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THE PAGEANT OF PARLIAMENT

VOL. I

CONTEMPORARY
PORTRAITS:

Men of My Day in Public Life. By the Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West, Author of “Recollections,” “One City and Many Men.” With many Illustrations. Demy 8vo, cloth.

18s. net.

Sir Algernon West, at one time secretary to Mr. Gladstone when Prime Minister, and who has filled a number of important official positions, is well qualified by his personal experience and the number of his acquaintances in the upper regions of the official world to write this book, which includes reminiscences of Sir Louis Mallet, Lord Blachford, Lord Sandford, Sir E. May, Lord Welby, Matthew Arnold, Sir E. Bradford, and many others. Sir Algernon West, as his previous work shows, is a delightful raconteur, and the present is one of the most informing and charming he has written.

T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. London

SPEAKER’S CHAIR AND CLERKS’ TABLE IN HOUSE OF COMMONS.
(From Sir Benjamin Stone’s pictures, British Museum.)

THE PAGEANT OF
PARLIAMENT

BY

MICHAEL MacDONAGH

AUTHOR OF “THE SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE”
AND “THE REPORTERS’ GALLERY”

VOL. I

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD

LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in 1921

(All rights reserved)

PREFACE

The purpose of this book, briefly stated, is to describe Parliament doing its work, as a living organization, in the framing of laws, in the levying of taxes and in their spending, and in the consideration of the discontents, anxieties and necessities of the Commonwealth, with a view to their removal or amelioration. I have embodied in my book—if I may say so without sounding the loud timbrel too vain-gloriously—considerable experience as a journalist of General Elections and by-elections in all parts of Great Britain and Ireland, and of thirty-five years’ observation of the two Houses of Parliament from the Reporters’ Gallery, supplemented by a study of their history and traditions, laws and procedure, the careers of leading statesmen, and the political principles by which they guided their management of public affairs.

There are many valuable text-books on the Constitution by learned lawyers and philosophical writers. My book does not aspire to be classed with these grave and profound treatises. They are of high documentary value, but I think it is doubtful whether one can really get to know Parliament from a study of them alone. They ignore the human side of Parliament. Often they seem to present Parliament as a mere abstraction—a thing of rules, principles and theories unrelated to the human personalities who compose its membership. Parliament cannot be divorced from life any more than Literature. Rightly to appreciate Parliament in its strength and in its weakness you must have an acquaintance with it in being, and an understanding of the politicians who, whether in office or out of office, whether in Government or Opposition, bend it, or try to bend it, to their will. Mr. Speaker Lowther, presiding at a lecture on the House of Commons, told a story which serves to illustrate the difference between theory and experience. When Sir William Anson, the author, as Mr. Lowther truly said, of “a very grave and almost classical work” on the British Constitution, was being escorted up the floor of the House of Commons to take the oath and his seat for the first time, an old and witty Radical member who happened to be sitting beside Mr. Lowther said to him: “Is this the gentleman who has written a great work on the House of Commons?” “Yes, that is the very man,” replied Mr. Lowther. “Well,” the other remarked, “he will find it a very different place from what he thought it was.” It is idle for historical writers to try to depreciate the importance of personality in affairs. Certainly in Parliament it is personality that, even more than opinion, is the determining factor in every great political crisis.

I trace the progress of a Parliament, its unfolding and development, from the General Election, when it is constituted by the votes of the people, until the day the Sovereign, on the advice of the Cabinet, pronounces the sentence of its dissolution. I describe its framework and machinery, its chief officers, its ceremonies, usages and customs, its contrasts of solemnity and gaiety; the Party forces which move it and direct its course; how Administrations are made; the duties of Ministers; the pleasures and woes of the M.P.; how Public and Private Bills are passed; how Supplies are voted; the mode in which the proceedings of both Houses are reported for the newspapers; and the varied elements, aspects and usages of Parliament, whether it be regarded as the historic temple of British liberties, equally ancient and venerable with Westminster Abbey over the way; the scene of great achievements in oratory and statesmanship; the institution by which, as the incarnation of the current political thought of the day, questions affecting the well-being of the community are determined by legislators and administrators, or the field upon which the continuous and exciting duel between Parties is fought at close quarters, with all the whims, oddities, weaknesses of human nature as well as with its noble qualities. I have made some excursions into the domain of history. That, of course, was inevitable in writing about Parliament, whose roots lie so deep in the past. But I have avoided as much as possible the broad beaten tracks, and have turned down unfrequented or little-trodden by-ways in search of fresh and apt anecdotes to enliven my descriptions, in fact and in experience, of the Pageant of Parliament.

There is one general observation which I should like to make, and it may not be out of place to make it here. My studies have led to the discovery that there has hardly ever been a time when it has not been asserted by someone or other, in writing or in speech, that the authority of Parliament and the esteem in which it is held have sadly declined. There is nothing surprising in that. Cynics and wits of all ages have tried their hand at making great institutions, as well as great men, butts at which to shoot their ridicule and contempt. Parliament has not escaped the common fate of the mighty and the sublime. It has been described as inefficient and corrupt. Its downfall has often been prophesied. Yet its foundations were never deeper or better laid than they are to-day, broad-based as they are on electoral comprehensiveness and the people’s will. Parliament as I have presented it—even with all reverence and admiration—may not be perfect. It has its faults. After all, its legislators and administrators are but human. But it is, perhaps, as fine and perfect an instrument of democratic government as can humanly be devised. Ancient and renowned as it is, it stands not remote and apart. On the contrary, it is of the fabric of the life of the people. It makes a living reality of the great principle—“Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” It is the country’s chief political instrument of progressive civilization. It is idle, in the light of experience, to talk of its being clumsy, inefficient, slow. More than ever does it make possible the closest and quickest impact of the country’s mind upon government and administration. In the World War it signally proved its practical and speedy utility. Statesmen obtained quickly and surely all the measures they deemed necessary for the national safety and the enemy’s defeat. Whenever Parliament seems to have lost caste the cause may be traced, not to the institution itself but to its membership, the confusion of its Parties, the weakness of its Ministry. The remedy is not to destroy it, and put in its place some untried mode of government and administration; but, by changing its composition, to restore it to the proper service of the Nation. Parliament is fully capable of accomplishing whatever may be asked of it, in the changing thoughts of men, probably, till the end of all time, and of doing so soberly and slowly by process of evolution, or with revolutionary rapidity and completeness, as the situation demands.

MICHAEL MacDONAGH.

CONTENTS

THE PAGEANT OF PARLIAMENT

CHAPTER I
THE MEMBER AND THE CONSTITUENCY

1

At the General Election the Party in office throws down its superb challenge to the Party in Opposition. “We appeal,” they say, “to the solemn judgment of the Nation on the political issues in contention between us.” This invoking of the electors’ decision at once raises a question of political morality as well as of constitutional practice—the relation in which a Member of Parliament rightly stands to his constituency. Is the M.P. a representative or a delegate? As these capacities may be said to be in a sense identical, it is well to put the question in a fuller and more definite form. Is the M.P. an agent sent to the House of Commons by the electors of a certain geographical district to state their opinions solely and act in accordance with them, or may he exercise his own independent judgment, even against the will of those to whom he owes his seat in the Assembly? Edmund Burke dealt with this question on the hustings at Bristol, during the General Election of 1774, in a speech that is memorable in political literature as a classic statement of the constitutional position of an M.P., in the opinion of the representative, at least, and also, it must be said, in the opinion of a large body of the electors. Burke said it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him, their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention. “But,” Burke goes on, “his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serves you if he sacrifices it to your opinions.” Nevertheless, Burke was returned to the House of Commons as Member for Bristol in 1774, for no more exalted reason than that his political views were in accord with those of the majority of the constituency in regard to the matters that then divided Tories and Whigs.

In 1778 Burke supported two Bills that were presented to the House of Commons, one relaxing some of the restrictions on Irish trade, the other removing some of the civil disabilities of the Roman Catholics. These votes were in conformity with Burke’s mature judgment as a statesman as well as with his Irish prepossessions. But they were also directly in opposition to the material interests and the religious tenets of the people of Bristol. That being so, Burke fell into disfavour, and, however honourably his unpopularity was earned, it was inevitable that he should be brought to account by his constituents on the first opportunity. This was afforded by the General Election of 1780. In a noble speech from the hustings in defence of his action, he exclaimed: “I did not obey your instructions. No; I conformed to the instructions of truth and Nature, and maintained your interests against your opinions with a constancy that became me.” He went on, in passages of moving power and earnestness, to declare that he did not stand before them accused of any venality or neglect of duty. “No,” he cried, “the charges against me are all of one kind: that I have pushed the principles of general justice and benevolence too far, further than a cautious policy would warrant, and further than the opinions of many would go along with me. In every accident which may happen through life—in pain, in sorrow, in depression, and distress, I will call to mind this accusation and be comforted.” But the popular prejudice against Burke—a prejudice aroused solely by the expression of his liberality and broad-mindedness in action—was too strong to be overcome. The great statesman and philosopher was compelled to retire early from the contest, badly beaten.

The electors of Bristol have been put in the pillory for intolerance and selfishness, while Burke stands, for all time, a shining example of self-sacrificing devotion to independence of mind. Many years have passed since then—years of steady advance in political enlightenment, and in public duty on the part of electors as well as of representatives—and questions, more vital and fundamental, arise constantly for settlement. Yet where to-day is the constituency ready to elect a man who is opposed to its political views, however great a genius he may be, and however stainless his honour? There is nothing more certain than that Bristol would expel Burke in the twentieth century as it expelled him in the eighteenth, if his political opinions were distasteful to the majority of the electors, or if his parliamentary actions were opposed to what they conceived to be their interests. A hundred years hence the Nation may have reason to bewail our obtuseness, and, in resentment of the trouble we have caused them, bitterly to cry out—“Fools, fools, fools!” The thought does not disturb our political equanimity. We are resolved to yield our opinions, prepossessions, prejudices to no man who would tell us to think and act differently—aye, though he be our M.P.!

In no constituency will the plea be accepted that the Member must be allowed to decide what is best ultimately for it against its opinions, or even against its prejudices—if, indeed, the one can be distinguished from the other in politics. It is not only that in this conflict of one mind against many the wrong-headedness is just as much likely to exist in the representative as in the constituents. What is more, the representative system is a check, not on the people, but for the people. The chief function of the House of Commons is to protect the people’s rights and extend their social well-being; and as under our democratic system the people are free to vote as they please and for whom they please, it is inevitable that they should constitute themselves, in each constituency, the supreme judge as to the man best fitted faithfully to discharge a trust that means so much to them. That is not to say that a Member of Parliament is expected to outrage his honour and conscience by supporting measures which he secretly abhors, or believes in his heart to be detrimental in the long run to the true interests of the Nation, because they find favour with a majority of his constituents, and to oppose them would entail the loss of his seat. He votes, of course, according to his convictions. Nor is it necessary for him to comport himself in an attitude of servility towards the electorate. Once he is returned he may, if he so pleases, entirely change his politics, and cross the floor of the House of Commons without having beforehand to go back to his constituency, as a delegate in a like situation would be bound to refer to the body or society of which he was the chosen spokesman. The constituency has no immediate control over the representative. They cannot forthwith deprive him of his authority and position, as a society or other body can recall and supersede a delegate. But the representative who votes according to personal convictions which are out of harmony with the political principles of the majority of his constituency must be ready to pay the penalty of this conflict between his opinion and their judgment—the penalty of being summarily dismissed, like Burke, at the earliest opportunity. In a word, such a representative is rejected by the constituency for the very same reason that the country frequently discharges a Government at the General Election—incompatibility of political temper. The feeling of most electors is that they would be false to themselves—false, at any rate, to their opinions—were they to vote for a candidate with whom they were in disagreement on political issues, no matter how great he might be as a man.

2

Goldsmith, in well-known lines, gently reproves Burke as one—

Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind,

And to Party gave up what was meant for mankind.

On the contrary, it would be truer to say that Burke was politically undone because he gave his grand talents to what he regarded as the service of mankind rather than to Party, particularly in relation to the French Revolution, when the action of his Party was, in his view, opposed to the real interests of humanity. Moreover, Goldsmith uses the word “Party” in a disparaging sense. His idea of Party politics seems to have been that it was a game unscrupulously played for the stakes of mere power and influence, greater wealth and station; and there are people even to-day who agree with him. It is a strange notion, and one that appears to me to be entirely without foundation. Undoubtedly the inspiring force of Party is a sincere regard for the good of the Commonwealth. It is true there are politicians, with little principle and less scruple, who become Party men for the advancement of personal ambitions which are mean and unworthy in the circumstances. But all the Party movements—Conservative, Unionist, Liberal, Radical, Labour, Irish Nationalist, Free Trade, Protection—are each, in the main, an honest effort, however you or I may think it mistaken, to effect the greatest good of the greatest number. As to the ultimate object, all Parties are agreed. It is the methods by which this common end had best be attained that creates the fundamental differences between Parties and excites political antagonisms.

“Party,” says Burke, “is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavour the national interest upon some particular principle upon which they are all agreed.” No one else has written more powerfully in support of the view that Party discipline is essential to strong and stable parliamentary government. Yet Burke himself was a most indifferent Party man. He had that stern independence of judgment which, refusing to yield even in details, is fatal to the unity of purpose and action without which efficient Party organization is impossible. From the Party point of view, Burke, with all his political philosophy, was just what Fox described him—“a damned wrong-headed fellow!” The theory advanced by Burke that a Member of Parliament ought to be returned unfettered by political pledges because it is his bounden duty to exercise his free and independent judgment, irrespective of the constituency’s opinions and desires, on the public questions that arise for decision, is an exalted counsel of perfection. Perhaps it makes a demand too stern and unbending for human nature under any form of Constitution, however Utopian or perfect. In a Parliament based on the Party system it is impossible of acceptance. The power of the House of Commons is exercised not according to any fixed rule of law, but according to certain broad general principles—Justice, Equity, Reason—and the current interpretation of these principles is guided by the dominant political opinions of the day.

Members of Parliament are, in practice if not in form, Party delegates. To them the majority of the electorate have relegated their authority to support or oppose in the House of Commons the controversial political questions of the time in the light of certain Party principles. Whatever local character the M.P. possesses may be said to disappear as soon as he presents the return of the writ to the Clerk at the Table of the House of Commons, shakes hands with the Speaker, and then, amid Party cheers, makes his way to the Liberal, or Unionist, or Labour benches, according to the Party views he was really chosen to support. By that action he stands revealed as a Party delegate. And yet he is a representative, in a sense deeper and wider than that which prevailed of old, before the uprise of the powerful Party organization. He is a representative not solely of the local views of his constituency, but of one section of the paramount and possibly abiding opinions of the Nation as a whole.

3

The country being, in the main, divided politically into three chief groups of thought—Conservative, Liberal and Labour—the machinery for the promotion of political principles and Party interests is principally supplied by three great rival organizations. These are the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations, controlled by the Conservative Central Office; the National Liberal Federation, controlled by the Liberal Central Association; and the Labour Party, controlled by the National Executive. Each of these organizations is aided by several subsidiary but independent bodies, which are formed for the promotion of sectional political interests within the main movement to which they are attached.

The systems of the National Union, the Liberal Federation and the Labour Party are much alike in methods. Those of the two ancient political Parties may be taken for the purposes of illustration. In most constituencies there is a branch of each organization. These local bodies elect the council for the county or for the borough. These councils send delegates to the annual conferences of the Conservative Union, or the Liberal Federation, by which the programme of each Party is considered, revised and confirmed, and a central executive is appointed with supreme authority. The branches look after Party interests locally. The Federation, or the Union, speak for the Liberalism or Conservatism of the country as a whole.

But in reality Party organization is controlled, for the Conservatives by the Conservative Central Office, and for the Liberals by the Liberal Central Association. Both the Union and the Federation are founded upon a popular and representative basis, and their annual meetings, at least, are open to the Press. They each fulfil the double functions of educating political thought in the country, and of enabling the Party leaders in Parliament to gauge the drift of opinion within the Party on current questions of the day. But of the working of the Conservative Central Office and the Liberal Central Association little or nothing is made public—nothing, at any rate, that is really important. What is known is that each consists of a staff of officials directed by a Chief Agent, who is appointed by the parliamentary leaders of the Party. The Chief Party Whip in the House of Commons is also a leading director of the affairs of each of these central bodies. In each is vested the expenditure of the Party fund, subscribed by wealthy supporters, and popularly supposed to be immense. Each has a voice in the selection of candidates. The favour of headquarters is often the best passport to selection by the local association. Each body has an agent permanently residing in constituencies where political opinion is pretty evenly divided. “Give the men a smoking concert,” these Party agents are advised in a little book called How to Win an Election, “where they can obtain a reasonable quantity of good, pure, wholesome beer, rather than a tea opened with a touch of the religious element.” Each body also has gentlemen continually on the road—rival political travellers, as it were, bringing round to the electors the newest and most attractive samples of principles, Liberal or Conservative.

