestly carrying out such a scheme, even if it could get accepted on paper?
If the Committees were packed with partisans, placemen, and place-hunters, the Minister would give them only such information as he chose, and would dictate the policy which they would obediently endorse. The Committees might even be used to increase (if that be possible) the modern irresponsibility of members, by affording a buffer between them and the House. As to independent members, it would be easy to keep them off Committees, or at any rate off the particular Committees where they might be dangerous. Mr Victor Grayson has told the world how he applied to be put on a Committee of Social Reform, and was immediately told that he had been appointed to sit on the Committee to consider the Irish Linen Marks Bill!
That is perhaps no insignificant indication of what might happen if Mr Jowett’s plan were adopted in a House still dominated by the Party System.
The institution of primaries and the choice of {193} candidates by their localities would be valuable enough; but it must be remembered that it will be no easy task to graft primaries with their postulate of popular initiative on to English society, as it is at present.
Another suggestion made for the democratisation of our politics is the Referendum. This proposal, excellent in itself, has of late been rendered a trifle ridiculous by its sudden and obviously insincere exploitation by one of the party teams. Mr Balfour’s “Referendum,” so far as its nature can be guessed at, amounts to no more than that the “bosses” of the two sides acting, as always, in collusion, should from time to time entertain the people by submitting to their judgment proposals in which they take no interest whatsoever, a course which might also prove convenient as a means of burying some highly unpopular proposal insisted on by a wealthy subscriber or a too-persistent colleague. The only Referendum which will prove of the slightest value to the people will be the Referendum accompanied by the Initiative; in other words, the right of the people (as expressed by a certain number of electors) to determine on what subjects they shall vote. Such a right would indeed be of incalculable value; but before it is likely to be obtained the people must develop a sufficiently alert political sense to make their initiative a reality.
It would seem, then, that changes in political machinery will prove either impossible or in-{194}effective, unless the people can be awakened to political consciousness and to a resolution to make their will prevail. An alert democracy, even with unchanged machinery, could knock the bottom out of the Party System to-morrow by refusing to elect party hacks and by sending to Parliament men fully determined to make an end of the corruption and unreality of our politics. In proportion as the mass of men understand the nature of the present system, and resolve to replace it by a better, the Party System will become more and more difficult to work.
The political education of the democracy is therefore the first step towards a reform.
The first need is exposure. To tell a particular truth with regard to a particular piece of corruption is of course dangerous in the extreme; the rash man who might be tempted to employ this weapon would find himself bankrupted or in prison, and probably both. But the general nature of the unpleasant thing can be drilled into the public by books, articles, and speeches. True, the Press will do its utmost to prevent the dissemination of the truth with regard to public life; for the Press, as we have seen, is one of the chief accomplices in this side of the national decline. But it is an error to imagine that publicity, because it is at first restricted, will be ineffectual.
So suspicious is an increasing section of the public growing of the whole political scheme, and of the printed support of it, that the continued {195} exposure of the evil, even if it be undertaken by comparatively few men, has a wide effect.
It may have for its organs of expression only a few and ill-capitalised papers; but one man speaks to another, and truth has this particular quality about it (which the modern defenders of falsehood seem to have forgotten), that when it has been so much as suggested, it of its own self and by example tends to turn that suggestion into a conviction.
You say to some worthy provincial, “English Prime Ministers sell peerages and places on the Front Bench.”
He is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know from other sources than the Press to be a wealthy man who uses his wealth in bribery) his doubt grows into conviction.
That is the way truth spreads, and that, by the way, was why this book was written.
The truth, when it is spoken for some useful purpose, must necessarily seem obscure, extravagant, or merely false; for, were it of common knowledge, it would not be worth expressing. And truth being fact, and therefore hard, must irritate and wound; but it has that power of growth and {196} creation peculiar to itself which always makes it worth the telling.
Again, exposure (within the limits which the machine is compelled to allow—and the machine is not without its power over the judiciary) works in a manner less just, but still of some value; it works by ridicule.
Men love to laugh, and if you can present your liar, your coward, your place-hunter, your hypocrite, not as hypocrite, place-hunter, coward, and liar, but as a buffoon, though the action may be unjust, you have not done wholly ill. As a buffoon he is well advertised; once advertised, a discovery of all that he really is will follow.
The Party System is not principally, though it is largely, a piece of buffoonery; principally it is hypocritical; it reposes upon falsehood; it has for its main instruments avarice and fear.
These things are dreadful, not ridiculous; but their ridiculous side can be happily harped upon until men attend: comprehension of the rest will follow.
For instance, during the late election one of the younger men who had just been put upon the Front Bench by the machine said that the “gulf” between the two Front Benches was “unbridgable”; he said it to a mass of men much poorer than himself, whose votes make him what he is. They had no opportunity to see behind what scenes the actor moves. He deliberately deceived them. Well, this young man had his place from {197} marrying a lady whose uncle had made many thousands in one half of the team; the same lady had a first cousin who had made a much larger number of thousands in the other half of the team. One of these new-found relatives was labelled “Opposition,” the other “Government,” and the poor men who listened were told that there was an “unbridgable gulf” between the one relative and the other!
