The Strand Magazine/Volume 5/Issue 27/From Behind the Speaker's Chair
From Behind the Speaker's Chair.
III.
(VIEWED BY HENRY W. LUCY.)
"Obstruction."
T is thirteen years since a new Parliament last blithely started on its way with Mr. Gladstone sitting in the seat of the Premier. Since March, 1880, a great deal has happened, not least in the change of circumstances under which the business of the House of Commons is conducted. The majority of the House of Commons may be Liberal or Conservative, according to a passing flood of conviction on the part of the constituencies. When presumptuous hands are stretched forth to touch the Ark of its procedure, its instincts are all Tory. For more than two hundred years preceding the advent of a Tory Ministry in 1886, this was so. Mr. Gladstone, driven to desperation in the second Session of the Parliament of 1880-5, endeavoured to reform procedure so that obstruction might be fought on even terms. He was met by such resolute and persistent opposition from the Conservative side that, even with an overwhelming majority at his back, he succeeded only in tinkering the pot. Oddly enough, it was left for the Conservatives when they came into office to revolutionize the system upon which, through the ages, Parliamentary business had been carried on.
F. H. O'Donnell.
There was nothing in the reforms more startling to the old Parliamentarian than the proposal automatically to close debate at midnight. A dozen years ago members of the House of Commons assembled at four o'clock for prayers. Questions began at half-past four, and no one could say at what hour of the night or of the next morning the cry "Who goes home?" might echo through the lobby. In those days Mr. O'Donnell was master of the situation, and he had many imitators. A debate carried on through several nights might seem to be approaching a conclusion. The Leader of the Opposition, rising between eleven o'clock and midnight, spoke in a crowded House. The Premier, or his lieutenant, followed, assuming to wind up the debate. Members wearied of the long sitting were prepared to go forth to the division lobby; when from below the gangway on the left there uprose a familiar figure, and there was heard a well-known voice.
These usually belonged to Mr. O'Donnell bent upon vindicating the right of a private member to interpose when the constituted authorities of the House had agreed in the opinion that a debate had been continued long enough. A roar of execration from the fagged legislators greeted the intruder. He expected this, and was in no degree perturbed. In earliest practice he had a way of dropping his eye-glass as if startled by the uproar, and searched for it with puzzled, preoccupied expression, apparently debating with himself what this outburst might portend. He did not love the British House of Commons, and delighted in thwarting its purposes. But he knew what was due to it in the way of respect, and, however angry passions might rise, however turbulent the scene, he would never address it looking upon it with the naked eye. As his eyeglass was constantly tumbling out, and as search for it was preternaturally deliberate, it played an appreciable part in the prolongation of successive Sessions.
"Eye-glass play."
O'Donnell's last appearance.
What has become of Frank Hugh now, I wonder? Vanishing from the House of Commons, he reappeared for a while on the scene, characteristically acting the part of the petrel that heralded the storm Mr. Pigott ineffectively tried to ride. It must be a consolation to Mr. O'Donnell, in his retirement, wherever it is passed, to reflect on the fact that it was he who directly brought about the appointment of the Parnell Commission, with all it effected. His action for libel brought against the Times preluded and inevitably led up to the formal investigation of the famous Charges and Allegations.
The member for Dungarvan was, in his day, the most thoroughly disliked man in the House of Commons, distaste for Mr. Parnell and for Mr. Biggar in his early prime being softened by contrast with his subtler provocation. An exceedingly clever debater, he was a phrase maker, some of whose epigrams Mr. Disraeli would not have disowned. He was a parliamentary type of ancient standing, and apparently ineradicable growth. In the present House of Commons fresh developments are presented by Mr. Seymour Keay and Mr. Morton. These are distinct varieties, but from the unmistakable root. Both are gifted with boundless volubility, unhampered by ordinary considerations of coherency and cogency. Neither is influenced by that sense of the dread majesty of the House of Commons which keeps some members dumb all through their parliamentary life, and to the last, as in the case of Mr. Bright, weighs upon even great orators. The difference between the older and the new development is that whilst over Mr. O'Donnell's intentional and deliberate vacuity of speech there gleamed frequent flashes of wit, Mr. Morton and Mr. Keay are only occasionally funny, and then the effect was undesigned.
Mr. Seymour Keay.