Such is the British variant of the American Caucus. It was imported from the country of its origin, in 1873, by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain—a man who has profoundly influenced Party tactics and strategy, as well as political opinion, in Great Britain—and was first set up in Birmingham under the direction of Mr. Francis Schnadhorst. The Caucus was at once attacked as a most mischievous element in public life. It was contended by old-fashioned Liberals and Tories alike that it would make impossible the free expression of the will of the constituency. The electors would become an unthinking, passive mass under the dominion of headquarters, and the destiny of the Nation—controlled as it is by the exercise of the franchise—would pass into the hands, perhaps, of unprincipled and artful demagogues. But the Caucus had come to stay. It was adopted by the Conservatives as well as by the Liberals. In fact, the idea of forming a Party organization in this country first originated with Disraeli.

In the General Election of 1868 the Conservative Government, of which Disraeli was Prime Minister, was hopelessly beaten at the polls. There was practically no organization of the Conservatives at the time, and the work of bringing it into existence was entrusted by Disraeli to a young barrister who had been in the House of Commons for a year or two—John Eldon Gorst. Gorst began by establishing the “Central Conservative Office.” He then proceeded to create a permanent system of local bodies throughout the country for the registration of voters, linked them up in the National Union, and kept at headquarters a register of approved candidates from which the local bodies could make their own selection. The dissolution of the Liberal Parliament in 1874, unexpected though it was, found the Conservatives accordingly quite prepared, and they returned from the polls victorious. The Liberals then set earnestly to work on the same lines, and, improving upon the Conservative example, produced an even more perfect electoral machine. In 1877 Schnadhorst founded the National Liberal Federation, and, becoming the chief organizer and electoral adviser of the Liberal Party, it was to his exertions that the immense Gladstonian victory of 1880 was mainly due. Schnadhorst, on his retirement in 1887, was presented with 10,000 guineas by the Liberal Party as a slight recognition of his great services to their cause.

In truth, the rise of the highly developed and powerful Central Party organization was a destined stage of political development in Great Britain as well as in the United States. An essential adjunct of a constitutional system like the British—the two fundamental principles of which are democracy and Party government—is the Party organization for the education of public opinion in its tenets, and for having its forces ready to take the field at the General Election, the outcome of which is the supremacy of one Party or the other in the House of Commons for a term of years, and, consequently, the paramount influence of one set of political principles or the other in the government of the Nation. Moreover, the effect of Party organization has, on the whole, been beneficent. It is hardly too much to say that to it is due the healthy political vitality of Great Britain. It has aroused an interest in public affairs and government, and by the propagation of ideas it has given to the democracy coherent political convictions. If public opinion were unorganized, its aimless ebbing and flowing—knowing not what it really desired—its tendency to separate into numerous factions, some of them, possibly, with wild and visionary aims, would have led in time to the instability of the Constitution. The Party system, on the other hand, has undoubtedly contributed to the strength and security of the State by bringing about the convergence of the various streams of political thought into three main channels, each with settled principles, Conservative, Liberal and Labour in tendency, and pursuing ends that are on the whole national as well as rational.

CHAPTER II
WOOING OF THE ELECTORS

1

Party organization reached its highest point of perfection and influence before the outbreak of the World War in 1914. Yet even at that period it was remarkable how small both the Conservative Union and the Liberal Association were in actual membership. It was unusual to find among one’s acquaintances, however wide the circle, anyone who belonged to either organization. Their power lay in propaganda and direction. And if millions of voters acknowledged their sway, there were other millions, though not quite so many, perhaps, over whom they had no influence. At many General Elections before the War not more than 50 or 60 per cent. of the electors went to the polls. The absentees were equally numerous in electoral contests immediately after the War.

Who are they, these silent voters, who constitute so unknown a quantity, so sore a puzzle, to the Party managers, and sometimes confound their nicest calculations? A man’s politics depends upon his individual temperament and point of view, but, like his religion, it is largely the accident of his birth and home environment or early education. I have seen an election address in which the candidate said: “I was born a Conservative on August 29, 1848.” Another man is a Liberal because of the chance that it was Liberalism and not Conservatism which he unconsciously imbibed at his father’s knee. In fact, the sentry in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera was not far wrong in singing that every little boy or girl who’s born into the world alive—

Is either a little Liberal,

Or else a little Conservative.

But the silent voter seems to have disdained to adopt fixed and settled political opinions—like the generality of mankind—either by inheritance or by an effort of thought. It may be that he is ignorant of the object of politics, in the general sense of the word; it may be that he knows what it implies, but thinks it unimportant. At any rate, the cries of Party make no appeal to him. He owes allegiance to none of the three great political organizations, nor to any of the many smaller groups formed for the advancement of particular purposes. He is scornful of the mere Party man. “Hack,” indeed, is the word he contemptuously uses. In his opinion ordinary politicians are but gramophones which mechanically grind out echoes of the catch cries that emanate from the Party headquarters or the Party newspapers. Indeed, the Party system appears to him a thing eminently absurd. He sees nothing in it but three scolding political organizations condemning each other’s methods and belittling each other’s achievements, bent solely on the possession of office with its attendant prestige and benefits. In his self-righteousness he accounts himself the ideal elector who, animated by a high sense of public duty, refuses to espouse any side in the Party struggle, and, taking the welfare of the Nation as his guiding light, brings free and reasoned judgment to bear upon the rival political policies at issue in the General Election. On the other hand, the staunch Party adherent calls him a “wobbler”—a sort of backboneless creature who cannot stand steadily upon his legs, much less four square to all the winds that blow, and who, when he votes, is influenced by some petty mood of the moment.

But whatever he may be—whether the idealistic free and enlightened elector, or a creature of unstable mind, whether he represents a low standard of political intelligence, or the highest form of integrity applied to politics—undoubtedly he it is who swings the electoral pendulum. He is the human instrument for the working out of that curious law of electioneering by which, before the World War, with but little irregularity, one Party succeeded the other in office, since the first really democratic extension of the franchise by Disraeli’s Reform Act of 1867, when the principle of household suffrage was established. The “wobblers” are not organized. They have no newspapers. No common consciousness of similar aims unifies or unites them. They do not appear upon platforms nor in audiences, nor do they feel impelled to write to the Press. They keep their own counsel, and rarely talk politics even in their own circles. They are, in fact, ignorant of each other’s existence. Yet their political influence is immense. It is not that they succeed in having themselves largely represented in Parliament. A peer who sits on the “cross benches” in the House of Lords—right in the middle of the floor, unattached, between the Government and the Opposition—is the closest analogue of the “wobbler” to be found in Parliament. Nor are they successful in having their political views considered in legislation and administration. Indeed, it is likely that they are a very varied lot in ideas, sentiments, and tastes. Almost invariably non-politicians are dead against change. So long as things go on pretty much as usual they are content to stand aside. But if it were possible to hold a convention of “wobblers,” and they drew up a political programme, we should have, no doubt, a fearful mixture of Toryism, Liberalism, Socialism, of the principles of free trade and tariff reform, of open doors and closed ports, of loaves big and little, of nationalization and private enterprise, of the whole hog or none.

The power which is wielded by this silent reserve of voters, as opposed to the crowd who belong to organizations, or who go to meetings and make their opinions known, is this—that in many constituencies where the steadfast Liberal, Conservative, and Labour supporters are evenly balanced, they exercise, as it were, the casting vote. In them may be said to lie the decision of the fateful question of the General Election—Shall the Government of the British Empire be Conservative or Liberal or Labour for a term of years? In the mass they may be moved by opposing sentiments and motives, they may be pursuing widely different ends. Many of them, no doubt, are of the kind who can only support a cause so long as it is favoured by fortune. But, as a rule, they are friendly disposed towards the “outs.” “Let the ‘outs’ have a turn of office,” they say, as they place their cross on the ballot paper in the polling booth. Thus swings the electoral pendulum to and fro.

Occasionally there is a wave of national feeling—whether it be enthusiasm for the new cause, or absolute weariness of the old, which, as in the extraordinary General Election of 1906 that brought the Liberals back to power after many years in the wilderness, sweeps over the country like a tidal wave overthrowing the barriers set up by the Party organizations and obliterating the lines of orthodox Party politics. Then it is that the non-political electors who do not trouble to vote on ordinary occasions flock to the polls in their hundreds of thousands, that numbers of voters who held their opinions weakly go over to the other side, and that the candidates of the Party in power are made to feel the full weight of their combined wrath. But this rarely happens. In the periods of calm which more often mark the public life of England, when there are no really fundamental or vital differences between parties, and interest in politics is, therefore, at a low ebb, when the General Election means no more than a struggle to get one set of Ministers out and another set of Ministers in, victory for Liberalism, Conservatism, or Labour depends on organization and persistent urging during the actual contest, each on their own particular supporters, to fail not, on their Party allegiance, to go to the polling booths.

2

The contrast between elections in the nineteenth and in the twentieth centuries is very striking and interesting. We see the good effects of Party in sweeping away electoral corruption, and also its drawbacks in limiting the scope of independent opinion and character. One of the most remarkable elections ever held was that which led to the return of John Stuart Mill for Westminster, as an independent Member, in 1865. Mill’s views were uncommon at the time. He held that a Member of Parliament should not have to incur one farthing of cost for undertaking a public duty. The expenses of an election ought, in his opinion, to be borne as a public charge, either by the State or by the locality. Mill also contended that the M.P. should not be expected to give any of his time or labour to the local interests. He declared that he himself had no desire to enter Parliament. He thought he could do more as a writer in the way of propagating his opinions. He declined to conduct a personal canvass of the constituency. Mill thus set at defiance all the accepted notions of right electioneering. A well-known literary man, he relates, was heard to say that the Almighty Himself would have no chance of being elected on such a programme. Yet Mill was returned by a majority of some hundreds over his “Conservative competitor,” as he calls his opponent. And all his expenses were paid by the constituency. It was impossible in the state of Party feeling even then existing that so independent a Member as Mill could be allowed to remain very long in Parliament. So Mill was thrown out at the General Election of 1868. “That I should not have been elected at all would not have required any explanation,” he writes in his Autobiography. “What excites curiosity is that I should have been elected the first time, or, having been elected then, should have been defeated afterwards.” The explanation was that his writings gave as much confidence to Conservatives as they did to the Liberals that he would be a supporter of their cause. The reason he was rejected was that in Parliament he pleased neither the one nor the other.

Macaulay, like Mill, was opposed to canvassing. He declared that an elector who surrendered his vote to supplication, or to the caresses of his baby, forgot his duty as much as if he sold it for a banknote. In his contest for the representation of Leeds, in 1832, he refrained from asking a single elector personally for his vote. He wrote:

The suffrage of an elector ought not to be asked or to be given as a personal favour. It is as much for the interest of the constituents to choose well, as it can be for the interest of the candidate to be chosen. To request an honest man to vote against his conscience is an insult. The practice of canvassing is quite reasonable under a system in which men are sent to Parliament to serve themselves. It is the height of absurdity under a system in which men are sent to Parliament to serve the public.

Gladstone, on the other hand, nor only recognized that canvassing was essential to successful electioneering, but also positively enjoyed it. He, too, was a candidate in that General Election which followed the passing of the great Reform Bill of 1832. He once said, towards the end of his long life, that in all the stirring and momentous political scenes in which he had been an actor—fighting for a seat in the House of Commons, making Cabinets, taking part in historic decisions on peace and war—there was nothing to compare for excitement with his first contest for Newark in 1832, out of which he came victorious. There were 2,000 houses in the borough. It was then the custom for the candidates in all elections personally to visit every house, whether occupied by a voter or not, to solicit the elector for his vote and the non-elector for his or her influence. Gladstone went five times to every house in Newark, thus making 10,000 calls in all. In the twentieth century most candidates are disposed to dispense with canvassing altogether. It must be repugnant to sensitive souls, or to those with a quick response to the ridiculous, to have to go from house to house following the traditionally seductive ways of the aspirant to a seat in the House of Commons. Perhaps the prettiest compliments that have ever been paid, outside those of the lover to his mistress, have been paid by candidates canvassing electors. Kissing even played a leading part in the art in the gallant days of old. The custom had its drawbacks. Did not the eloquent auctioneer who offered for sale the notorious borough of Gatton, in Surrey, with its estate and mansion as well as the power of electing two M.P.’s, set out, among its advantages: “No claims of insolent electors to evade; no impossible promises to make; no tinkers’ wives to kiss”! So kissing by candidates has fallen into disfavour, and the most candidates are expected to do is to pinch the cheeks of babies or chuck them under the chin, in the hope of inducing the parents to recognize the merits of the Unionist or Liberal or Labour cause. Perhaps canvassing ought to be included in the practices which are declared by statute to be illegal at elections. But its effect on the issue of the contest, especially in constituencies where the Parties are rather evenly divided, is sometimes decisive. The feeling of many electors is that in their votes they possess a favour to bestow. They like to be asked for it, and the candidate who comes to their houses, hat in hand, soliciting their support, usually gets it, at least from the non-party electors or the “wobblers.”

In days gone by, even candidates with the highest sense of virtue and honour, public and private, had to woo the electors by a lavish expenditure of money. Lord Cochrane stood as a Whig for Honiton at a by-election in the spring of 1806 against Augustus Cavendish Bradshaw, who sought “a renewal of the confidence of the constituency” on accepting a place in the Tory Government. Bradshaw had paid five guineas a vote at the former election, and on this occasion expected to get returned unopposed at the reduced rate of two guineas; but on the appearance of Cochrane in the field he was compelled to raise his bounty to the old figure. “You need not ask me, my lord, who I vote for,” said a burgess to Cochrane; “I always vote for Mister Most.” The gallant seaman, however, refused to bribe at all, and got well beaten in consequence. How he turned his defeat to account makes an amusing story. After the election he sent the bellman round the town, directing those who had voted for him to go to his agent, Mr. Townsend, and receive ten guineas. The novelty of a defeated candidate paying double the current price of a vote—or, indeed, paying anything at all—made a great sensation. Cochrane states in his Autobiography of a Seaman that his agent assured him he could have secured his return for less money. As the popular voice was in his favour a trifling judicious expenditure would have turned the scale. “I told Mr. Townsend,” he writes, “that such payment would have been bribery, which would not have accorded with my character as a reformer of abuses—a declaration which seemed highly to amuse him. Notwithstanding the explanation that the ten guineas was paid as a reward for having withstood the influence of bribery, the impression produced on the electoral mind by such unlooked-for liberality was simply this—that if I gave ten guineas for being beaten, my opponent had not paid half enough for being elected: a conclusion which, by a similar process of reasoning, was magnified into the conviction that each of his voters had been cheated out of five pounds five.” In the October following there was a General Election. Cochrane was again a candidate for Honiton, and, although he had said nothing about paying for his votes, was returned at the head of the poll. The burgesses were convinced that on this occasion he was “Mister Most.” Surely it was impossible to conceive any limits to the bounty of a successful candidate who in defeat was so generous as voluntarily to pay ten guineas a vote! They got—not a penny! Cochrane told them that bribery was against his principles. What the trustful electors said about their representative would not bear repetition here. But there was another dissolution a few months afterwards, and Cochrane did not dare to face outraged Honiton.

3

It was not often, however, that burgesses were outwitted by a candidate. A story that is told of the Irish borough of Cashel shows how the voters usually scored. The electors, locally known as “Commoners,” fourteen in number, were notoriously corrupt, and always sold their votes to the highest bidder. It was for this constituency, by the way, that that very prim and straight-laced man, Sir Robert Peel, was first returned to Parliament in 1809. The usual price of a vote in Cashel was £20. The popular candidate at one election, anxious to win the seat honestly and not to spend a penny in corruption, got the parish priest to preach a sermon at Mass, on the Sunday before the polling, against the immorality of trafficking in the franchise. The good man, indeed, went so far in the course of his impressive sermon as to declare that those who betrayed a public trust by selling their votes would go to hell. Next day the candidate met one of the electors and asked what was the effect of Sunday’s sermon. “Your honour,” said he, “votes have risen. We always got £20 for a vote before we knew it was a sin to sell it; but as his reverence tells us that we will be damned for selling our votes, we can’t for the future afford to take less than £40.” The borough was ultimately disfranchised for corruption.

Bribery did not always mean the direct purchase of votes for money down. Many whimsical dodges were adopted to influence voters without running any great risk from the law. Cheap articles were bought from the voters at fancy prices, or a valuable commodity was sold to them at a fraction of its value. At an election at Sudbury in 1826 a candidate purchased from a greengrocer two cabbages for £10 and a plate of gooseberries for £25. He paid the butcher, the grocer, the baker, the tailor, the printer, the billsticker, at equally extravagant rates. At Great Marlow an elector got a sow and a litter of nine for a penny. Candidates also suddenly developed hobbies for buying birds, animals, and articles of various kinds which caught their eye during the house-to-house canvass. Some were enthusiastic collectors of old almanacs; others were passionately fond of children’s white mice. “Name your price,” said the candidate. “Is a pound too much?” replied the voter. “Nonsense, man,” said the candidate; “here are two guineas.” Rivers of beer were also set flowing in the constituencies. The experience of the Earl of Shaftesbury (the philanthropist and friend of the working classes) was common. As Lord Ashley he contested Dorset in the anti-Reform interest at the General Election of 1831, which followed the rejection of the first Reform Bill, and was defeated. His expenses amounted to £15,600, of which £12,525 was paid to the owners of inns and public-houses for refreshments—“free drinks” to the people. In those days some of the most respectable as well as renowned of parliamentarians got their chance by means of a judicious distribution of five-pound notes among the electors.