It would be well if the world were such that falsehood of this sort could be burnt out. Failing that, to make it ridiculous is no small advance to its removal.
After exposure the second line of attack is the advocacy of definite reform within the machine itself. By which we do not mean a change in the procedure of Parliament, for, in the first place, Parliament is free to effect that whenever it chooses, and, in the second place, it is so hopelessly corrupt that it will not of itself ever effect the manifold and detailed reforms which would be necessary for its purification.
But it might be possible, by scattering and using a sufficient number of trained workers, to extract from candidates definite pledges during the electoral period, which would have an effect upon the Party System comparable to the introduction of wedges into the diseased fabric of an ancient tree. Of the method of action of these pledges we will speak in a moment; for it is notorious that as things now are, the pledges of a candidate are worth nothing, {198} if only for the simple reason that no candidate has any initiative, let alone the innumerable other reasons, one of which is that very few candidates under the present system have either any intention of carrying out their pledges or take any steps towards that end.
The principal pledge which should and could be extracted from candidates would be a pledge that they would vote against the Government—whatever its composition—unless there were carried through the House of Commons, within a set time, those measures to which they stood pledged already in their election addresses and on the platform. A schedule could easily be drawn up, within whose limits certain measures were required by the electorate to pass the House of Commons.
A supreme advantage attaches to this method, and a grave weakness.
We will deal with the advantage first. The supreme advantage is that by this method even the professional politician cannot wriggle.
Thus, in the matter of Chinese labour it was easy to pledge a man “to vote that the Chinese should leave South Africa”; but had he publicly promised to vote against the Government unless the first cargo of them had left South Africa before the 1st of March 1906, and to vote against them again upon all measures they might propose after the 31st of December 1906, if by that time the last Chinaman had not left, your politician would have been caught. He could not get out of it by {199} saying that “his vote would have involved the fall of the Government, with all its rich promise of democratic legislation, etc., etc.” The pledge would stand.
Such a pledge for definite action would be efficacious—which no pledge now is. It would hold up the party boss and say, “Here are you and yours with such and such salaries. You can bend to the popular will, or you can go.” By such a pledge, and by such a pledge alone, could short parliaments and the withdrawal of the professionals’ power to dissolve Parliament be obtained.
In a word, a rigid pledge of this sort is a real instrument of war, or, to use the more accurate metaphor, of surgery. With it one might cut out the cancer.
Now for the weakness of the method:
That weakness does not consist (as we may imagine the professional politician at once remarking) in the fact that anyone might ask for any pledge, and that a mere confusion would arise.
The people know very well what they want, and they want a very few and definite things; and it is precisely in those things, as they are wanted with each phase of the national life, that the politicians cheat and betray the people.
For instance, the Trades Disputes Bill and Chinese Labour are excellent examples of what we mean.
Moreover, if (as will probably be the case) a multitude of pledges might be demanded, that or {200} those which had a definite popular demand behind them would very quickly be appreciated in public meetings. Cut off as the politician is from the life of England, the insistent presentation of one type of question throughout the election would get to him at last, and he would be afraid of it. But above all things it will be essential that the questioner should ask him not to “pledge” himself in general—a practice of which everyone is by this time heartily sick, for it is futile—but to pledge himself in particular that if the thing were not passed within a definite date (by the House of Commons, not by the Lords of the Crown), then he would vote against the Government upon all measures whatsoever.
No, the real weakness of the proposition lies in this: that the mass of men have so despaired of the House of Commons and its methods that no sufficient organisation with this end could be constructed. What they feel is: “The old thing is fading; let it fade. The enormous effort required for making any impression on it at all is not worth while.”
Well, if it so prove, if freemen will not make an effort to control their representatives, then it is necessary to decide that the law-making institution of England, which has already ceased to be an instrument of Government, is done with.
A spasmodic life may be, and probably will be, lent it in the desperate attempt of the professionals to keep up the old interest in their trade. Questions {201} of real import may be raised. It is conceivable, for instance, that a “Conservative” leader might frankly adopt Protection, or a “Liberal” prefer Adult Suffrage. It is exceedingly likely, nay almost certain, that, as matter of self-preservation, the politicians of the immediate future will establish temporary divisions upon which true interests can range themselves; but they will not thus restore Parliament, for purpose is lacking to them. The body will jerk, perhaps—it will not revive.
For on this thing all observant men are now settled: the House of Commons in its present inaptitude, producing as “leaders” the type of men who play at the rotation of the party game, cannot deal with the vast and rapidly changing necessities of the country at home, where men starve—or abroad, where (behind their backs) they are humbled.
The degraded Parliament may ultimately be replaced by some other organ; but no such other organ appears to be forming, and until we get our first glimpse of it we are in for one of those evil spaces, subject to foreign insult and domestic misfortune, which invariably attach to nations when, for a period, they lose grip over their own destinies.