Since we have these two gentlemen still with us, it would be rash to say that if Mr. O'Donnell could revisit the glimpses of Big Ben he would find his occupation gone. He would certainly discover that his opportunities had been limited, and would have to recommence practice under greatly altered conditions. One of the former member for Dungarvan's famous achievements took place in the infancy of the Parliament of 1880-5, and, apart from its dramatic interest, is valuable as illustrating the change effected in parliamentary procedure by the New Rules. On that particular June night the paper was loaded with questions in a fashion unfamiliar in the last Parliament, though there are not lacking signs of renewed activity since political parties changed places. Question No. 23 stood in the name of Mr. O'Donnell, and contained in his best literary style a serious indictment of M. Challemel-Lacour, just nominated by the French Government as their representative at the Court of St. James.
Mr. A. C. Morton.
Sir Charles Dilke, then Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, made categorical reply, directly traversing all the points in the indictment. When he resumed his seat Mr. O'Donnell rose in his usual deliberate manner, captured his eye-glass, and having fixed it to his satisfaction, remarked in his drawling voice that it was "perfectly impossible to accept the explanation of the Government." Being interrupted with cries of "Order! Order!" he quietly played his trump card: "If I am not allowed to explain," he said, "I will conclude with a motion."
The House howled again, but it was a cry of despair. Mr. O'Donnell, they knew, had the whip hand. In those good old days he, or any other member desiring to obstruct ordinary procedure, might, in the middle of questions, start a debate on any subject under the sun. This and other outrages were doubtless recalled by the House of Commons when revising its Rules. It then ordered that no member might, during the progress of questions, interpose with a motion on which to found debate. If, in this current month of March, Mr. O'Donnell, being a member of the House of Commons, had wanted to attack M. Challemel-Lacour, he must needs have waited till the last question on the paper was disposed of, and could then have moved the adjournment only if his description of the question—as one of urgent public importance—was approved by the Speaker, and if, thereafter, forty members rose to support the request for a hearing.
Sir Charles Dilke.
In June, 1880, all that was left for the crowded House to do was to roar with resentment. Mr. O'Donnell was used to this incentive, and had it been withheld would probably have shown signs of failing vigour. As it was, he produced a pocket-handkerchief, took down his eye-glass and carefully polished it, whilst members yelled and tossed about on their seats with impotent fury. Under the existing Rules this scene, if it had ever opened, would have been promptly blotted out. The closure would have been moved, probably a division taken, and the business of the evening would have gone forward. There was no closure in those days, and Mr. Gladstone, after hurried consultation with Sir Erskine May, hastily moved that Mr. O'Donnell be not heard.
A shout of savage exultation rising from every bench, save those on which the Irish members sat, hailed a stroke that promised to deliver the House from the thraldom of Mr. O'Donnell at the very moment when its chains had taken a final twist. In ordinary circumstances this resolution would have played the part of the as yet unconsecrated closure. A division would have followed, the motion carried by an overwhelming majority, and Mr. O'Donnell would have been temporarily shut up.
But those were not ordinary times. The Fourth Party was in the prime of its vigour. Lord Randolph Churchill's quick eye discovered an opening for irritating Mr. Gladstone and damaging the Government by making what should have been a business night one long turmoil. Mr. Parnell, whilst disclaiming any personal sympathy with Mr. O'Donnell, moved the adjournment of the debate, and poor, placid Sir Stafford Northcote, egged on by the young bloods below the gangway, raised various points of order. Finally, at eight o'clock, the House dividing on Mr. Parnell's amendment, Sir Stafford Northcote voted with the Irish members, leading a hundred men of the Party of Law and Order into the same lobby.
Stirring up Sir Stafford.
Hour after hour the riot continued. At one time blameless Sir William Harcourt, then Home Secretary, appearing at the table, a Conservative member, amid tumultuous shouts, moved that he be not heard. When members tired of shouting grew at each other they divided on fresh motions for the adjournment, and it was not till one o'clock on the following morning that Mr. O'Donnell, grateful for a pleasant evening, was good enough to undertake that before he recurred to the question he would give due notice, so that the Speaker might exercise his discretion in revising its terms. At five minutes past one in the morning, after a wrangle full eight hours long, the Speaker, with a pretty assumption of nothing particular having happened, called on the next question on the paper, which was Number 24.
"Disgust."
All this might happen again on any night of this month save for the beneficent action of the New Rules a long-suffering Parliament was finally induced to adopt. On the threshold of a new Parliament it is useful to recall the scene as an assistance in calculating what may be accomplished by the Parliament elected in 1892, as compared with that which began its history in 1880. On the face of it, Parliament to-day has much less time at its disposal for the accomplishment of work than it had a dozen years ago. Then, the duration of a sitting was indefinite. The House might, as it did in February, 1881, meet at four o'clock on a Monday afternoon and sit continuously till Wednesday morning. Now, the Speaker takes the Chair at three o'clock; public business commences at half-past three; and at midnight, save in cases where the Standing Order has been formally suspended, the Speaker leaves the Chair, and the House adjourns, whoever may be on his feet.
