A PARLIAMENT OR A CONGRESS?

TWO

"I have no doubt the result of a considerable amendment of the rules of the House of Commons will be to send from time to time, when there are bad Houses of Commons, a considerable number of objectionable measures to the House of Lords, and I hope the House of Lords will not shrink trom acting upon its conscientious convictions."

LORD SALISBURY at Oxford, November 23. "The House of Lords must be mended or ended.' " Mr. JOHN MORLEY, M.P.

"If ever you succeed in altering the character of the House of Lords so that it shall consist of intense and determined politicians, you will pronounce the doom of the present system of Government." LORD SALISBURY, House of Lords, March 20.

WO momentous things were done by Parliament within the past couple of months. The front Opposition Benches, both in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, voted for motions against hereditary legislators; and the House of Commons passed the last of the new Rules of Procedure. These steps have a vital relation to each other, as perhaps the utterances quoted at the head of this article sufficiently show. Popular feeling has been impelled so close to the House of Lords that the question whether the structure shall be renovated or abolished, "mended or ended," is now an imperative question of practical politics which can no longer be neglected. At the same time the House of Commons has been undergoing a renovation. Following the example of the American House of Representatives, it has been, so to speak, changing its base and preparing to become more of a legislative and less of a deliberative assembly than it has been in the past.

The amendment of the House of Lords has become a living question just as the House of Commons has been giving such absolute power to majorities that the rights of minorities will cease to be respected unless they can find protection in a Second Chamber. It needs but little foresight to perceive that a grave pass in the history of the two ancient Chambers of the British Parliament is at hand.

A similar crisis was reached by the two Houses of the American Legislature about half a century ago. It was a crisis brought about by a supposed necessity for speedy legislation, by obstruction, and by proposals to reform Parliamentary procedure. The two Houses met the contingency in different ways. The Senate held to its traditions, most of which it inherited from the British Parliament, and weathered the storm without altering its procedure. The House of Representa

tives "went in " for the new Rules. Till that day, both Chambers had fairly justified the expectations of the framers of the Constitution in remaining each the even balance of the other, with the preponderance, whenever there was any, in favour of the popular Chamber. From that day the even balance began steadily to disappear. The Senate increased in dignity and influence; the House of Representatives proportionately deteriorated. For the reform of procedure adopted by the latter House proved to be not merely an affair of convenience, but a revolution in the whole character and spirit of its constitution.

This American precedent cannot but throw considerable light on the present controversy in England. It was a very curious thing to witness, during the recent discussions on Procedure, that, while constantly alluding to American examples, and imitating American precedents with almost slavish admiration, neither the reformers of procedure in the House of Commons nor the would-be reformers of the House of Lords (if we except Mr. Morley and Lord Rosebery) made a single well-informed appeal to American experience. Political thinkers in the United States must find it a profoundly puzzling phenomenon to see the House of Commons eagerly adopting the practices of Congress just as they are themselves declaring that if representative government is to be restored to its true purposes in America, and American public life rescued from the blighting influence of "bossism" and machine-politics, these practices must be discarded, and the ways of Congress remodelled so as to bring them more nearly into harmony with those of the English Parliament.

THREE AMERICAN TENDENCIES IN THE NEW RULES.

There are three cardinal tendencies in the new Rules of Procedure which the House of Commons has just adopted-viz., to depreciate and repress debate, to increase the power of the Speaker, and to devolve work upon Standing Committees. The second is the inevitable resultant of the other two. All three tendencies come from America.

The Closure, with which Mr. Smith is making the House of Commons so familiar, is simply the Previous Question which is so terribly familiar to the House of Representatives. Mr. Smith moves "That the question be now put," and the Speaker, upon his own responsibility, decides whether he will allow the motion to be made or not; the Congressman moves, "Shall the question be now put?" and the American Speaker, before admitting it, takes the sense of the House that is the only difference. The Standing Committees are the patented invention of Congress, and the chief peculiarity of its constitution. The House of Commons has appointed two American Standing Committees, to which are to be referred all Bills relating to Trade, Shipping, and Manufacture, and to Law, Legal Procedure, and

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Courts of Justice. There has been a motion on the paper from the front Opposition Bench, calling for the appointment of three more Standing Committees to deal with the Army, Navy, and Civil Service Estimates; and private members have put down motions calling for Standing Committees on Agriculture and Foreign Relations. Thus, behind the two already appointed, there is a tendency in favour of more. More must come, if the experiment with two works well. was Sir Erskine May who first broached the plan of Standing Committees for the House of Commons. He pretended to derive his idea from the old Grand Committees of which vague mention is made in the Journals of the Long Parliament. This was pardonable in an antiquarian Clerk who worshipped the traditions of an ancient assembly. But it was like going to the College of Heralds to find a mail-clad ancestor for a nouveau riche. The parent of Sir Erskine May's Grand Committees was a thriving Yankee. It was nothing more nor less than the Standing Committee system of Congress, and the offspring resembled the parent in every particular. Indeed, Sir Erskine May's description of his Parliamentary Utopia is so good an exposition of the principles of the American system that there can be no better preface to an examination of that system. "The organization of such a plan," he writes in his "Machinery of Parliamentary Legislation," "might be attempted in the following manner :*