When bribery was thus avowed and flagrant, no limit could be placed to the possible cost of a seat in the House of Commons. Success was won, or defeat sustained, in many an election at the price of bankruptcy and ruin. The most expensive contest in the annals of electioneering was the fight in 1807 for the representation of Yorkshire. The candidates were Lord Milton, son of Earl Fitzwilliam (Whig); the Hon. Henry Lascelles, son of Lord Harewood (Tory); and William Wilberforce, the famous advocate of the abolition of slavery (Independent). The poll was taken in the Castle yard at York in thirteen booths, which, in accordance with the existing law, were kept open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. for fifteen days. Wilberforce and Milton were returned. The total number of electors polled was 23,007, and the three candidates spent between them £300,000, or about £13 for each vote polled. Wilberforce’s bill ran into £58,000, which had to be defrayed by public subscription. A good deal of this money went into the pockets of the electors. Therefore it is hardly surprising to read in the debates on the Reform Bill of 1832 the contention advanced that a seat in the House was private property, that the possession of a vote was a source of income, and consequently that to take one or the other from a man without compensation, by the abolition of small boroughs and fancy franchises, was as much robbery as to deprive a fundholder of his dividends, or a landlord of his rents.

4

All this but emphasizes the purity of the wooing of the electors to-day. The various stringent Acts against bribery and corruption carried in the latter half of the nineteenth century have not been passed in vain. In 1854 bribery was made a criminal offence by the Corrupt Practices Prevention Act. Election petitions by defeated candidates claiming seats on the ground that there had been corrupt practices were formerly tried by committees of the House of Commons. Often the decisions were partisan, and directly in the teeth of the evidence. Yet the House of Commons for centuries so jealously guarded its own jurisdiction over all matters relating to the election of its members that it rejected proposals of a judicial tribunal. At length in 1868 the Parliamentary Elections Act was passed, and since then two Judges of the King’s Bench Division try petitions, and report the result to the Speaker. After the General Election of 1880 there were no fewer than ninety-five petitions impugning returns on various grounds, including bribery, intimidation, personation of dead or absent voters, and most of them were sustained. After the General Election of 1885 there was not a single petition. Between these electoral contests a statute was passed—the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of 1883—which has done much to make parliamentary elections pure. Its main purpose was the fixing of a maximum scale of electioneering expenditure, varying in amount according to the character and extent of the constituency, and each candidate was required to make a statement of his expenses to the returning officer within thirty-five days after the contest. The expenditure of an election—other than the personal expenses of the candidate and the returning officers’ charges—was limited by this Act in England and Scotland to £350 for the first 2,000 electors in boroughs, and £650 for the first 2,000 electors in counties, with accretions of £30 in the case of boroughs, and £60 in the case of counties, for every additional 1,000 electors. The personal expenses of a candidate were confined to £100. The General Election of 1880—the last election in which expenditure within the law was practically unlimited, and, as the disclosures in the hearing of the petitions showed, was most excessive—cost the candidates over £2,000,000, or about 15s. for each vote polled. The General Election of 1885, the first held under the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883, cost only £1,026,646, or 4s. 5d. per vote. The tendency of the expenditure is still downwards. Under the Representation of the People Act, 1918, the expenses of a candidate must not exceed an amount equal to 7d. for each elector on the register, in the case of counties, and 5d. in the case of boroughs, exclusive of personal expenses. The fee paid to the election agent must not exceed £75 in counties and £50 in boroughs.

Still, the question is sometimes asked in all seriousness: Is electioneering really any purer now than it was in the days before the first Reform Act? It is admitted that seats in the House of Commons are no longer openly purchased, that individual voters are no longer directly bribed. But it is said that the old blunt and barefaced forms of corruption have simply given place to newer and subtler methods of bribery, which are just as dishonourable to those who give and those who take. A candidate does not now buy a constituency; he “nurses” it. In other words, he tries to secure the good will and support of the electors by subscriptions and donations for various local objects. Against this practice, with its many by-ways of expenditure, there is no law. The objects for which money is thus spent divide themselves into two classes—religion and philanthropy, sport and amusements. Is a peal of bells required for the parish church? Does the chapel aspire to a steeple? Is a billiard-table wanted by the young men’s society? Are coal and blankets needed by the poor during the winter? The open-handed candidate is only waiting for a hint in order to supply the necessary cheque. Then there are football and cricket clubs to which the candidate is expected to give financial assistance. And give it he does gladly, for, as he says, it is the duty of public men to encourage national sports and pastimes. If the stories one hears be true, it would seem, indeed, as if the old tradition that a vote is a saleable commodity, and that parliamentary elections are held, not so much that the country may be governed in accordance with the wishes of the people as that the constituency may profit financially in one way or another by the return of a representative, still to some extent survives. It is even said that impudent individual demands are made on the purse of the candidate. They range from five shillings for getting a voter’s clothes or tools out of pawn to a five-pound note for sending an invalid supporter to the seaside.

But these attempts to blackmail the candidate are, when all is said and done, exceedingly rare. According as the franchise has been broadened, as the property qualification for the vote has been reduced, the purer have elections become. This is due to some extent partly to the fear of the law against corrupt and illegal practices, and partly to the size of the constituencies, which are now so large that the purchase of a sufficient number of votes to decide the issue is beyond the capacity of most purses. But I think it is more due to the sturdy pride and self-respect of the new electors, the working classes generally, as well as their sense of public duty, which have put an end to the old petitional extension of hands for doles in return for votes. Happily, there is no gainsaying the seriousness and responsibility with which, on the whole, the franchise is now exercised. Taking them all in all, the voters go to the polling booths animated by a fine public spirit—respect for the Constitution, devotion to the State—which it is not too much to say is aroused and kept purely aflame by their different political convictions, anti without a thought of individual gain.

Moreover, Party organization makes a representative largely independent, not only of the local whims and caprices of his constituency, but of any section of the electors who may look for favours in return for their support. The representative may occasionally be hard pressed by local interests, but as a rule these are regarded as subsidiary to Party considerations, to the supreme purpose of each Party to obtain control of the machinery of Government. Therefore the secret of success in the wooing of the electors to-day is not the distribution of blankets or billiard-tables. It might perhaps be said that it is not even wit, wisdom and eloquence in the candidate—though, of course, these possessions greatly count—much less complete independence of Party in public affairs. It is adherence to one Party ticket or the other; it is agreement with the Party opinions of the majority of the constituency. The victorious candidate does not always owe his election to his personal success in turning the majority of the voters round to his side. As a rule, his election means simply that he has had the good fortune to present himself to a constituency which, in the main, was already in agreement with his political opinions. And instead of five-pound notes, he is expected to distribute only Party promises and pledges.

CHAPTER III
A NEW PARLIAMENT IN THE MAKING

1

“Register, register, register!” Such was the emphasized advice which Sir Robert Peel gave to his Tory followers so long ago as 1837. At that time Party organization as we now understand it was unknown, and each elector had to see for himself that he got on the register. The motto of all political Parties in these days of thorough organization is more than ever, “Register, register, register!” For when the General Election comes the fate of Parties is decided beforehand by the extent to which their respective adherents have got on the register of voters. The Party complexion of the successful candidate in any constituency is always a reflection of the predominant political colour of the register of voters.

The preparation of the register of voters, which was first provided for by the Reform Act of 1832, is the duty of the local authorities, and is discharged, under the Representation of the People Act, 1918, at the public expense, one-half being paid out of the local rates and the other out of the National Exchequer. The registration officers are the town clerk in borough divisions, and the clerk of the county council in county divisions. The qualifications for a vote are, for men, twenty-one years of age and six months’ residence as a householder or lodger, or occupation of business premises; and for women, thirty years of age, possessing herself the local government franchise by reason of six months’ ownership or tenancy of land or premises in her own right, or being the wife of a local government elector. Voters’ lists are first compiled by the registration officers from the rate-books, supplemented by a house-to-house inquiry to get the names of householders whose rates are paid through the landlord and of persons qualified as wives or lodgers. Printed copies of these provisional or draft lists are exhibited for public reference in the town or county halls, post offices, public libraries, and at the doors of churches and chapels in each constituency. This is done to afford all concerned an opportunity of seeing whether they are on the lists, and, if necessary, of giving notice to the returning officer of claims to make corrections or additions.

It is curious what little attention is given to these huge and unwieldy bundles of printed matter. Few voters are moved to examine them. Small boys take a real interest in them, and that is usually of an impish and destructive kind. Otherwise the lists are too often left neglected. The average man apparently never troubles himself about his vote until a contest arises in his constituency or the General Election approaches. There seems to be in his mind the supposition that it is the duty of some person or some body—he frequently knows not who or what—to see that he shall be in the position to vote when the time comes for the exercise of this privilege of his citizenship. And in a sense the average man is right. There is a person keenly anxious that he should get the vote to which he is entitled—the local agent of the Conservative, Liberal, or Labour Party.

To this most important branch of political work the central offices of the great political organizations give the closest attention. At one time large sums of money were spent in registration, provided partly from the funds of the central offices, and partly by the sitting Members, to maintain their interest, as it was called, or by prospective candidates of other politics who were “nursing” constituencies. No sooner did a stranger come to reside in a constituency—especially where Parties are somewhat evenly balanced, and where, in consequence, the rival Party organizations were highly active—than he was waited upon by the Party canvassers to ascertain his political opinions. The local organization of the Party to which he gave adhesion saw that his name duly appeared on the register of voters. That is so to some extent yet, though it is not carried to the same degree of Party competition as formerly. The Representation of the People Act, 1918, lifted registration above being a mere wrangle between rival political agents over the body of the claimant to a vote, by establishing the principle that it was the business of the State to see that every qualified person was put on the register of voters, despite the disfranchising activity of the Party agents and the ignorance or apathy of the individual citizen. Each Party now confines its operations to seeing that qualified voters of its own political colour are put on the register and kept there. And it must be said that as the result of their competing watchfulness a register as complete and accurate as possible is usually obtained.

The Representation of the People Act, 1918, also reformed the procedure of the courts for correcting and amending the voters’ lists and passing them finally as the register of voters. Formerly these courts were presided over by revising barristers who were lawyers of not less than seven years’ standing appointed by the senior Judge of the summer assizes for the constituencies within his circuit, and were paid 200 guineas each for deciding claims and objections. The political Parties used to be represented in the revision courts by their agents, who left nothing undone to put on the register as many as possible of their own supporters, and to put off as many as possible of their opponents. Since 1918 the revision of the lists has been done by the town clerks, or the clerks of the county councils, as registration officers. I saw some of the reformed revision courts at work in London for the first time in 1918. The procedure was quite simple. The town clerk sat at the head of the table with the voters’ lists before him, and the overseer by his side to help him in his duties. At the table also were the agents of the local Party organizations. The lists were gone through. Errors in the spelling of names or the numbering of residences were corrected; duplicate entries were struck out. It was all done smoothly and rapidly. There was none of the old contention between the Party agents for the insertion of this name or the omission of that which I frequently had to listen to in the old revision courts. Claims were numerous, and the disposition was to allow them. On the other hand, the objections were few, and were mostly formal. When the full register of voters for each division is printed a copy is to be seen and consulted at the office of the registration officer of the division—the town hall or the county council hall. The part of the register relating to each unit of the division, ward, or district is hung in local post offices, the public libraries and church porches.

2

Everything is now in readiness for the dissolution of Parliament. The two Houses of Lords and Commons are dissolved by Royal Proclamation issued by the King “by and with the advice of Our Privy Council” (which means the Ministers) and under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom. In order to keep the existence of Parliament as nearly continuous as possible, a new Parliament is summoned at the same moment that the old is dissolved. Hence in the Royal Proclamation the Sovereign declares his desire to meet as soon as may be his people, and to have their advice in Parliament, and accordingly requires the Lord Chancellors of Great Britain and Ireland to issue forthwith the writs for causing the Lords spiritual and temporal and Commons who are to serve in the said Parliament to be duly returned and give their attendance. Thereupon the machinery of a General Election is put into motion by the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery (an officer of the Crown in attendance upon the Lord Chancellor in Parliament, with offices in the precincts of the House of Lords), and does not cease working until the two Houses are again constituted and in session.

Various kinds of writs are issued from the Crown Office. There are the writs of summons to attend in Parliament, which are sent to the temporal and spiritual peers. There are three classes of peerages which carry an hereditary right to a seat in the House of Lords—peerages of England created before 1707; peerages of Great Britain, created between the Union with Scotland in 1707 and the Union with Ireland in 1801; and peerages of the United Kingdom created since 1801. The twenty-six Bishops who hold peerages by right of office and the twenty-eight Irish representative peers who are elected for life by the peerage of Ireland also receive writs, but sixteen Scottish representative peers elected for each Parliament by the peerage of Scotland assembled at Holyrood House, Edinburgh, do not. However, the writs with which we are now more particularly concerned are those for the election of the Commons of Great Britain. They are sent by the Clerk of the Crown to the returning officers of the constituencies—in county areas the sheriffs, in urban areas the mayor or chairman of the borough council—commanding them, in the name of the King, to “cause election to be made according to law” of Members to serve in the new Parliament; and “to cause the names of such Members, when so elected, whether they be present or absent, to be certified to us in Our Chancery without delay.” The writs for a General Election are, in fact, always prepared in the Crown Office and ready to be issued in case there might be any sudden dissolution of Parliament before it has run its prescribed term of five years. They are printed on parchment in imitation copper-plate handwriting, with blanks for names and dates to be filled in by a penman, and are oblong in shape, about 15 inches across by 12 inches in length.

Years ago the transmission of the writs was a dignified and onerous and also a profitable duty. Messengers of the Great Seal, as they were called, were despatched through the country post-haste with the writs for personal delivery to the returning officers, and they collected five guineas for a writ for a borough and ten guineas for a writ for a city or a county. Under this system grave irregularities prevailed. Candidates schemed to get early possession of the writs in order to forestall, by hastening the election, any threatened opposition; and the Messengers of the Great Seal, it was said, were disposed to give a writ to the candidate who would pay most for it. But an Act passed in 1813 provided for the conveyance and delivery of the writs through the prosaic but purer agency of the Post Office. Precautions are taken to avoid any chance of their going astray. They are placed in envelopes of strong cartridge paper with a lining of glazed calico, each addressed to the respective returning officer, and are conveyed to the General Post Office, London, by one of the clerks of the Crown Office, designated for this occasion, “Messenger of the Great Seal,” who receives from an official appointed by the Postmaster-General a written acknowledgment of the delivery of his precious charge. The writs are then despatched through the first available post as registered letters. With each there is sent an injunction to the postmaster of the place where the returning officer resides to have the writ safely and speedily delivered, and to get a receipt from the returning officer. This receipt the local postmaster transmits to the Postmaster-General, who in turn has the particulars entered in a book which is available for inspection by any person interested. In what is known as the London Metropolitan area, extending into four counties—Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Essex—personal service of the writs to the returning officers of the divisions by the Messenger of the Great Seal is still in vogue, the messenger travelling in a motor-car instead of on horseback, and demanding no fees for his services.

Nomination day is the same in all constituencies, as provided by the Representation of the People Act, 1918. On the day appointed, the eighth day after the date of the Royal Proclamation, the returning officer attends at the municipal buildings, or the courthouse, within certain fixed hours—usually from 10 a.m. till noon—to receive nominations of candidates. The nomination paper sets out the name, abode, profession or calling of the candidate, and the names and addresses of two registered electors, who propose and second him, and of eight other assenting burgesses. Each candidate provides himself with several nomination papers, filled up by electors from various classes or sections of the constituency, with a view to show the representative character of his supporters, and also to secure himself from the risk of the nomination being declared null and void by the returning officer owing to some irregularity in the original nomination paper. The Ballot Act requires that the nomination paper must be handed in to the returning officer by the candidate personally, or by his proposer or seconder. At one election the nomination paper was given in by the agent of the candidate, and this was held to be fatal to the nomination. It was a small technical point, and since then it has come to be understood generally by agents of all Parties that no advantage is to be taken of such slips or oversights.

3

Membership of the House of Commons is remarkably free and unrestricted. Under the American Constitution it is necessary for a Member of Congress—whether he sits in the House of Representatives or in the Senate—to reside in the state by which he is returned. There is no such rule in the case of Members of Parliament. It was provided by a statute of Henry V that “knights of the shires and citizens and burgesses should be dwelling and resident” within the constituencies they represented. But this residential qualification had been evaded or fallen into disuse long before 1620, when a committee of the House of Commons recommended its abolition. It was not formally repealed, however, until 1774. The Act (14 Geo. III, C. 58) declared that the laws as to residence, passed in the fifteenth century, “have been found by long usage to be unnecessary and have become obsolete”; and in order to “obviate all doubt that may arise upon the same” it was ordered that the statute book should be cleared of all enactments relating “to the residence of persons to be elected to serve in Parliament.”