The influence of this automatic procedure is beneficially felt throughout the whole of debate. One wholesome influence works in the direction of using up the early hours of the sitting, an arrangement which carries comfort to countless printing offices and editorial sanctums. Some time before the New Rules came into operation, Mr. Gladstone discovered for himself the convenience and desirability of taking part in debate at the earliest possible hour of a sitting. His earlier associations drifted round a directly opposite course. In the good old days the champions of debate did not interpose till close upon midnight, when they had the advantage of audiences sustained and exhilarated by dinner. That was before the era of special wires to the provincial papers, early morning trains, and vastly increased circulation for the London journals. Mr. Gladstone discovered that he was more carefully reported and his observations more deliberately discussed if he spoke between five and seven o'clock in the evening than if, following his earlier habit, he addressed the House between eleven and one in the morning. He has, accordingly, for some years been accustomed, when he has an important speech to deliver, to interpose in debate immediately after questions.
This habit has become general, even compulsory, with members who may, within certain limits, choose their own time for speaking. All the cream of debate is now skimmed before the dinner-hour. At the close of a pitched battle, the two Leaders of Party, as heretofore, wind up the debate. But their opportunity for orating is severely circumscribed. The audience in the House of Commons does not begin to reassemble after dinner till half-past ten. Rising at that hour, the Leader of the Opposition, if he fairly divides the available time with the right honourable gentleman opposite, must not speak more than three-quarters of an hour, and should not exceed forty minutes.
This is a necessity desirable not less in the orator's interest than in that of the audience. Except for the exposition of an intricate measure, twenty minutes is ample time for any man to say what is useful for his fellow-men to hear. All Mr. Disraeli's best speeches were made within half an hour, and if he thought it necessary, from a sense of the importance of his position, to prolong them, his stock of good things was exhausted in twenty minutes, the rest being what Carlyle disrespectfully described as thrice-boiled colewort. Mr. Gladstone can go on indefinitely, and in very recent times has been known to hold his audience spell-bound for three hours. But even he has profited by the beneficent tyranny that now rules the limit of debate, and, rising with the knowledge that he has but forty minutes to speak in, has excelled himself. For less exuberant speakers not gifted with his genius, the new discipline is even more marked in its benefits.
Mr. Keir Hardie.
It is too soon to endeavour to estimate the general characteristics of the personnel of the new Parliament. It will probably turn out to be very much of the same class as the innumerable army of its predecessors. When Mr. Keir Hardie came down on the opening day in a wagonette, with flags flying and accordions playing, it was cried aloud in some quarters that the end was at hand. This apprehension was strengthened when Mr. Hardie strolled about the House with a tweed travelling cap on his head, the Speaker at the time being in the chair. This, as Dr. Johnson explained, when the lady asked him why he had described the horse's pastern as its knee, was "ignorance, pure ignorance." Mr. Hardie is not a man of the quietest manners, as was testified to by the apparition in Palace Yard of the wagonette and its musical party; but in the much-talked-of incident of the cap he sinned inadvertently. Before the Speaker took the chair he had seen members walking about with their hats on. He had observed that even in his presence they remained seated with their heads covered. The shade of etiquette which approves this fashion whilst it sternly prohibits a member from keeping his hat on when in motion, even to the extent of leaning over to speak to a friend on the bench below him, was too fine to catch the eye of a new member.
Mr. Keir Hardie has done much worse things than this in his public appearances during the recess, and since the Session opened there has not been lacking evidence of resolve to keep himself in the front of the stage where the gallery may see him. But this is no new thing, to be cited in proof of the deterioration of the composition and style of the House of Commons. It has been done repeatedly in various fashions within recent memory, and always with the same result. No man, not even Mr. Biggar—and he may be cited as the most ruthless experimenter—has successfully struggled against the subtle disciplinary influence of the House of Commons.
From the first the member for Cavan set himself in deliberate fashion to outrage Parliamentary traditions and usages. He finished by becoming a punctilious practitioner of Parliamentary forms, a stickler for the minutest observation of order. Whilst Mr. Gladstone and other members of old standing were content to preface their speeches with the monosyllable "Sir," nothing less than "Mr. Speaker, sir," would satisfy Mr. Biggar. No one who has not heard the inflection of tone with which this was uttered, nor seen the oratorical sweep of the hand that launched it on its course, can realize how much of combined deference and authority the phrase is capable of. Mr. Biggar, having in his early Parliamentary days defied the Chair and affronted the sensibilities of the House, alike in the matter of dress and deportment, developed into a portly gentleman of almost smug appearance, a terror to new members. Woe to any who in his ignorance passed between the Chair and the member addressing it; who walked in from a division with his hat on; or who stood an inch or two within the Bar whilst debate was going forward. Mr. Biggar's strident cry of "Order! Order!" reverberated through the House. Others joined in the shout, and the abashed offender hastily withdrew into obscurity.
