581-593.
better do, his practice was to shut himself up in a room assigned him at St. John 's gate, to which he would not suffer any one to
approach , except the compositor or Cave's boy for matter , which , as fast as he composed it , he tumbled out at the door. . . . In the perusal of these debates , as written , we cannot but wonder at the powers that produced them . The author had never passed those gradations that lead to the knowledge of men and business: born to a narrow fortune, of no profession , conver sant chiefly with books, and, if we believe some, so deficient in
the formalities of discourse, and the practices of ceremony, as in conversation to be scarce tolerable ; unacquainted with the stile of any other than academical disputation , and so great a stranger to senatorial manners, that he never was within the walls of
either house of parliament. That a man , under these disadvan tages, should be able to frame a system
of debate, to compose
speeches of such excellence, both in matter of form , as scarcely to be equalled by those of the most able and experienced states
men , is, I say, matter of astonishment, and a proof of talents that qualified him on earth .” 23
for a speaker in the most august assembly
Considered as historicalmaterial, the verdict must be that “ as
records of the speeches in the period they cover, they are prac tically worthless ” 24 and that " they are ‘dramas' which may be perused for amusement rather than for instruction .” 25 These illustrations have been given to suggest not only the un reliability of the early reports of Parliament, but even more the obstacles placed in the way of reporters that made these subter fuges necessary . It was long beforemembers of Parliament real
ized thatby allowing their speeches to be reported they were mul tiplying their power, and therefore , long before there was even a
tacit relaxation of the stringent regulations against the presence of reporters.26 The beginning of the open controversy over the admission of press representatives to the House of Commons is found in a plot laid by John Wilkes in 1771. He had long encour
aged newspaper proprietors to publish parliamentary debates and, as a result of a ruse to bring about a quarrelbetween the City
23 Sir John Hawkins, Life of Samuel Johnson, pp. 90 , III. 34 M . Macdonagh, The Reporters' Gallery, p . 163. 25 Id ., p . 164 , cited from A .Murphy .
26 An interesting account of the efforts to exclude reporters is given in M . Macdonagh, The Reporters' Gallery, chaps. XLIII, XLVI, “ Clearing the Reporters' Gallery ” and “ Mr. Speaker, I Espy Strangers."