In view of the common interests of the country and its complete coherence in social and economic life, it would be idle to limit the electors in their choice of representatives to local residents. Moreover, such a restriction would tend to the exclusion from Parliament of able and distinguished men whose reputation is national rather than local. But one regrettable result of this freedom of selection is that the varying idiosyncrasies of the different parts of the country are no longer reflected, distinctly and sharply, in the House of Commons. The representatives are not, in many cases, racy of the soil of their constituencies. Each of them is not permeated with the spirit of the place for which he sits—thinking its local thought, speaking its dialect, having its accent on his tongue. A man with an Irish brogue may sit for a London constituency. A South of England man may represent the northernmost constituency in Scotland. This typical Yorkshireman finds a seat in the West of England; that unmistakable Devon man speaks for a place in Lancashire. The manufacturer is returned by an agricultural county; the country squire by an industrial borough. It is true that in the main the representatives of Wales and Scotland are essentially Welsh and Scottish, though less so with respect to Scotland than with respect to the other Celtic fringe. The English membership, which constitutes the vast bulk of the House, is also strong in English characteristics; but the views, feelings and interests of a particular locality are seldom expressed in its voice and with its manner by its representative. Though a local man is still supposed to be, more or less, a strong candidate, in truth local representation in Parliament is fast losing its local character and ceasing to have any local purpose at all under the operation of the Caucus, or the system of rigidly organized political Parties. Members of Parliament are no longer chosen specially to safeguard the local interests of their constituencies. Their chief purpose is to have the country governed and administered by the light of their political principles. This Member is said to sit for Hodgeshire, that other for Cottonopolis. What they really represent, generally speaking, is the Conservative Central Office, or the Liberal Central Office, or the Labour Executive. But while membership of the House of Commons is now thoroughly political, it is, for that very reason, also thoroughly national. “Every Member, though chosen by one particular district, when elected and returned serves for the whole Realm.” So wrote Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, about the middle of the eighteenth century. It was, then, perhaps, but a pious aspiration. It is now undoubtedly an accomplished fact, at least in the sense that the representative serves for the whole Realm according to the political principles which he is returned to uphold.

The property qualifications which formerly made a seat in the House of Commons the privilege of the rich were abolished in 1858. At no time was it possible for any man but a man of substantial means to gain access to the House. But it was not till 1711, in the reign of Queen Anne, that an Act was passed providing that all Members—except the eldest sons of peers and the representatives of the Universities and of Scottish constituencies—must possess an income from land to the extent of £600 a year in the case of a knight of the shire, and of £300 a year in the case of a citizen of a city and a burgess of a borough—the three classes into which Members of the House of Commons were then divided. The enactment was designed to perpetuate the ascendancy in the House of Commons of the country or Tory Party, which they themselves feared was being threatened by the rich manufacturers and traders who were being returned by the cities and towns. Swift described it in the Examiner as “the greatest security that was ever contrived for preserving the Constitution, which otherwise might in a little time be wholly at the mercy of the monied interest.”

The law, however, was evaded frequently by fictitious conveyances of property. Any candidate could be required to make a declaration before the returning officer that he possessed the necessary amount of income from land on the application of his rival or of any two electors; and, in order to be ready for this emergency, should it arise, it was the custom for landless men to have transferred to them by relatives or friends on the eve of the election sufficient landed property to qualify, which they returned again to the donors as soon as the election was over. To put a stop to this practice an Act was passed in 1760, during the reign of George II, by which a Member, when he came to the Table of the House of Commons to take the oath of allegiance and sign the roll, had not only to swear that he possessed £600 a year or £300 a year from land—according as he was a knight of the shire or a citizen or burgess—but to provide the Clerk with a schedule setting out in detail the situation and extent of the qualifying property. Even so, membership of the House of Commons was not restricted to the genuine possessors of landed estate. Temporary transfers of property in land notoriously went on all the same. The only difference was that the transfer was now not for the election only but for the life of the Parliament. Landed relatives or friends were still accommodating. The rich but landless man could obtain from his bank a rent-charge on some of the landed property which it possessed in the way of business; and for the man with no great balance at his bankers there were attorneys ready to provide him with the qualification for a fee of 100 guineas. It was well known that those brilliant parliamentarians, Burke, Pitt, Fox and Sheridan, were thus fictitiously qualified one way or another.

But why should the property qualification be restricted to incomes from real estate? Why should not incomes from personal property also qualify? It was inevitable that these questions should be asked insistently and urgently with the increasing rise of wealthy merchants and manufacturers ambitious of taking part in public life. Nevertheless, it was not until 1838—six years after the great Reform Act, which really opened the doors of the House of Commons to the middle classes—that it was provided by a statute passed by the Whig Parliament that general property or professional incomes should also serve to qualify. In all other respects the law remained unchanged. The county Member had still to have an income of £600 a year, the borough Member had still to have an income of £300 a year, and both were still required to swear to their qualifications at the Table of the House and supply particulars to the Clerk.

Twenty years elapsed before the property test for the House of Commons was finally abolished. The year before—that is to say, in 1857—there was a painful parliamentary scandal in connection with the property qualification. The return of Edward Auchmuty Glover for Beverley was petitioned against, and as the result of the trial the election was declared void on the ground that he was not possessed of the qualifying income. Glover was, by order of the House, tried at the Old Bailey for having made a false declaration at the Table that he was qualified. The jury convicted, but recommended the prisoner to mercy, as this was the first prosecution for such an offence, and as it was notorious that declarations as to the possession of the property qualification were loosely made by Members of Parliament. A sentence of three-months’ imprisonment as a first-class misdemeanant was, however, imposed. In the following year Locke King—a private Member who cleared the statute book of many obsolete measures—introduced a Bill for the abolition of the property qualification, which, though it encountered considerable opposition in both Houses, went through; and since June, 1858, the penniless man, as well as the landless man, has been eligible for membership of the House of Commons.

From this arises a constitutional anomaly which appears strange indeed. A pauper without a penny in the world, homeless and voteless, may be elected a Member of Parliament, while only a man of property and position, to the extent at least of being a householder or a lodger of six months’ standing, and a payer of poor rate, directly or indirectly, is qualified to vote for a Member of Parliament. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, in a speech on the franchise laws which I heard him make in the House of Commons in 1895, gave a striking illustration of the absurdity to which the law in practice led. He said that his son, Austen Chamberlain, who gave him the pleasure of his society by residing with him, being neither a householder nor a lodger, was not entitled to the vote; and yet the law not only allowed his disfranchised son to sit in the House of Commons but to become a Member of the Government, he being at the time Civil Lord of the Admiralty. Mr. Austin Chamberlain was subsequently appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, the greatest and most responsible post in the Government next to that of the Prime Minister; and in the years he was the head of the Department controlling the raising and expenditure of the national taxation—being still unmarried and residing with his father—his name was not to be found on the burgess rolls of the Kingdom in respect of any rating qualification. I find that in the General Election of 1906 Mr. Austen Chamberlain voted in the City of London as a liveryman of the Cordwainers’ Company.

4

There are, however, certain disqualifications for Membership of the House of Commons. Aliens cannot compete for a seat. The candidate must either be a natural born British subject or a naturalized foreigner. Colonials and native Indians are, of course, eligible. But any British subject may not be nominated. The candidate must be of the age of twenty-one years. Yet the production of a birth certificate is not required by the returning officer. There are at least two notable instances of “infants” having sat in the House of Commons. Charles James Fox was returned for Midhurst before he was twenty, and Lord John Russell for Tavistock before he was twenty-one. Mental imbecility is a disqualification. It would, perhaps, be too much to say that the candidate is required to be of sound mind and understanding, but he must not obviously be a lunatic or idiot. If he should lose his senses after election his case is provided for by “An Act to amend the law in regard to the vacating of seats in the House of Commons,” which was passed in 1886. It enacts that if a Member is committed as a lunatic to any asylum it is the duty of the medical doctor who made the committal and the superintendent of the asylum to report the case without delay to the Speaker. The Speaker then directs the Commissioners of Lunacy to examine the Member, and if they report that the Member is of unsound mind six months are allowed to elapse, when they again examine and report, and if they still find the Member insane the two reports are laid on the Table of the House, and the seat thereby becomes vacant. Blindness is not a disqualification—not even for the Treasury Bench. There is the remarkable case of Mr. Henry Fawcett, who, in spite of this great physical disability, sat for Hackney, was Postmaster-General in the Gladstone Administration of 1880, and was the originator of the postal order, parcel post, and Post Office annuities. Are deaf and dumb persons disqualified by reason of their physical defects? They are said to be, but as there is no case in point, the matter is somewhat in doubt.

English peers and peers of Great Britain and the United Kingdom are ineligible for election to the House of Commons, being, of course, hereditary Members of the House of Lords. The second Lord Selborne sat as Lord Wolmer in the House of Commons for West Edinburgh, when, on the death of his father in 1895, he succeeded to the peerage. As he desired to remain in the House of Commons, he raised the point that a peer, as such, was not debarred from sitting in that House until he received his writ of summons to the other House as a Lord of Parliament, and declared his intention to be not to make the necessary application for such writ of summons. The House of Commons appointed a Select Committee to inquire into the matter, and on their report that Lord Wolmer had succeeded to a peerage of the United Kingdom the constituency of West Edinburgh was declared to be vacant, and a new writ was at once issued for the election of a Member for the seat. It is the succession to a peerage, and not the receipt of the writ of summons to the House of Lords, which is held to disqualify for membership of the House of Commons. Scottish peers are also precluded. Even those outside the sixteen representative peers of Scotland—elected by the general body of the Scottish peerage to sit for each Parliament in the House of Lords—are ineligible for election to the House of Commons. The Irish peerage is not under this political disability. By the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland an Irish peer—providing he is not one of the twenty-eight Irish representative peers elected by the general body of the Irish peerage to sit for life in the House of Lords—may be returned by any constituency in England or Scotland. But he is disqualified for an Irish seat. The most famous instance was that of Lord Palmerston, who was an Irish peer and sat in the House of Commons for an English constituency for close on sixty years.

Clergymen of the Church of England, of the Church of Scotland, and Roman Catholic priests are disqualified. The statutory exclusion of clergymen from the House of Commons dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until then the question was involved in doubt and uncertainty. It was first raised in a concrete form by the return of the famous Radical parson, Horne Tooke, in 1801 for the nomination borough of Old Sarum. He held no benefice in the Church, but as in law he was still a clerk in Holy Orders it was contended that he was ineligible. A Select Committee appointed to inquire into the precedents reported that they were not sufficiently clear to warrant the exclusion of Tooke; but though he was, accordingly, allowed to retain his seat, an Act was immediately passed which closed the doors of the House of Commons to clergymen of the Established Church and ministers of the Church of Scotland. Church of England parsons who, under the provisions of the Clerical Disabilities Act of 1870, divest themselves of their Orders become thereby eligible for election, and several ex-clergymen have sat in the House of Commons. Roman Catholic priests are expressly incapacitated by a clause of the Emancipation Act of 1829, which admitted Roman Catholic laymen to Parliament. The Act of 1801 does not apply to ministers of dissenting Churches, and they therefore are qualified to sit in the House of Commons.

Office of various kinds is a disqualification. Judges of the High Court and county court judges are ineligible. In the time of the Stuarts a resolution of the House of Commons precluded Judges of the High Court from sitting in Parliament. During the Commonwealth, when the House of Lords was abolished, Sir Matthew Hale and other distinguished Judges sat in the House of Commons. It was not until the passing of the Judicature Act, 1875, that Judges of the High Court came under a statutory disability to sit in the House of Commons. County court judges had already been precluded by an Act passed in 1847. A Recorder may sit in the House of Commons, but not for the city or borough in which he exercises his jurisdiction in criminal matters. The civil servants on the permanent staff of the various Departments of Government are debarred from sitting in the House of Commons. Yet commissioned officers of the Army and Navy are qualified. But Army officers become M.P.’s at the sacrifice of half their pay, though they remain on the active list. Government contractors for work to be done or goods to be supplied in the public service are ineligible. No returning officer may stand for the place where he is commanded by writ from the Crown Office to hold an election. A bankrupt is disqualified. He may be nominated, but if elected he cannot sit.

But though all property qualifications have been abolished, the aspirant for a seat in Parliament must have money in his purse, or raise it from some other source. The expenses of the returning officer for the provision of polling stations and the fee for his official services were formerly paid by the candidates. If there was no contest, the candidate on nomination paid £25. In the event of a contest the charges were considerably higher. They ran in boroughs from £100 up to £700, and in counties from £150 to £1,000, according to the number of electors on the register, and were apportioned equally between the candidates. As provided by the Representation of the People Act, 1918, the returning officer’s expenses are now paid by the Treasury. But each candidate must deposit with his nomination paper a sum of £150, which is returned to him if he wins as soon as he has taken the oath as a Member of Parliament, and even if he loses, provided he obtains more than one-eighth of the votes polled. In all other cases the deposit is, as the Act says, “forfeited to His Majesty,” save in University elections, where it is retained by the University. This provision was designed to discourage “freak” candidatures. It costs more to lose than to win an election.

5

Polling at a General Election is held on the one day. It is the ninth day after nomination day, as provided by the Representation of the People Act, 1918. Before the day of polling a group of men wait upon the returning officer of the constituency. They are usually rate-collectors or other officials of the local municipal bodies. Vested by the returning officer with his authority and responsibilities, they are to represent him in the polling booths. Each booth is in charge of a presiding officer, and he is allowed a poll clerk for every 500, or part of 500, electors on his section of the register of voters. The presiding officer and their clerks must not have been employed in any capacity by any of the candidates during a contest.

Each presiding officer and poll clerk signs a declaration in which he undertakes to maintain and to aid in maintaining the secrecy of the voting. They are also told that for any breach of faith in this respect they are liable to six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. More than that, another section of the Ballot Act is read by the returning officer which states that if they supply a ballot paper to any unauthorized person, or fraudulently put into the ballot box any paper but the official ballot paper, or destroy any ballot paper, or open, or in any way tamper with the ballot box, they are liable to imprisonment for any term not exceeding two years. “I hope none of you gentlemen will get it,” adds the returning officer, indulging in the time-honoured joke of the occasion.

The returning officer may use as a polling booth, free of charge, the rooms of any school which is in receipt of a parliamentary grant, or any building maintained out of the local rates. Failing these, he may hire any other place, with some important exceptions, such as an inn or beerhouse—unless by consent of all the candidates given in writing—or a church, chapel, or other place of public worship. The polling booth must be opened at eight o’clock in the morning on the day of the election. It is the duty of the presiding officer and his clerks to be there at least a quarter of an hour earlier. The ballot box—made of steel, enamelled in black, with a slot in the lid—is already in the booth. The presiding officer finds inside the box the ballot papers, also pencils, pens, blotting-paper, drawing pins, red tape and sealing-wax, and copies of the Old and New Testament for administering the oath should occasion for it arise. There are also copies of so much of the register of voters as applies to the district for which the polling booth is intended. He also finds in the box that which is guarded with the most jealous care—the official mark for the stamping of the ballot papers. The returning officer is bound to keep the form of this stamp absolutely secret until the morning of the poll. It must not be a stamp that has been used at elections for the same constituency during the preceding seven years. This official mark may consist of any device—a letter of the alphabet, a cross, or a circle—which can be stamped upon the ballot paper. No ballot paper without this identification is counted. Owing to these precautions it is absolutely impossible for ballot papers to be surreptitiously printed, marked in favour of one of the candidates, and slipped into the ballot box as genuine votes. Then the presiding officer shows the empty ballot box to those present in the station in an official capacity, so that they can testify that when the polling began there was nothing in it, and proceeds to lock it and seal it in such a manner that it cannot again be opened without breaking the seal. The slit of the ballot box must be so constructed that the voting papers dropped through it cannot be withdrawn.

All is now ready for the polling. In the booth are those only who are authorized to be present. Each candidate is represented by a polling agent to look after his interest. But the complete control of the booth lies in the presiding officer, and there are constables present to carry out his commands. He can have removed from the booth any person who misconducts himself or who disputes his lawful orders. He may in certain circumstances give a disorderly person into custody. But he must be careful that any action he may take does not prevent a person entitled to vote from voting.

At eight o’clock sharp the doors of the polling station are opened. Usually a number of electors are waiting outside, some to compete for the empty distinction of recording the first vote, and some anxious to discharge the task or duty before going about the day’s business. The official register sets forth the name, address, number, and qualification of every man and woman in the district entitled to vote. When the poll clerk is satisfied with the identity of the applicant, the white ballot paper is stamped with the official mark, back and front, and handed to the elector, and a short horizontal line or tick is drawn against his name on the register to show that he has voted. The ballot papers are made up like cheque-books, each paper having a counterfoil, and are numbered consecutively on the back. As the poll clerk gives a ballot paper to an elector he writes on the counterfoil the elector’s number on the register. Thus the vote of every elector can be traced should any circumstances arise to make this necessary.

The voter, provided with the ballot paper, retires to a compartment where, alone and aloof and screened from observation, he or she places his or her two pencil strokes, the simple “X,” and that only, in the space to the right of the name of the candidate by whom he or she wishes to be represented in Parliament. Then, folding up the ballot paper so as to conceal the mark, but leaving the official stamp exposed in order to satisfy the presiding officer or the poll clerk, by a cursory glance, that it is the genuine paper, the voter drops it into the ballot box through the slit in the lid, and with a pleasant sense of self-importance immediately quits the polling station.