The late Mr. Biggar.
It is the same with others of less strongly marked character. Vanity or garrulity may force a new member into a position of notoriety. He may, according to his measure of determination, try a fall again and again with the House, and may sometimes, as in the case of Mr. O'Donnell, seem to win. But in the end the House of Commons proves victorious. It is a sort of whetstone on which blades of various temperature operate. In time, they either forego the practice or wear themselves away. In either case the whetstone remains.
This is a rule without exception, and is a reassuring reflection in view of the talk about the degeneracy of the House of Commons, and the decadence of its standard of manner. It would not be difficult to show that the House at present in Session will, from the point of view of manners, favourably compare with any that have gone before—though, to be just, the comparison should be sought with Parliaments elected under similar conditions, with the Liberals in office and the Conservatives in opposition. That is an arrangement always found to be more conducive to lively proceedings than when parties are disposed in the contrary order. The Parliament dissolved last year was decorously dull. Mr. Gladstone in opposition is not prone to show sport, and no encouragement was held out to enterprising groups below the gangway to bait the Government. It was very different in the Parliament of 1880-5, of which fact the Challemel-Lacour episode is an illustration, only a little more piquant in flavour than the average supply.
There are already signs that the new Parliament will not lie under the charge of deplorable dulness brought against its predecessor. But these varying moods are due to waves of political passion, and do not affect the question whether the House of Commons as a body of English gentlemen met for the discharge of public business has or has not deteriorated. I have an engraving of a picture of the House of Commons in pre-Reform days. It was carefully drawn in the Session of 1842. A more respectable body of the gentlemen of England it would be difficult to gather together. With the possible exception of one or two political adventurers like the then member for Shrewsbury, there is probably not a man in the House who is not well born or at least rich. Mr. Keir Hardie would look strange indeed in these serried ranks of portly gentlemen with high coat collars, cravats up to their chin, short-bodied coats showing the waistcoat beneath, and the tightly trousered legs. Yet this House, and its equally prim successors, had its obstruction, its personal wrangles, and its occasional duel. Peel was attacked by Disraeli in a fashion and in language that would not be tolerated in the House of Commons now, even though the target were Mr. Gladstone.
It is not necessary to go back as far as the days of Peel or Parliamentary Reform to sustain the bold assertion that, so far from having degenerated, the manners of the House of Commons have improved. In the Parliament elected in 1874 there sat on the Conservative side a gentleman named Smollet, who early distinguished himself by bringing Parliamentary debate down to the level of conversation in "Roderick Random." In those days Mr. Gladstone was down after the General Election, and Mr. Smollet, to the uproarious delight of gentlemen near him, savagely kicked him.
"Mobbing him."
It was in the second year of this same Parliament, less than twenty years ago, that Mr. Gladstone, issuing from a division lobby, was suddenly pounced upon by some fifty or sixty Conservative members, and howled at for the space of several moments. It is, happily, possible for Mr. Gladstone to forget, or at least to forgive, personal attacks made upon him through his long career. In this very month of the new Session he may be nightly seen working in cordial fashion with ancient adversaries from Ireland, describing as "my honourable friends" gentlemen who, ten years ago and for some time subsequently, heaped on his head the coarsest vituperation permitted by practised manipulation of Parliamentary forms. But this scene in the division lobby on the 12th of April, 1875, is burned into his recollection. I have heard him, within the last few months, refer to it in those tones of profound indignation and with that flashing fire in his eyes only seen when he is deeply moved. He mentioned, what I think was not known, that Lord Hartington happened to be walking with him at the time. But there was no mistake for whom the angry cries were meant. Mr. Gladstone spoke with the profounder indignation because, as he said, he had on this occasion gone out to vote on behalf of a man whose character he detested, because he saw in the action taken against him an attack upon one of the privileges of Parliament.
That scene was an outburst of political animosity; and the movements of political animosity, like the dicta of taste, are not to be disputed. But on the question of good manners, the only one here under consideration, it may be affirmed that the present House of Commons would be safe from lapse into such an exhibition. To this better state of things the operation of the New Rules has conspicuously contributed, and though, as we know, they have not operated to the absolute extinction of Parliamentary scenes, they have appreciably limited opportunity and incentive.