"The House should be divided into six Grand Committees, consisting of about 110 members each, to whom would be added fifteen or twenty Ministers and other leading members, who would be nominated to serve upon all the Grand Committees. The members would be distributed by a Committee of Selection, subject to approval by the House, in such a manner as to secure an equal representation of political parties, interests, and classes in all the Committees, and, at the same time, to maintain in each a preponderance of members more particularly conversant with its peculiar department of business. . . . . Each Committee should have assigned to it a chamber, arranged so as to admit of the distribution of parties, and to afford facilities for debate. It would be a novel experiment to admit the public and reporters to the deliberations of a Committee; but this would be an essential part of the proposed plan. The main object in view is to invest the deliberations of these Committees with as much importance as possible, and to delegate to them the discussion, and, as far as possible, the decision, of questions which now devolve wholly upon the House. If this could be accomplished, the labours of the House would be to that extent diminished. Perhaps the number of days in the week on which the House would sit might be diminished; at all events, the length of the sittings might be curtailed, and the two or three hours after midnight, which now inflict so much fatigue on busy members, might often be spared. The tendency of such an arrangement would be to make the House a Court of Appeal, as it were, from its Grand Committees rather than a Court of Primary Jurisdiction in all legislative matters as it is at present. . . . . In a Grand Committee, whose deliberations offered no impediment to the progress of the business of the House, and whose proper duty it was to discuss the clauses of a Bill, a more careful revision of them might reasonably be expected. The majority

* Reprinted from the Edinburgh Review, 1854, pp. 33–37.

of the members would probably be interested in the subject of discussion; and those who desired to offer their opinions would be heard without impatience. In each Grand Committee the Government would be represented by its official members, who had charge of any Bill, and by independent members co-operat ing with them; and the Opposition and other parties would have equal opportunities of advancing their own opinions. . . . . Every vote would be open to revision by the House; and their minutes of proceedings and division lists would show how far they had paid attention to their duties, and were entitled to support. If the experiment of Grand Committees should prove successful in the case of Bills, it might be extended to other descriptions of business with equal, if not greater, advantage. Bills relating to religion and trade, for instance, which are now required to originate in a Committee of the whole House, might more conveniently be initiated in these Committees. . . . . With what alacrity would the House refer the question of Maynooth and the Nunneries to the Grand Committee of Religion! How gladly consign intricate questions of Law Reform to the Grand Committee on Law and Courts of Justice!"

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This speculation, while being an almost accurate sketch of the American system of Standing Committees, is an admirable résumé of the arguments, the fallacies, and the delusions of those who have just revived Sir Erskine May's nostrum in the House of Commons. It shows, too, how the idea is necessarily an expanding one. House has begun, however, at the end instead of the beginning of Sir Erskine May's suggestion. It has rescinded the Standing Order concerning Bills relating to religion and trade, and it has established Standing Committees for Bills relating to Law, Courts of Justice, and Legal Procedure, and to Trade, Shipping, and Manufactures. We shall presently see what the working value of this scheme is as proved by fifty years of experience in America.

The third tendency of the new Rules, the growth of the power of the Speaker, seems to arise naturally as a consequence of the other two. The old theory of Parliament, from the days of Lenthal, that belief in the impartiality and respect for the authority of the Speaker depended upon his absolute powerlessness, has been overthrown by the new Rules. They heap power after power upon the Chair: the option of refusing the Closure motion, the option of refusing certain motions for adjournment, the power of summarily ordering a member to quit the House and remain without its precincts under ignominious restrictions.

Each of these powers inflicts a disability upon all other members of the House as compared with the member in the Chair. The first two take away a right which has hitherto been the imperious privilege of every representative of the people-the right to move a resolution when it was in order. The third, which not only strikes a blow at the dignity of the House, but allows the Speaker to disfranchise a constituency for the time being, is a power which the House has hitherto jealously kept in its own hands, and exercised under the gravest sense of responsibility. In America the Speakership of the House of Representatives began on the old English theory. Gradually

its character was transformed by the phenomenal growth of its powers, until now the American Speaker is the most powerful administrative officer in the Constitution, next to the President. The Committee system has only to grow in the House of Commons, and the nomination of the Committees to be transferred for convenience' sake from the Committee of Selection to the Speaker, for the Speaker of the House of Commons to become as powerful an administrator and as essentially a partisan, as his brother in Washington.

HISTORY OF CLOSURE IN CONGRESS.

A glance at the history of Closure in Congress affords a singular illustration of the old truth that there is nothing new under the sun. Reading the Congressional Globe for 1841, one might fancy oneself turning over certain pages of "Hansard." In 1841 the Whigs came into office, rather eager for work, after having been out for a dozen years. They were met in both Houses by a persistent minority bent on giving them the most active opposition. The Democrats had able leaders, especially in the Senate. They systematically opposed all the Whig measures, "hammering them incessantly," as they said themselves, and "impaling them against the wall." Their contention was that all the Whig measures meant "plunder," and should be resisted to the last gasp. It was obstruction pure and simple. The imperious will of the great Whig leader, Henry Clay, could ill brook being thwarted in this fashion. He declared that the interests of the country demanded some rule of procedure in Congress which would enable the majority to get control of public business. The minority, he said, controlled the action of Congress.

Accordingly, two new rules were submitted to the House of Representatives. One extended to the House the power to apply the Closure or Previous Question to the Committee of the whole in the most drastic manner." * The other provided that no member should, under any circumstances, speak longer than an hour.† The first of these rules was passed, after a bitter struggle, on the 6th of July. Here is a passage from one of the speeches against it, that of Mr. Medill, who afterwards became Governor of Ohio; it is worthy of comparison with the utterances of Mr. W. H. Smith, or Mr. Arthur Balfour, when they were opposing the Liberal Closure Resolutions in 1882:

"What is the tendency and operation of this monstrous proposition? It is to enable the majority to apply the gag in Committee of the whole, as well as in the House, and thus cut off debate on any subject whatever. This is a proposition which, I venture to say, was never before made in any legislative body, and in the British Parliament would subject its mover to the most indignant rebuke. In • "The House may, by a majority vote, provide for the discharge of the Committee from the consideration of any Bill referred to them, after acting without debate upon all amendments pending, and that may be offered."

"And that no member be allowed to speak more than one hour to any question under debate."