But the polling does not always proceed with this easy and monotonous regularity. Not infrequently a boisterous elector enters to whom the solemnity of the booth or the secrecy of the ballot makes no appeal. “Your name and address, please,” says the poll clerk. “My name’s Ted Lillywhite, and no mistake, and I live at 70 Carpenter Street, and don’t you forget it,” answers the elector stiffly. He gets the ballot paper, and without any attempt at concealment makes a big sprawling cross opposite the name of Smith, and, as he drops the paper with a flourish into the ballot box, cries: “There! I’ve voted for Smith, good man and true, and I’d like all the world to know it.” Another man comes in only to find that despite the vigilance of the candidates’ polling agents—or, it may be, with the connivance of one or other of them—someone has already voted in his name. The man is asked on oath by the presiding officer if he is the person he claims to be, and if he swears that he is, a pink ballot paper officially known as a “tendered vote” is given him. The vote, however, is not put into the ballot box, but is given to the presiding officer, who places it in an envelope specially provided for the purpose. All particulars of the voter—name, number on the register, and any remarks the presiding officer may have to make—are entered on what is termed the tendered votes list, which is delivered at the close of the poll to the returning officer. There is also the clumsy voter who spoils his ballot paper. The presiding officer may, if it be proved to his satisfaction that the paper was inadvertently spoiled, cancel it and supply the voter with another. There is the elector who is blind, or has no hands, or is incapacitated by any physical cause from marking the ballot paper himself. There is the elector who declares his inability to read. There is also the elector who, being a Jew, is precluded by his religious belief from marking his vote himself should the polling be on a Saturday, which is his Sabbath. These are dealt with alike. The presiding officer, in the presence of the candidates’ agents, marks the ballot paper in accordance with the wishes of the voter and places it in the ballot box. The greatest problem of all that confronts the presiding officer is the recording of the vote of a deaf and dumb elector who can neither read nor write. A list of the votes so marked, and the reasons for so marking them, must be kept by the presiding officer and supplied to the returning officer. The presiding officer may also put questions to ascertain whether a person who asks for a ballot paper has already voted in other constituencies in which he is entitled to vote. A man may vote by reason of a residence qualification in one constituency and give one more vote in another constituency where he is registered for a business premises qualification, or as a University elector. A woman can vote in only one constituency where she is registered by virtue of her own or her husband’s local government qualification, but she can vote also at a University, if she is on its register.

The poll closes at eight or nine o’clock. Ballot papers cannot be given out after that time. But any voters who have received papers before the hour has struck may put their votes into the ballot box. The presiding officer, in the presence of the agents of the candidates, then stops up the slot of the ballot box and seals it, so as to prevent the insertion of any more voting papers. The ballot box, securely locked, bound in red tape and sealed, is then brought by the presiding officer to the place appointed for the counting of the votes, which is usually the town hall or county hall, and is delivered up to the returning officer, together with a statement in writing of the number of ballot papers supplied to the polling station, and accounting for them under the heads of “used,” “unused,” and “spoilt,” and also the counterfoils of the used ballot papers, the unused ballot papers, the marked copies of the register of voters, and the list of tendered votes, all of which had been carefully made up in separate parcels and sealed before leaving the polling station.

CHAPTER IV
THE COUNTRY’S VERDICT

1

How simple and decorous is a parliamentary election nowadays compared with the tumultuous polling when voting was open, before the Ballot Act of 1872! In remote times an election was decided by a show of hands at a public meeting of the electors. The right of a candidate to challenge the decision on a show of hands and demand a poll was established in the reign of James I. However, it continued to be the practice for the sheriff or returning officer on the day of nomination still to ask for a show of hands on behalf of each of the candidates, and to declare for the one in whose support the larger number of hands had been uplifted. But as the majority of the crowd were usually non-voters, the demand for a poll by the other candidate followed as a matter of course. Formerly the election might last for a month, and the voting stations might be kept open until late into the night. Early in the nineteenth century a limit of fifteen days was fixed for the polling. The Reform Act of 1832 further reduced the period to two days, and provided also that the voting should take place between the hours of nine and four o’clock, with the option of opening an hour earlier on the second day, if the candidates agreed.

But on the polling days—whether forty, fifteen, or two—disorder and violence were common throughout the country at the General Election. Indeed, one of the first acts of a candidate was to have organized a mob of bludgeon men to protect himself and his adherents during the campaign, and also, of course, to intimidate the supporters of his opponent. Between the rival mobs the constituency was kept in a state of excitement and uproar during the polling. The most trying part of the contest was the ordeal of the hustings. These were temporary platforms erected in the square, at the market cross, or in some other open place of the borough or chief county town, where the candidates were proposed and seconded. The speeches were usually little better than mere dumb show. Each of the rival politicians made determined but usually vain efforts to convince the shrieking mob, amid showers of stones, mud, rotten eggs and dead cats, of the sublime virtue of his opinions, or of the utter depravity of the views of his opponent. The sort of item that was common in a candidate’s election bill before the Ballot Act was this: “To the employment of 200 men to obtain a hearing, 460s.” These men believed that the best way “to obtain a hearing” for their employer was to prevent his rival being heard; and as the hired mob on the other side was likewise animated by the same conviction, both candidates were equally shouted down. There is, for instance, the evidence of Bernal Osborne, a famous wit and Member of the House of Commons. “The honourable gentleman talked about the voice of the electors,” he said in a debate on old open-voting ways. “As if the individual voice of an elector was ever heard at a nomination, and as if there was not a general agreement to roar, to hiss, and become debased with drink! The true-born Englishman is said to delight in that day. Now, who are the true-born Englishmen?” he asked; and answered, “Why, the representatives of muscular Christianity—prize-fighters and people of that sort. I have spent as much money in retaining the services of those gentlemen as anybody in this House. One of my most efficient supporters in Nottingham was a man who was always clothed as a clergyman of the Church of England, but who was really an ex-champion of England, Bendigo by name.”

As an illustration of the treatment a candidate had to expect at the hustings, and of the style of speaking which was thought appropriate to the occasion, listen to Disraeli addressing the Buckinghamshire electors at Aylesbury. Received with a cry of “You look rather white,” he thus retorted: “I can tell you that it is at least not the white feather I show. [Laughter and cheers, mixed with howling.] If any member of the melodious company of owls [loud laughter] wishes to address you after me, I hope that you will give him a fair hearing. [Interruption.] I can tell the honourable gentleman who makes this interruption that if it were possible for him to express the slightest common sense in decent language, I should be ready to hear him. In the meantime I must say, from the symptoms of intelligence which he has presented to us to-day, I hope he is not one whom I number amongst my supporters.” (Cheers and laughter.) Disraeli, still directing his attention to his opponents, further said: “Your most brilliant argument is a groan, and your happiest repartee a hiss.” A voice then exclaimed: “Speak quick, speak quick!” for he was a slow speaker, and he retorted: “It is very easy for you to speak quick, when you only utter a stupid monosyllable; but when I speak I must measure my words. [Loud cheers and laughter]. I have to open your great thick head. [Laughter]. What I speak is to enlighten you. If I bawl like you, you will leave this place as ignorant as you entered it.” (Cheers and laughter.)

Another picture of a scene at the hustings which I call up from my reading on the subject is of a painful kind. It was in the year 1865, when there was a contest for Westminster, and from the hustings erected in Covent Garden, at the base of St. Paul’s Church, John Stuart Mill, the Radical candidate, addressed the crowd. In his pamphlet, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, Mill bluntly said that the working classes, though ashamed of lying, were yet generally liars. This statement was printed on a placard by Mill’s opponent and aroused against Mill the animosity of the working men of the division. At one meeting he was asked whether he had really written such a thing. He at once answered, “I did,” and scarcely were the words out of his mouth when, as he states in his Autobiography, vehement applause burst forth. The working men present were, according to Mill, so used to equivocation and evasion, that this direct avowal took their fancy, and instead of being affronted, they concluded at once that Mill was a person whom they could trust. But Mill does not mention the hostile reception he got when he appeared on the hustings. Before the speaking commenced a member of the crowd asked an enthusiastic supporter of Mill which of the gentlemen on the hustings was the candidate. “There,” exclaimed the admirer, as he pointed at the author of the treatise On Liberty, “there is the great man.” “Then,” said the other, taking a dead cat from under his coat and flinging it at Mill, “let him take that.” When Mill afterwards spoke he was pelted by the porters of Covent Garden with the garbage of the market.

The mob influence exercised at elections—often the determining influence—might be intimidatory, but it was not always venal. These unsavoury arguments, dead cats and rotten apples, were at times the expression of sincere political convictions on the part of people without votes. As it was only by the use of violence in some form or another that non-voters could have weight in public affairs, the Chartists were opposed to the introduction of secret voting so long as the franchise was restricted to the comparatively few. They admitted that the ballot would be an excellent thing if universal suffrage were established under it. Until then they avowed their determination to see to it that the unfranchised part of public opinion should not be deprived of the chance of influencing the electors, under a system of open voting, by the methods of blacking eyes and smashing windows.

2

To convince Parliament of the beneficence of secret voting at elections took forty years of unremitting advocacy, though meanwhile the franchise had been enlarged. Grote, the historian of Greece, who sat as a Radical for the City of London from 1832 to 1841, annually moved a resolution in favour of the ballot. It was always rejected. On the retirement of Grote into private life in 1841 Henry Berkeley continued to move the motion every year, with the same want of success until 1851, when, despite the opposition of the then Whig Government, headed by Lord John Russell, he carried it by a majority of thirty-seven. Nevertheless, twenty-one years were yet to elapse before the ballot was finally established by Act of Parliament. A Select Committee of the House of Commons, which sat in 1868 to inquire into corrupt practices at elections, reported in favour of the ballot as a measure likely to conduce to the tranquillity, purity, and freedom of contests. The undue influence which was exercised in various forms at open elections is strikingly set forth in the evidence taken by that committee. Its most common shape was the direct physical terrorism exercised by hired mobs. There was also the more subtle intimidation of tenants by landlords, of workmen by employers, of servants by masters, of tradesmen and shop-keepers by customers, and, more reprehensible still, the undue spiritual influence of ministers of religion, who, in the guidance of their flocks as to the way they should vote, did not scruple to invoke the terrors of the world to come.

The report of the Select Committee, which appeared in 1869, greatly helped to turn public opinion in favour of the ballot. In the following year W. E. Forster, a Member of the then Liberal Government, with Gladstone as Prime Minister, introduced a Bill abolishing nominations at the hustings and introducing vote by ballot. It passed through the House of Commons, only to be rejected by the House of Lords by 97 votes to 48, on the motion of the Earl of Shaftesbury. The arguments against the measure had been set forth long before by John Stuart Mill, one of the ablest and most distinguished opponents of secret voting. As the franchise was a public trust, confided to a limited number of the community, the general public, for whose benefit it was exercised, were entitled to see how it was used, openly and in the light of day. The ballot, therefore, meant power without responsibility. It was also cowardly and skulking. Under its shelter the elector was likely to fall into the temptation of casting a mean and dishonest vote for his own benefit as an individual, or for that of the class to which he belonged. The Bill was reintroduced in the following session of 1872. It passed again through the Commons, was sent up to the Lords, and, despite the renewed opposition of Lord Shaftesbury, was carried to the Statute Book. Since then the elector has been free to vote as he pleased, according to the dictates of his conscience, his political convictions, his foolish whims and his wayward fancies without anyone knowing a bit about it. The Ballot Act was not, however, made the permanent law of the land. In the House of Lords an amendment limiting the operation of the Bill to eight years was accepted by the Government. Therefore, from 1880 the Ballot Act had to be renewed every year by being included in the Expiring Laws Continuance Act—otherwise the measure would have had to be reintroduced and carried through all its stages in both Houses—until 1918, when a clause of the Representation of the People Act transformed it from an annual into a permanent statute. Yet there is one election to which the Ballot Act does not apply—an election for the representation of a University. During the time allowed for the polling—about five days—electors can vote either personally or by proxy papers, which, having been signed before a justice of the peace, are sent by post to the University, and in either case the votes are openly declared before the presiding officer.

In the Life of Grote there is recorded an interesting conversation between him and his wife on the subject of secret voting after the Ballot Act had been passed. “You will feel great satisfaction at seeing your once favourite measure triumph over all obstacles,” said Mrs. Grote to her husband one morning at breakfast. “Since the wide expansion of the voting element, I confess that the value of the ballot has sunk in my estimation,” the historian replied. “I don’t, in fact, think the electors will be affected by it one way or another, so far as Party interests are concerned.” “Still,” said the wife, “you will at all events get at the genuine preference of the constituency.” “No doubt,” said Grote; “but then, again, I have come to perceive that the choice between one man and another among the English people signifies less than I used formerly to think it did. The English mind is much of one pattern, take whatsoever class you will. The same favourite prejudices, amiable and otherwise; the same antipathies, coupled with ill-regulated though benevolent efforts to eradicate human evils, are wellnigh universal. A House of Commons cannot afford to be above its own constituents in intelligence, knowledge, or patriotism.” But this must be said—thanks to the ballot, all parties are united in eliminating from the stock of political arguments rotten eggs, stale fish, dead cats, over-ripe fruit and decaying vegetables, and, in agreeing that in electioneering it is better to count heads than to break them.

3

One of the most memorable of General Elections under the Ballot Act surely was that held in December, 1918, following the passing of the Representation of the People Act and the close of the World War, when women voted for the first time. The scenes I saw in London on the polling day, that historic Saturday, made a profound impression on me. Women in thousands flocked to the booths as well as men. Many wives and mothers of the working class brought their babies in perambulators. What did they think of it all? They were not subdued in demeanour and thoughtful, in keeping with the greatness and gravity of the occasion. On the contrary, they were joking and laughing, as if quite elated at the notion that they should be voting for a Member of Parliament—and a Parliament in which, as it turned out, a representative of their own sex was to sit for the first time in the person of Lady Astor, of the Sutton Division of Plymouth.

Even so, was not this the last word in ordered and organized democracy? Could there be, I asked myself, a more advanced and striking manifestation of the free citizenship in the most perfectly planned Republic? Then I wondered what the Barons of Magna Charta—whose statues I have so often looked upon in the House of Lords—would have thought of it, those feudal lords who, over 600 years before, extracted from an absolute King the first great enunciation of constitutional liberty? Nay, why go back so far and remotely? What would the working men who, as a protest against the denial of electoral reform in July, 1866, tore down the railings of Hyde Park, have thought of it? What they wanted was the extension of the franchise to male householders. They could never have imagined that their grand-daughters would have that which they themselves did not then possess—the vote for a Parliament the least fettered in the world by a written Constitution and the most omnipotent in the exercise of its legislative powers.

4

The counting of the votes takes place on the night of the polling day, or the next day as the returning officer may appoint. In county constituencies, where the polling stations are many miles apart, it is impossible to commence counting the votes until the next morning; but in boroughs, where all the ballot boxes are delivered up to the returning officer within a quarter, or at most half an hour, of the close of the poll at 8 or 9 p.m., the counting is got through as a rule by eleven o’clock. No person may be present at the counting of the votes besides the returning officer and his counting clerks, the candidates and their agents, except by the authority of the returning officer, and everyone present is placed under an obligation to maintain, and aid in maintaining, the secrecy of the voting.

The first thing that is done is to check the number of votes in each ballot box with the return furnished by the presiding officer of the number of ballot papers issued at the polling booth, in order to see if they tally. All the ballot papers from all the boxes are then mixed up together in one great heap, so as to make it impossible to find out how the voting went in any particular polling district. The ballot papers are next placed on the table faces upward, so that the number printed in each case on the back—the only thing which might give a clue to the identification of a voter—shall not be seen. Any person who attempts to obtain the number of a voting paper in violation of the secrecy of the ballot is liable to six months’ imprisonment. The ballot papers are then distributed among the large staff of counting clerks seated at scattered tables in the room, and the counting of the votes recorded for the several candidates begins. There are two ways of counting in vogue. In one—the London way—the clerks are divided into pairs. One clerk is provided with a sheet of foolscap containing the names of the candidates with a number of squares under each, and the other clerk goes through the ballot papers calling out the name of the candidate opposite to which the voter has placed his cross. If the vote is given for “Robinson,” a stroke is inserted in one of the squares under Robinson’s name; if it is given for “Smith,” a stroke is put in one of the squares under the name of Smith. Provision is made on each sheet for 250 votes to be thus counted, and when either of the candidates has received that number the figures for each are put at the foot—“Robinson, 250,” “Smith, 76”—and the sheet is passed on to the returning officer. Under the other system of counting, each clerk places on the table in front of him the ballot papers for each candidate in separate piles, makes them up into packets of fifty, placing an elastic band round each, and hands them over to the returning officer.

The work of the counting clerks is closely watched by an agent representing each of the candidates. All votes about which there is any doubt are referred to the returning officer. Any paper which has on it any writing or mark by which the voter could be identified is rejected. Some electors are so vehemently partisan that, not content with making the simple “X,” they add personal remarks about the candidates or comments on the political issues as the strong feelings of the moment prompt them. I remember at one election where only Liberal and Socialist candidates stood many angry Conservatives wrote across their ballot papers such phrases as “Betwixt the devil and the deep sea,” and “God help England!” Every voting paper so defaced is cast aside. Any paper which contains votes for more candidates than the elector is entitled to vote for is also void. There are also voting papers about which hang the element of uncertainty. On some the “X” is made on the candidate’s name; on others it commences in one square and ends in another. Other electors, again, impishly desirous no doubt of puzzling everybody concerned, make their “X” meet exactly on the line which separates the names of the candidates. Each paper thus irregularly marked is judged on its own merits, but the guiding rule is that the vote is given to the candidate whose name appears within that section of the voting paper where the lines of the voter’s cross touch each other.

The candidates are also present in the room with some of their leading and more intimate supporters, and often with their wives, awaiting with such composure as they can command the result which is to realize or disappoint their hopes and ambitions. Sometimes the candidates never get into personal touch with one another until they meet in the counting-room. And though Party feeling usually runs high, those contests are not without their charming amenities. It was on such an occasion that Thackeray was paid what he thought was the greatest compliment of his life. He contested Oxford in the Liberal interest in 1857, and, meeting his opponent, Edward Cardwell, he remarked: “Well, I hope the best man will win.” “I hope not,” replied the Tory candidate. Notwithstanding all the care of the officials, aided by the vigilance of the candidates’ agents, mistakes are occasionally made, and, what is more annoying and perplexing, are not discovered until after the result of the count is supposed to have been ascertained, though not officially declared in the room. A bundle of counted ballot papers may fall unnoticed under the table, or may be erroneously placed in the batch of the wrong candidate. Surely no disappointment more bitter can befall a man than that of the candidate who within five or ten minutes of his feeling certain of being duly returned to Parliament finds there has been an error in the counting, and that he has really been beaten after all.

The returning officer cannot vote at the election; but should there be a tie between the candidates he may, if a registered elector, give a casting vote. At a by-election for South Northumberland in April, 1878, the candidates, Albert Grey (afterwards Earl Grey) and Edward Ridley (subsequently a Judge of the High Court), polled the same number of votes—2,912—a thing unprecedented in the case of a big county constituency. The sheriff declined to give a casting vote as returning officer, although himself an elector, preferring to make a double return by declaring both candidates elected. A few days later Mr. Grey and Mr. Ridley presented themselves at the Table of the House of Commons, the oaths were administered to them, both signed the roll, and both duly took their seats. They were not, however, allowed to vote. In the scrutiny which followed it was found that a few of the voting papers were spoiled, and Mr. Ridley, having a majority of the correct votes, was awarded the seat.

So, too, in 1886, Mr. Addison, Q.C., was returned in the Conservative interest for Ashton-under-Lyne by the casting vote of the returning officer, who was also chief magistrate of the town. Mr. Addison sat in the House of Commons for six years, according to the jocular description of his opponents, as “the Hon. Member for the Mayor of Ashton-under-Lyne.” In the event of a tie, the casting vote of the returning officer is only operative if exercised on the declaration of the poll. In October, 1892, at a by-election for the Cirencester division of Gloucester, Colonel Chesters Master, the Conservative candidate, was declared Member, having defeated Mr. Harry Lawson (afterwards Lord Burnham), the Liberal candidate, by a majority of three. A scrutiny of votes was demanded by Mr. Lawson, and this showed that both candidates had polled the same number of votes. The sheriff, having ceased to be returning officer on the declaration of the poll, could not give a casting vote, and accordingly there had to be a new election, when Mr. Lawson was elected by a majority of upwards of 100.

Such awkward incidents, however, are very uncommon. The returning officer, at the conclusion of the count, has usually no other duty to discharge than publicly to declare the candidate to whom the majority of votes was given duly elected to Parliament, and he sends forthwith the return to the writ of election, bearing the name of the successful candidate, to the Clerk of the Crown at Westminster. The voting papers, the counterfoils, the marked copies of the register of voters, and all other official documents relating to the election, are also made up in a bag and sealed by the returning officer and forwarded to the Crown Office. To give an idea of the enormous amount of official papers used at a General Election, I have been told at the Crown Office that they weigh from 22 to 25 tons. In case there might be a demand for a scrutiny and recount of the voting papers in any constituency, or a petition presented to declare the return null and void under the Corrupt Practices Act, all these documents are stored in the cellars of the Crown Office for a year and a day before they are destroyed. The writs are kept by the Clerk of the Crown until the Parliament is dissolved, when they are sent to the Public Record Office, where they are preserved.

5

A candidate declared elected by the returning officer, but whose return is questioned by petition, takes the oath and his seat in the House of Commons and serves in the usual course until the report of the two Judges who tried the petition is delivered to the Speaker and is by him communicated to the House. Jesse Collings, in January, 1886, as Member for Ipswich, while a petition against his return was pending, which resulted in his being unseated for reasons for which he was personally blameless, moved and carried the small holdings resolution, the famous “three acres and a cow,” which defeated Lord Salisbury’s Government and brought back to power again the Liberals under Gladstone. I remember a petition arising out of a contest at Exeter in the General Election of 1910 which had a curious result. The Liberal candidate was declared returned by a majority of four. The Judges who tried the petition disallowed five votes for the Liberal given by five men who were held to have been unlawfully employed as bill distributors during the election, and accordingly the seat was given to the Conservative candidate by a majority of one. On the day the decision of the Judges was announced by the Speaker I witnessed a very uncommon incident. This was the appearance of the wigged and gowned Clerk of the Crown, bringing the return to the writ for the Exeter election, and at the Table, in the presence of the Speaker and the Commons, amending the return by substituting “H. E. Duke” for “H. St. Maur” as the Member to serve for the borough. Immediately afterwards Mr. Duke took his seat in the House.

6

It is a long and elaborate process, this obtaining of the Verdict of the country; and rightly so, having regard to the momentousness of the issues that may be at stake. The philosophy expressed at a General Election may not always be thought very high or noble. Often it has but root in an idea of material well-being—that men and women who labour with their hands may enjoy a little more of the pleasures of life before the time comes for them to lie down and die. And that is a most excellent thing, and well worth striving for. But it is quite possible to have inaugurated at a General Election a mighty movement towards an entirely new conception or order of life, like the foundation of Christianity, the Reformation, or the French Revolution, and bring it about by the peaceful processes of parliamentary evolution. To say the least, a Nation can unitedly rise to a height of great glory by marching to the polling booths, and, by its votes, securing the success of a high moral cause. Anyway, nothing should be done to detract from the importance and impressiveness of the General Election. The one substitute for the ballot box that remains in this age is the match-box, not only as the symbol but as the instrument of Revolution by fire and blood, with the aid of a tin of petrol.

CHAPTER V
TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF THE M.P.

1

At every General Election there is seen the old and familiar, but ever curious and interesting, spectacle of about twelve or thirteen hundred men—who, though selected at random from the general mass, yet vary so much in position, ability and temperament that they may be said to reflect collectively the very image of the Nation—engaged in wooing the constituencies which have at their disposal the 707 seats in the House of Commons. What are the irresistible allurements that compel this large body of men, the majority of them actively engaged every day in business or professional life, to spend their money and time, their strength and temper, in order that they may be given the chance of making a gift of their professional capacity and business experience to the Nation, expecting in return, as regards the mass of them, neither fee nor reward beyond a salary of £400 a year?

Macaulay on the subject is well worth giving ear to. Writing to his sister Hannah (subsequently Lady Trevelyan) on June 17, 1833, after a few years’ experience of the House of Commons, he says:

I begin to wonder what the fascination is which attracts men, who could sit over their tea and their book in their own cool, quiet room, to breathe bad air, hear bad speeches, lounge up and down the long gallery, and doze uneasily on the green benches till three in the morning. Thank God, these luxuries are not necessary for me. My pen is sufficient for my support, and my sister’s company is sufficient for my happiness. Only let me see her well and cheerful, and let offices in Government and seats in Parliament go to those who care for them. If I were to leave public life to-morrow, I declare that, except for the vexation which it might give you and one or two others, the event would not be in the slightest degree painful to me.

Sir George Trevelyan, in his Life of Lord Macaulay, not only corroborates his uncle as to the inexplicability of the charm of the House of Commons, but gives also from personal experience a still more forbidding description of what he calls “the tedious and exhaustive routine” of an M.P.’s life:

Waiting the whole evening to vote, and then walking half a mile at a foot’s-pace round and round the crowded lobbies; dining amidst clamour and confusion, with a division twenty minutes long between two of the mouthfuls; trudging home at three in the morning through the slush of a February thaw; and sitting behind Ministers in the centre of a closely packed bench during the hottest week of the London summer.

If this were all that was to be said, it would, indeed, be hard to understand why a seat in the House of Commons should be regarded as an object to be sighed for, and schemed for, and fought for, and paid for by thousands of very astute and able men. The constituencies are not engaged at the General Election in fastening this burden upon unwilling shoulders. How incomprehensible, then, is the action of these who, having had experience of the hard and thankless lot of the Member of Parliament, its mental strain, its physical discomforts, yet labour unceasingly night and day during the weeks of the General Election to induce the electors to send them back again to the dreary round of routine tasks at Westminster. Indeed, Macaulay himself felt keenly the loss of his seat for Edinburgh in 1847, though at the time he was absorbed in his History of England; and in 1852, with his great work still uncompleted, he was delighted to be returned again to Parliament by his old constituency. But the truth is, we have been given thus far only the dark side of the picture. There is a silver lining also to the cloud. The life of a representative of the people has of course its compensations.

Still, the tribulations of an M.P. are undoubtedly many. There are, to begin with, the torments of the post. Cobden, in a letter to a friend early in 1846, when his name as the leader of the agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws was in all men’s mouths, gives a glimpse into the contents, half laughable and half pathetic, of the letter-bag of an M.P. He says:

First, half the mad people in the country who are still at large, and they are legion, address their incoherent ravings to the most notorious man of the hour. Next, the kindred tribe who think themselves poets, who are more difficult than the mad people to deal with, send their doggerel and solicit subscriptions to their volumes, with occasional requests to be allowed to dedicate them. Then there are the Jeremy Diddlers, who begin their epistles with high-flown compliments upon my services to the millions, and always wind up with a request that I will bestow a trifle upon the individual who ventures to lay his distressing case before me. To add to my miseries, people have now got an idea that I am influential with the Government, and the small place-hunters are at me.

Cobden supplied a specimen of the begging letters he was accustomed to receive. It was from a lady asking him to become her “generous and noble-minded benefactor.” As she desired to begin to do something for herself, she hoped he would procure her a loan of £5,000 “to enable her to rear poultry for London and other large market towns.” In another letter, written July 14, 1846, after the taxes on bread-stuffs had been repealed and the Corn Law League disbanded, Cobden says:

I thought I should be allowed to be forgotten after my address to my constituents. But every post brings me twenty or thirty letters—and such letters! I am teased to death by place-hunters of every degree, who wish me to procure them Government appointments. Brothers of peers—aye, “honourables”—are amongst the number. I have but one answer for all: “I would not ask a favour of the Ministry to serve my own brother.” I often think what must be the fate of Lord John, or Peel, with half the needy aristocracy knocking at the Treasury doors.

2

Happily, things have greatly improved since the time of Cobden. It is probable that the average elector still fails to see that his representative deserves any gratitude or thanks for his services in Parliament. On the contrary, the elector may think that it is he who is entitled to some return for having helped his representative to a seat in the House of Commons in preference to another who was equally eager for the honour. The spectacle of so many men competing for the voluntary service of the State in the capacity of a Member of Parliament cannot but tend to convince the ordinary elector that he is conferring a favour on the particular candidate for whom he votes. Constituents, certainly, are often very exacting. And as the representative desires to retain his seat, he cannot afford to ignore a letter from even the humblest and obscurest of the electors. The General Election may come round again with unexpected suddenness, bringing with it the day of reckoning for the Member who has been neglectful of communications from his constituents. Then it is that the voter, however humble, however obscure, can help to make or mar the prospect of the Member’s return to Westminster. The worst of it is that some constituents will unreasonably persist in asking for things impossible. In the post-bag of the M.P. appointments used to be greatly in demand. There was a time when the M.P. had some patronage to distribute in the way of nominations to posts in the Customs and the Inland Revenue, for which no examination was required, should the Party he supported be in power. But that good time, or bad, is gone and for ever. The throwing open of the Civil Service to competition deprived the M.P. of this sort of small change, which he once was able to scatter among the electors so as to reward past services and secure future support. Now he has absolutely nothing in his gift, except, perhaps, a nomination for any vacant sub-post office in his constituency. Yet numbers of the electors still imagine there are many comfortable posts in the public service which are to be had merely for the saying of a word by their representatives to the Minister of the Department concerned. An example of what the M.P. has occasionally to put up with may be seen in the terms of a blunt and abusive epistle—admittedly a very rare one—sent by a disappointed office-seeker to the man he says “he carried in on his own shoulders” at the last election. It opened: “You’re a fraud, and you know it. I don’t care a rap for the billet or the money either, but you could hev got it for me if you wasn’t so mean. Two pound a week ain’t any more to me than 40 shillin’s is to you, but I objekt to bein’ maid a fool of.” It went on: “Soon after you was elected by my hard workin’, a feller here wanted to bet me that You wouldn’t be in the House more than a week before you made a ass of yourself. I bet him a Cow on that as I thort you was worth it then. After I got Your Note sayin’ you deklined to ackt in the matter I driv the Cow over to the Feller’s place an’ told him he had won her.” And thus concluded: “That’s orl I got by howlin’ meself Hoarse for you on pole day, an’ months befoar. I believe you think you’ll get in agen. I don’t. Yure no man. An’ I doant think yure much of a demercrat either. I lowers meself ritin to so low a feller, even tho I med him a member of parlerment.”

Other electors argue that as M.P.’s are law-makers they should consequently be able to rescue law-breakers from the clutches of the police and gaolers. Accordingly there are appeals for the remission of fines imposed on children for breaking windows, and even to get sentences of penal servitude revoked. The respectable tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy, who could be restored to a sound financial position by the loan of £100, is perhaps the worst pest of all the cadging letter-writers. He usually declares that he not only voted for his representative, but also attended every meeting that gentleman addressed in the course of the election. The best reply the M.P. could make to such an attempt to fleece him is to advise his correspondent to attend more to business and less to politics; but he probably never makes it, for he can rarely afford to speak out his mind to a constituent. An Irish Member who was elected for an Ulster constituency after a close contest showed me a letter he got from one of his supporters asking for some favour. “I voted for you under thirteen different names,” said the writer, “and could I do more for you than that?” No Member would think of offending so invaluable a supporter. Inventors are also of the plagues from which the M.P. suffers. The man who knows how to make soap out of sawdust writes glowing letters about the fortune awaiting a company which would work the process. Almost every post brings samples of tonics and boxes of lozenges calculated to transform the harshest croak into the clearest and mellowest of voices. “I shall be thankful for a testimonial,” said the maker of one mixture, “that after you had used my specific the House was spellbound by the music of your tones, and I guarantee to extend your fame by publishing it, with your portrait, broadcast.” Tradesmen are very importunate. For instance, the Labour Members receive circulars from too enterprising firms soliciting their custom for things which, it was declared, were most requisite for the maintenance of the state and dignity becoming a Member of Parliament. From one firm a Member, fresh from working in the coalmines, had a tender for a Court dress of black velvet, to cost, with sword, only £50. A company of wine merchants offered to stock with the choicest brands the wine-cellar of the establishment they presumed he was about to set up in London.

The day after the announcement of a birth in a Member’s family a van pulled up at the entrance to the Houses of Parliament containing three different sorts of perambulators. The tradesman who brought them was extremely indignant because the police refused him admission to the House to display their good points and conveniences to the happy father! Poets ask for subscriptions to publish their works, or, enclosing some doggerel verses as samples, appeal for orders for odes for the next General Election. “If you would quote in the House a verse from my volume, Twitterings in the Twilight, what a grand advertisement I’d get!” wrote one rhymester to his representative. “You might say something like this: ‘One of the most delightful collections of poems it has ever been my good fortune to come across is Mr. Socrates Wilkin’s Twitterings in the Twilight. Could the situation in which the Empire finds itself be more happily touched off than in the following verse of that eminent poet?’ and then go on to quote some lines from my book, which I enclose.” Members who are lawyers and doctors are expected by a large section of their constituents to give professional advice for nothing. If one of these unreasonable persons has a dispute with his landlord as to the amount of rent due, or finds it impossible to recover a debt, he expects, as a matter of course, his representative, if a gentleman learned in the law, to help him out of his difficulty; or, if a doctor, he favours him with long and incoherent accounts of mysterious complaints from which he has suffered for years. The M.P. is also expected to throw oil on disturbed domestic waters. Here is a specimen of a communication which is by no means uncommon:

Dear Sir,

Me and the wife had a bit of a tiff last Saturday night, and she won’t make it up. If you just send her a line saying Bill’s all right, she will come round. She thinks the hell of a lot of you since you kissed the nipper the day you called for our votes.

But pity the poor M.P. who receives from a female voter so embarrassing a letter as the following:

Honoured Sir,

I hear that Mr. Balfour is not a married man. Something tells me that I would make the right sort of wife for him. I am coming to London to-morrow, and will call at the House of Commons to see you, hoping you will get me an introduction to the honourable gentleman. I am only thirty years of age, and can do cooking and washing.

Agnes Merton.

P.S.—Perhaps if Mr. Balfour would not have me, you would say a word for me to one of the policemen at the House.

During the evening the Member who received this strange epistle cautiously ventured into the Central Hall, and, sure enough, espied an eccentric-looking woman in angry controversy with a constable, who was trying to induce her to go away. But she refused to leave, and ultimately found sympathetic companions in the crazy old party who has haunted the place for years in the hope that some day she will induce the Government to restore the £5,000,000 of which she declares they have robbed her, and the other lady, younger, but just as mad, who is convinced that some M.P. has married her secretly and left her to starve, and has come to Westminster to claim him “before all the world.”

3

The Member of Parliament is liable to receive other communications of even less flattering and more exasperating character. Bribes are occasionally dangled before him through the post. Will he allow his name to be used in the floating of a company, or in the advertising of some article of common use or a patent medicine? Will he use his influence in obtaining a Government contract for a certain firm? If he will, there is a cheque for so-and-so at his disposal. In the course of a debate in the House of Commons on the payment of Members, John Burns, for many years a well-known Liberal Minister, evoked both laughter and applause by reading his reply to an offer of £50 received during his previous service as a Labour representative if he obtained for a person in Belfast a vacant collectorship of taxes. “Sir,” he wrote, “you are a scoundrel. I wish you were within reach of my boot.”

But the sane and the righteous give the M.P. more annoyance than the knavish and the crazy. Think of the numerous local functions—religious, social, and political—to which the Member of Parliament is invited! When a meeting is being organized in the constituency, naturally the first thought of its promoters is to try to get the Member to attend. The more conspicuous he is in Parliament, and therefore the more likely to attract an audience, the greater is the number of these invitations; and if he fails to respond, the more widespread is the dissatisfaction among his baulked constituents. He is expected to preside at the inaugural meetings of local amateur dramatic societies and local naturalists’ field clubs, and “to honour with his presence” the beanfeasts of local friendly societies. The literary institution, designed to keep young men of the constituency out of the public-houses, must be opened by him. He must attend entertainments of a mixed political and musical sort, at which his speech is sandwiched between a sentimental song and a comic.

But perhaps the Member of Parliament is most worried by the appeals to his generosity and charity which pour in upon him in aid of churches, chapels, mission-halls, schools, working men’s institutes, hospitals, asylums, cricket and football clubs, and in fact societies and institutions of all sorts and sundry. It is only proper that if money be needed for an excellent local purpose, the representative of the district in Parliament should be included in the appeal. Many wealthy Members of Parliament spend from £1,000 to £4,000 a year on local charities, and they spend it willingly when the objects appear to them to be deserving. But of the 707 M.P.’s there are never a great many who can be described as wealthy.

Besides that, many representatives—among them being some of the most charitable of men—always refuse to send contributions to local objects, influenced by a sense of honour and the fear that it might be regarded as bribing the electors. In so doing they run a grave risk of being misunderstood by their constituents. If a Member of Parliament should refuse to help in providing them with coals, blankets, footballs, cricket-bats, big drums, billiard-tables, church steeples, sewing-machines, he is set down as mean, and numbers of his constituents vow that he shall not have their votes again at the General Election. There is a story told that when John Morley was seeking re-election for Newcastle-on-Tyne an elector who was asked to vote for this statesman of the highest and purest ideals indignantly exclaimed: “Not me! What has John Morley ever done for the Rugger Football Club?”

The representative is to be commended by all means in resisting these illegitimate demands. Macaulay, when Member for Edinburgh, was asked to subscribe to a local football club. “Those were not the conditions upon which I undertook to represent Edinburgh,” he answered. “In return for your generous confidence I offer parliamentary service, and nothing else. The call that is now made is one so objectionable that I must plainly say I would rather take the Chiltern Hundreds than comply with it. If our friends want a Member who will find them in public diversions, they can be at no loss. I know twenty people who, if you elect them to Parliament, would gladly treat you to a race and a race-ball each month. But I shall not be very easily induced to believe that Edinburgh is disposed to select her representatives on such a principle.” On the other hand, there is something to be said for the constituents. Surely they may very properly ask: “From whom can we more reasonably seek aid for our deserving local charities than from our Member of Parliament?” They recall to mind his accessibility and graciousness while he was “nursing” the constituency. Was he not ever ready to preside at the smoking concerts of the Sons of Benevolence, to sing songs or recite at the mothers’ meetings, to hand round the cake at the children’s tea parties, to kick off at the football contests?

His speeches are also remembered. Did he not regard service in the House of Commons while he was seeking it more as a distinction and privilege than as a public duty? Did he not tell the electors from a hundred platforms that for all time he was absolutely at their service? Did he not come to them literally hat in hand begging the favour—mind you, the “favour”—of their vote and influence? Yet to this cynical end has it all come, that, badgered by requests for subscriptions to this, that or the other, he replies—to quote the prompt, emphatic and printed answer which one representative has sent to all such appeals: “I was elected for —— as Member of Parliament, not as Relieving Officer.”

4

In the House of Commons itself some disappointments also await the M.P. The motives which induce men to seek for a seat in Parliament are many and diverse; but there is hardly a doubt whatever that the main reason is a genuine desire to serve the State and promote the well-being and happiness of the community. Accordingly, in the first flush of enthusiasm after election our representatives zealously set about informing themselves of the subjects which are likely to engage their attention in Parliament. But soon comes a rude awakening, bringing with it the first of the disappointments that await them. They find that to instruct themselves properly in questions that are ripening for legislation would leave them very little time for the calls of business and social life.

The breakfast table of the M.P. is heaped almost every morning during the session with parliamentary papers of one kind or another—Blue Books, Bills, reports and returns. Blue Books are popularly supposed to be unattractive reading. This is a mistake. They may look ominously ponderous in outward appearance, but their matter is not therefore portentously dull. With a little delving, illuminating facts for the serious student of the condition of the people—the supreme and all-embracing question of politics—come to light. There are, however, not only too much of them, but too many. On an average, eighty are issued every year, making an impossible demand on the attention of even the most conscientious representative. The Bills are more inviting than the Blue Books, for, embodying as they do the fads and hobbies of the 707 Members of the House of Commons, they bring one into touch with curious manifestations of common human nature and individual political ideals. About 300 of them are introduced every session. After the formality of a first reading, they are printed and circulated among the representatives, who are expected to make themselves acquainted with their provisions.

It is to be feared that many M.P.’s give up this task in despair. Instead of attempting to arrive at independent conclusions by personal investigation and study, they are content to rely upon their Party leaders to direct them on the right path in regard to Government measures dealing with the main public questions of the day, and upon their Whips as to whether they should oppose or support the Bills of private Members. Yet it is not always plain sailing, even when the lazy course is pursued of just giving one’s ear to the leaders on both sides attacking and defending. “The worst effect on myself resulting from listening to the debates in Parliament,” writes Monckton Milnes, “is that it prevents me from forming any clear political opinion on any subject.” Of the 300 Bills brought in every session, very few are passed. So supreme is the command of the Ministry over the time of the House of Commons that the private Members have little chance of carrying legislation. Only the Bills of the Government set out on their course through both Houses of Parliament with a fair prospect of reaching the Statute Book.

Furthermore, the M.P. who is ambitious “the listening Senate to command,” also soon discovers that the opportunities for talking are flagrantly restricted in the interest of the Government. He may have devoted many days to the making and colouring of artificial flowers of rhetoric with which to decorate his speech in a great debate. Sometimes he may get the chance to deliver it in a House almost empty, and containing but two interested listeners—one the hon. Member who hopes to follow, and is impatient of his prolixity, and the other his wife in the Ladies’ Gallery, fuming at the indifference with which his eloquent periods are being received. That is bad enough; but there is a worse fate still. He may sit night after night on the pounce to “catch the Speaker’s eye” and yet fail to fix the attention of that wandering orb. Meanwhile he may hear his arguments and his epigrams made use of by luckier men, who probably got them in the Library from the same shelf, the same book, the same page as himself. Finally, the debate may be brought to an end, leaving him baulked in his design, with a mind further oppressed by the burden of a weighty unspoken speech. Then his constituents say unpleasant things of him because they do not see his name in the newspaper reports. He is neglecting his duty, or he is an empty-minded “silent Member,” who, having nothing to say, says it.

There is an old proverb at Westminster which declares that “they are the wisest part of Parliament who use the greatest silence.” Again, in the opinion of the leaders of the Party in office he is the most useful of Members who never consumes valuable time by speaking, but is ever at hand to vote when the bells ring out the summons to the division. The man who always votes at his Party’s call and never dreams of thinking for himself at all is to be found by the score in the House of Commons. But to many another M.P. it must be a sore trial to find his opinions often dictated by his leaders and his movements in and out of the House controlled by the Whips. Party discipline is strict in all the political groups, and violations of it are rarely condoned. The speech of the Member who is sincere and courageous enough to take up an attitude independent of his Party in regard to some question of the day is received with jeers by his colleagues, and, what is perhaps more disconcerting, with cheers by the fellows on the other side. There are, to be sure, representatives to whom the House of Commons is but a vastly agreeable diversion from other pleasures and pursuits. Imagine the feelings of such an easy-going Member when, on a dull night off, an urgently worded and heavily underscored communication from the Whips demanding his immediate attendance is delivered by special messenger at some most inopportune moment, perhaps as he is just sitting down to a pleasant dinner or is leaving his house for the Frivolity Theatre. If, prone as he is to yield to the temptation of the flesh, he should ignore this peremptory call of Party duty, he is held guilty, like the crank and the faddist, of a grave breach of discipline. His past services in the division lobbies—on nights when the proceedings in the House were to him a most enjoyable lark—are forgotten. He gets a solemn lecture from the Chief Whip on the enormity of his offence. Worse still, his name is published in an official black list of defaulters, or a nasty paragraph exposing his neglect of duty appears in the newspaper which most widely circulates in his constituency.

And yet what model M.P., Liberal or Unionist or Labour, with all his sincere attention to the desires, the whims, the caprices of his constituents, with all his willing surrender of private judgment to his leaders, of personal pleasures to the Whips, can confidently feel that his seat is safe? It is hard to get into Parliament. To remain there is just as difficult. The insecurity of the tenure of a seat in the House of Commons is perhaps the greatest drawback of public life. Many a man with ambition and talent for office does years of splendid service for his Party in Opposition. The General Election comes. His Party is victorious at the polls. But he himself has been worsted in the fight, and he has the mortification of seeing another receive the office which would have been his in happier circumstances. To such a man with his capacity for public life, with his keen enjoyment of the Party fights in Parliament, existence outside must be barren and dreary indeed. Yet never again may he cross the charmed portals of the House of Commons.

CHAPTER VI
THE FASCINATION OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.

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But now that the litany of the cares and disappointments of a Member of Parliament is exhausted, there remain many compensations which make a seat in the House of Commons an object greatly to be coveted, and well worth the physical labour, the mental worry, the demands on the purse, which are involved in its attainment. Its rewards are chiefly moral and social. The gratification of having won the trust of a large body of the public comes first, perhaps. Then there is the sense of the power and influence of the legislator. The House of Commons is the greatest and most renowned of national assemblies. To be a Member of it is a great honour. The letters “M.P.” add distinction to a name. That is a proper source of pride on the part of the Member himself. It is also a mark for the deference of others. The “M.P.” is lifted out of the common run of humanity. Most of us would look a second time at a man casually encountered in the street if we were told he was an “M.P.”

The House of Commons has been called, as everyone knows, “the best club in London.” The phrase, by the way, was used for the first time in a novel called Friends of Bohemia, or Phases of London Life, written in the mid-Victorian era by E. M. Whitty, then a sketch-writer in the Reporters’ Gallery. Some say the House has lost its proud pre-eminence in that respect. There is an entire absence of class feelings and social distinctions in the House. That the cook’s son is the equal of the duke’s son is, perhaps, more unreservedly admitted by the duke’s son than by the cook’s son. On the other hand, the Members will tell you that they differ too widely in class, wealth, avocations, business pursuits, and, above all, in political ideas and principles, for them to be clubbable in the mass by reason of mental affinity or association of interests. Yet there is no doubt whatever that in regard to one of the objects of a club, ministering to the personal needs and comforts of its members, the House is far better equipped now than ever it was in its most socially select period, before the Reform Act of 1832.

At that time hungry Members were able to obtain but a steak or a chop, or a pork pie, at Bellamy’s famous restaurant, which stood in Old Palace Yard immediately adjoining the old Houses of Parliament. Now they have an elaborate restaurant, very properly subsidized out of the public funds, and managed by a Kitchen Committee elected by themselves. Before the World War an excellent meal of three courses could be had for a shilling; and to realize what might then have been obtained for five shillings would stagger the imagination of a gourmand. Prices still remain below those charged for similar meals in a first-class restaurant. Even the secrets of the cellars have been recklessly disclosed to the electors. There is the “Valentia Vat,” holding 1,000 gallons of the rarest Scotch whisky. But our representatives are not stimulated by whisky alone, whether Scotch or Irish. We are also told that the cellars are always well stocked with wines.

In the old House of Commons, which was swept away by the great fire of 1834, there was but one smoking-room. What it was like Macaulay describes in a letter to his sister, dated July 23, 1832. “I am writing here at eleven o’clock at night,” he said, “in the filthiest of filthy atmospheres, in the vilest of all vile company, and with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils.” In the Palace of Westminster to-day there are several rooms devoted to the enjoyment of tobacco. The engaging spectacle to be witnessed, by all accounts, in the chief smoking-room any night of a session suggests the question: Is there any reality in Party conflicts? If half what M.P.’s say of each other be true, a man who is not a politician and is careful of his reputation would not like to be discovered associating with them. Yet opponents who have just been raging furiously against each other in the Chamber, are, we are told, to be seen exchanging opinions of politics, questions and personalities, with mutual good humour, frankness and confidence over coffee and cigarettes, in the delightful companionship of the smoking-rooms. Political controversy has there its fangs drawn. The only emulation between Members of opposite political parties when they foregather in clouds of tobacco smoke is as to who will say the cheeriest word and tell the most amusing story, with the result that many fast friendships between them are formed.

Chess is also played. It is the only game permitted at Westminster. One year there was a great match played over the telegraph wires between the House of Commons and the United States Congress, and though at one time the defeat of America seemed imminent, the match ended in a draw. In 1920 the introduction of billiards and cards was again suggested. “It is contrary to the traditions of the House that cards and billiards should be played within the precincts,” said Sir Alfred Mond, First Commissioner of Works, in reply. Then there is that most agreeable of all the adjuncts of the House, the Library. It consists of five pleasant rooms overlooking the river. The bookcases are of carved oak; the volumes are beautifully bound; Members move about silently, for all sound is deadened by the thick carpets, and the atmosphere is delightfully pervaded with the aroma of Russian leather. The books are about 50,000 in number, mainly historical, constitutional, legal, and political—just the works, in fact, where Members are certain to find the necessary material for confuting each other’s arguments.

The Ladies’ Gallery, and the development of the Terrace from a lounge for Members, which was its original purpose, into a society resort, have added greatly to the attractiveness of the House of Commons. They explain the remarkable expansion, within recent years, of what may be called the fashionable side of Parliament. It must not be supposed that this admission of ladies into Parliament by a side-door—unknown to the Constitution long before they were made eligible for election by statute—has had the result of making Members neglectful of their duties. On the contrary, the social functions at Westminster during the session have the effect of keeping members, and the young members especially, more regular in their attendance, or, at least, more within hearing of the division bells.

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Besides that, many Members of Parliament derive pleasure even from experiences which by others are regarded as worries and vexations. Their correspondence, with all its manifestations of strange phases of human nature, is a source of entertainment to some, and it ministers to the sense of self-importance of others. There are Members who give an ear of affable condescension to eccentric frequenters of the Central Hall, such as the mad engineer with his scheme for uniting Ireland with Great Britain by a bridge thrown across the Channel, via the Isle of Man, thus consummating a real tangible union between the two countries. They have a smile of welcome and a hearty handshake for all and sundry from their constituencies who call upon them at St. Stephen’s. There are Members to whom the pressing invitations to attend bazaars, flower shows, tea meetings, smoking concerts, cricket and football matches, are flattering evidence of their popularity, and they are accepted accordingly with a rare delight.

The House of Commons affords a splendid field—no better in the whole wide world—for the vain and ambitious who yearn for applause or crave for power. Any Member can easily emerge from the obscurity of the back benches into the full glare of the limelight. Let him but flagrantly break one of the rules of order, and his name will appear as a headline in a thousand newspapers. Then there are the material rewards. The young and ambitious are offered the dazzling prospect of office. The possession of any post in the Administration, even the humblest, carries with it a seat on the Treasury Bench, side by side with eminent statesmen whose names are household words. It carries also the right, when addressing the House, to stand at the Table before the famous despatch box, to lean elbow on it, and even to thump it, as an added emphasis in the very passion of argument, as was done by all the renowned parliamentarians of the past. It is true that keen and fierce is the competition for the higher offices in the Administration. The House of Commons, with all its constitutional supremacy as an institution, is composed of human beings. That being so, it is not free from the unamiable characteristics of intrigue and envy; and the qualities of resolute will and tenacity of purpose are, indeed, necessary in the ambitious young Member if he is to escape from being pushed aside or being trampled upon in the race for office. Once on the Treasury Bench, however, he has won half the battle for a post in the very hierarchy of the Government—the exclusive ring of Cabinet Ministers.

Yet the number of men in the House of Commons without social or political ambition is remarkably large; men, too, who are absolutely unknown outside their constituencies. They are in Parliament literally for their health. During the day they are engaged in the direction of great industrial and commercial undertakings, and in the evening they go down to Westminster for that rest and recuperation which comes with change of scene and occupation. They find the duties of an M.P. very agreeable, on the whole. The responsibilities of the position sit lightly upon them. They find a joy in all the details of parliamentary life.

Many old men, who have spent themselves in trade or finance, take to politics in the evening of their days as a mild relaxation or hobby, and a means of prolonging life. There was once a great merchant who, when he left for ever his desk in the city, after an association of half a century, found the separation a terrible strain, and seemed likely to pine and mope his way quickly to the grave. His medical adviser recommended him to find a seat in the House of Commons as a distraction to relieve the monotony of his existence. But the old man did not like the suggestion. He knew nothing of public questions. The financial intelligence was the only portion of his morning paper which he had carefully studied for fifty years. “If you do not go into the House of Commons, you will have to go to Paradise,” said the doctor; “it is the only alternative.” “Then I will choose the House of Commons,” said the old City man, with a sigh of resignation. And how glad he was when he became a Member! At last, something of the joy of life had really come to him.

To sit silently on the green benches during a debate, save when they cheer a supporter, or roar at an opponent, and to walk through the division lobbies, voting as directed by the Whips, amply satisfy the desire of not a few Members for political thought and labour. It is an existence that excites and soothes by turns. Disraeli once said to a friend who had just entered the House of Commons: “You have chosen the only career in which a man is never old. A statesman can feel and inspire interest longer than any other man.” A seat in the House does not, of course, make one a statesman. But, as a general proposition, there is much force in Disraeli’s saying. Old men find the fountain of youth in the halls of Westminster. It is all nonsense what one sometimes reads about the weary and trying round of parliamentary life. There are men in the House of Commons who, after twenty, thirty, forty years of service, show no symptoms of physical exhaustion, and who will tell you that Parliament is the most interesting and most entertaining place in the world. John Morley once spoke of the daily round of an M.P. as “business without work and idleness without rest.” During the years he was engaged in writing his Life of Gladstone he took no active part in the controversies of the House of Commons. But he could not keep entirely away from the place. How often had I seen that fine philosophical writer at this particular period of his career sitting on the front Opposition Bench, at the gangway corner, his arms folded, his legs crossed, listening, like an ordinary mortal, for hours to Members venturing to say this, not hesitating to say that, going one step further, adding another word, on subjects that must have had no interest for him. The spell of the House of Commons was upon him. He could not keep away. He had to come down, even as a distraction, just to see if anything was going on. Nothing was going on, but he remained for hours.

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Parliamentary life has a fascination which few men, having once breathed its intoxicating atmosphere, can successfully withstand. Its call is irresistible. Cobden thus wrote from a retreat in Wales, in July, 1846, after the object of his parliamentary career, the repeal of the Corn Laws, had been achieved:

I am going into the wilderness to pray for a return of the taste I once possessed for nature, and simple, quiet life. Here I am, one day from Manchester, in the loveliest valley out of Paradise. Ten years ago, before I was an agitator, I spent a day or two in this house. Comparing my sensations now with those I then experienced, I feel how much I have lost in winning public fame. The rough tempest has spoiled for me a quiet haven. I feel I shall never be able to cast anchor again. It seems as if some mesmeric hand were on my brain, or that I was possessed by an unquiet fiend urging me forward in spite of myself.

However disappointed a Member may be in failing to realize his dreams of political ambition and social success, there remains for him the consoling thought—indeed, the great reward—that he has the honour of serving the State, of helping in the management of national affairs, of guiding the destinies of a mighty Commonwealth. No wonder that most Members quit this exalted and historic scene reluctantly, with the deepest regret—aye, with breaking hearts. Should so great a misfortune befall them of being rejected from further service by their constituents at the General Election, they long to return again to the green benches. Complacently to settle down to the humdrum of private life is for many of them impossible.

Even the old and worn agitators who have voluntarily resigned pine to be in the thick of the shoutings of the rival Parties, and the trampings through the division lobbies. There was William Wilberforce, the emancipator of the slaves. Sir Samuel Romilly, who sat in the House of Commons in 1807, when slavery within the British Empire was finally abolished, said of Wilberforce: “He can lay his head upon his pillow and remember that the slave trade was no more.” But was Wilberforce content to be out of Parliament even in his extreme old age? Hannah Macaulay relates that in 1830, while staying at Highwood Hill, the guest of Wilberforce, she got a letter from her brother, enclosing an offer to him from Lord Lansdowne of the seat for the pocket borough of Calne. She showed the communication to Wilberforce. “He was silent for a moment,” she writes, “and then his mobile face lighted up, and he slapped his hand to his ear and cried: ‘Ah! I hear that shout again! Hear, hear! What a life it was!’”

CHAPTER VII
PALACE OF WESTMINSTER

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The Palace of Westminster, in which Lords and Commons meet—the largest and most imposing Gothic building in the world—may be regarded, rising so nobly on the left bank of the Thames, as an expression in architecture of the dignity and stability of Parliament, and the honour in which it is held by the Nation. Most visitors to the Palace reach it by Whitehall or Victoria Street. On that side are the entrances to both Houses. It is more picturesque, but less imposing, than the river front. The inclusion of Westminster Hall—the only overground portion of the old Palace saved from the fire of 1834—enforced the breaking up of the western or land front of the new Palace into a variety of façades. The light and shade produced by the massive grey masonry of the ancient Hall, mingling with the Gothic gracefulness of the new Palace, is very beautiful, and also pregnant with historic meaning. It reminds one of the survival of tradition in the forms and ceremonies of Parliament. The effect of this blending of the past and present is heightened by the close contiguity of the venerable Abbey, and the open grassy space, known as Parliament Square, with its effigies of great Victorian statesmen—Sir Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston, the Earl of Derby, and Lord Beaconsfield—which front the forecourt of the Palace; and the striking figure of Oliver Cromwell, with sword and Bible, on the sunken grass plot by the side of Westminster Hall. To the contemplative mind the long history of government and administration is presented—its struggles, its controversies, its failures, its successes.

But the most impressive view of the Palace to the eye is obtained from the opposite bank of the Thames. Standing beneath the aged and hoary Lambeth Palace on the Surrey side—town house of the Archbishop of Canterbury—and looking across the river, especially when the mighty waterway is at its full tide, one realizes more completely the Gothic stateliness of this temple of legislation, the outcome of the constructive genius of Sir Charles Barry, and the graceful fancy of Augustus Welby Pugin. The long façade above the river wall and terrace, its uniform symmetry, the lightness and grace of its stone carving, the many steeples and pinnacles—beginning with the delicate tracery of the lofty Clock Tower, close to Westminster Bridge, and terminating with the solid massiveness of the colossal Victoria Tower—form altogether a most imposing masterpiece in architecture, worthy of the ancient and august National Assembly which deliberates within its walls, that mother of representative institutions which perhaps is the greatest gift of the English race to mankind. So it is that something of the secret of the high place which Parliament holds in popular esteem and pride may be found in the grandeur of its home. At any rate, the spectacle presented by the Palace of Westminster does impress the mind with the glory of the purpose of Parliament and its might. Here we see the apotheosis of politics, the science of the progress and well-being of humanity, and the temple in which it is fittingly served.

Thus at Westminster we have not only the flower or the fruit of the national life in the guidance of the State aright, but its roots and fibres going deep down to the very bedrock of the past. For more than six centuries the grand inquest of the Nation has sat at Westminster. At first it was a council of the great and wise summoned by the King personally. When Edward I, “the great law-giver,” sent to the sheriffs writs for the election of two knights for each shire, two citizens for each city, two burgesses for each borough, in addition to himself calling together the prelates and the nobles, the principle of popular election came into operation. The Parliament thus elected and known as the “Model Parliament” was really representative of the Nation at large. It met in the Palace of Westminster so long ago as November, 1295. For over a century the three estates of the realm—the Prelates, the Nobles, and the Commons—deliberated together. The division of Parliament into two Houses—one for the Peers, spiritual and temporal, and the other for the Commons—took place in 1377, the last year of the reign of Edward III. The Lords have always met in the Palace of Westminster. The Commons for the best part of two centuries assembled in the Chapter House, or the Refectory, of Westminster Abbey. They held their last sitting there on the day that Henry VIII died.

Henry’s son and successor, Edward VI, gave St. Stephen’s Chapel—within the Palace of Westminster—to the Commons for their meeting place in 1547, the first year of his reign, and there the representatives of the people regularly met and deliberated until the place was destroyed by fire in 1834. This Chapel, built by Edward III in 1327, the first year of his reign, on the ruins of the original St. Stephen’s Chapel (which was provided by King Stephen in 1147 for the use of the inhabitants of the Palace, and dedicated by him to the first Christian martyr) was in the beautiful Gothic of the period, and Italian artists were brought to London to adorn its walls with religious frescoes. After the Reformation, when the Chapel was transferred from the Crown to the House of Commons, these mural paintings were covered over with a plain, decorous wainscot, which in the gay times of Charles II was in turn hidden behind rich tapestry hangings. These tapestries disappeared in the alterations made by Sir Christopher Wren in 1707, after the Union of England and Scotland, so as to provide accommodation for the forty-five Members from Scotland. The Chamber underwent a final transformation in 1800, when, as a result of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, seats for 100 additional Members had to be found. The old wainscot was then taken down; and although the paintings of the Italian artists of the fourteenth century were found to be in a perfect state of preservation, they were demolished likewise to make room for the required two extra lines of benches on each side. There were now five rows of benches on either side, divided, as in the present Chamber, by a gangway. The Speaker’s Chair was at the top of the Chamber, where the altar originally stood. It was a carved oak armchair, surmounted with the Royal Arms of England. Below it, as now, was the Clerk’s table.

The old House of Lords, like the old House of Commons, was an oblong chamber with rows of benches on each side running up from the floor to the walls. On the walls hung tapestries, divided into compartments by oak frames, illustrating scenes from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and with medallion portraits of the principal English naval captains woven in the borders. They were the gifts of the States of Holland to Queen Elizabeth in commemoration of England’s great deliverance and the ruined dream of Spain. The Throne on which all the Sovereigns of England from 1550 to 1834—from Edward VI to William IV—sat on the assembling of Parliament was at the top of the Chamber. It was a carved gilt armchair standing on a dais. The seat was lined with crimson velvet. Two gilt Corinthian pillars supported a canopy, also of crimson velvet, and the whole was surmounted by a crown.

Between the two Houses lay the Painted Chamber, a survival of the original Palace, erected by Edward the Confessor, who indeed used this particular room as a sleeping apartment and died in it. Its walls were painted with battle scenes by direction of Henry III in the middle of the thirteenth century, and hence its name. Here the Court, before which Charles I was arraigned, sat for the concluding days of the trial. Here Oliver Cromwell and Henry Martin blacked each other’s faces in fun, like giddy young schoolboys, as they signed the warrant which condemned the King to the headsman’s axe. The Chamber was also used for conferences between representatives of both Houses when they differed in regard to a Bill. At these meetings the Peers were seated and wore their hats, while the Commons had humbly to stand uncovered.

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Thus the old Palace of Westminster was historically of great interest. But it had no pretensions to beauty. It was just an architectural patchwork, added to from time to time without any sense of order or unity of design. Interiorily, it was also confined and uncommodious. Yet the idea of pulling it down to give place to a building of nobler proportions and one more suitable to its great purpose was not relished. In the very last session of the Commons that was held in St. Stephen’s Chapel Joseph Hume proposed that new Houses of Parliament should be built in the Green Park. The motion was rejected. Four or five months later, as the buildings were enveloped in flames, one of the spectators wittily cried out: “There is Joe Hume’s motion being carried without a division.”

The great conflagration which destroyed the Palace was on the night of Thursday, October 16, 1834. The Whig Ministry, under Earl Grey, that carried the Reform Act of 1832, broke up in July on the question of appropriating a portion of the revenues of the Church in Ireland to secular purposes, and was succeeded by another Whig Administration with Lord Melbourne as Prime Minister. Parliament was prorogued on August 15th by King William IV in person. It was to meet again on October 23rd. When that day came the ancient Palace of Westminster was a thing of the past. At first it was thought the fire was the work of political incendiaries. But a Committee of the Privy Council found, after a long and searching investigation, that it was due solely to human stupidity. An immense quantity of old wooden “tallies” or notched sticks, originally used as receipts for sums paid into the Exchequer, had accumulated at Westminster, and, after the abolition of this barbaric mode of keeping the national accounts and the substitution of pens, ink and paper, in 1826, the sticks were used as firewood in the Government offices. As the room in which the remaining “tallies” were stored at Westminster was required for another purpose, two men were employed all day, on October 16, 1834, in getting rid of the sticks by burning them in the stove under the House of Lords by which that Chamber was heated. At five o’clock they went home. At half-past six the House of Lords was found to be on fire. The heat from the over-charged flues had ignited the panelling of the Chamber. The progress of the flames could not be stayed, and gradually the conflagration swept over the whole mass of buildings. Thus did the ancient Palace of Westminster disappear through an act of almost incredible carelessness. All that remained of the historic fabric were the cloisters of the old St. Stephen’s Chapel (or House of Commons), the crypt beneath the Chapel, in which the Speaker used to entertain Members at dinners and other social functions, and, happily, Westminster Hall, with its centuried associations of great men and historic deeds. Practically everything else was destroyed, including the Throne in the House of Lords and the Chair in the House of Commons.

On October 23, 1834, the day appointed for the reassembling of Parliament, the two Houses met for a brief and formal sitting amid acres of still smouldering ruins, the Lords within the charred walls of their library, and the Commons in an adjoining committee-room. It was decided temporarily to fit up the House of Lords for the use of the Commons, and the Painted Chamber for the use of the Lords, and a sum of £30,000 was voted for the purpose. A Royal Commission was also appointed to superintend the construction of a new Palace of Westminster. Parliament then adjourned. On November 14th King William dismissed the Melbourne Ministry, and Sir Robert Peel was commanded to form a new Administration. On the advice of the Prime Minister, the King dissolved Parliament on December 29th, and the new Parliament met on February 19, 1835, in the temporary buildings, which continued to be used till the completion of the present Palace of Westminster.

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Among the immense crowd which witnessed the grand and terrible spectacle of the burning of the old Houses of Parliament on that night in October 1834 was an architect named Charles Barry. He had known and loved the ancient and historic pile from his earliest years, for, born in 1795, the son of a stationer who had a shop in Bridge Street, opposite the Houses of Parliament, he had grown to manhood under its very shadow. Parliament decided to have an open competition for designs of the new legislative buildings. The only condition imposed was that the style should be either Gothic or Elizabethan. As many as ninety-seven architects entered the lists. The successful competitor was Barry for his Gothic plan. He was forty years old at the time. In superintending the building and internal decoration of the Palace—subject to the control of the Royal Commission—Barry was assisted by Augustus Welby Pugin, another architect and an authority on the Gothic style. Hume’s idea of removing the Houses of Parliament to the Green Park was revived, but the historic associations of Westminster made too great an appeal. Moreover, was not the Duke of Wellington of opinion—far-seeing man that he was—that the site by the river was the best, as it would be fool-hardy to have the Houses of Parliament accessible on all sides to an attacking mob?

The river wall was begun in 1837. The buildings were not commenced until three years later. The selection of the stone received the anxious consideration of the Commissioners. Finally the hard magnesian limestone from Anston, in Yorkshire, was selected for the exterior of the buildings, and French Caen stone for the interior. Then, on April 27, 1840, the first stone—it may be seen from Westminster Bridge in the south-east angle of the plinth of the Speaker’s House—was laid without any public ceremony by the wife of the architect, and the vast edifice was raised on a bed of concrete, 12 feet thick. Exactly seven years later—April 15, 1847—the Lords first occupied their House; and at the opening of the session of 1852, on November 4th, the Commons assembled in their new Chamber.

The progress of the building was beset with many difficulties and vexations for the designer. The Palace was originally expected to be finished in six years, at a cost of £800,000, exclusive of furniture and fittings. Twenty years passed before it was fully completed, and over £2,000,000 was expended upon it. The Treasury refused to pay Barry an architect’s professional fees of 5 per cent. upon the outlay on the works executed under his direction, and fixed his remuneration at £25,000, or £23,000 less than he held he was entitled to. His designs were also subjected to continuous criticism and attack by other architects. However, he was knighted on the completion of his splendid work. Dying suddenly at Clapham Common on May 12, 1860, his remains were honoured by a grave in Westminster Abbey. His statue by John Henry Foley stands at the foot of the great staircase leading to the committee-rooms of the Houses of Parliament.

4

Probably no feature of London is so familiar in the metropolis, or so widely known by name in the provinces, as the famous clock of the Houses of Parliament. No visitor to London would think of returning home without having seen “Big Ben” and heard him chiming the quarters and booming out the hour. During the summer season hundreds of thousands of strangers, not only from the provinces, but from far-off lands, gaze up at his massive, honest face, proud and delighted to have made the acquaintance of so great a London celebrity. It is the largest clock in the world. Each of the four dials, there being one for each point of the compass, is of white enamelled glass and 23 feet in diameter. The minute marks on the dial look as if they were close together. They are 14 inches apart. The numerals are two feet long. The minute hand is 14 feet, and the hour hand six feet. To wind the clock takes about five hours. The time is regulated by electric communication with Greenwich Observatory.

The clock has a large bell to toll the hours and four smaller ones to chime the quarters. The large bell is called “Big Ben,” after Sir Benjamin Hall, who was First Commissioner of Works when the Clock Tower was erected. It weighs 13½ tons. Twenty men could stand under it. For a clapper it has a piece of iron 2 feet long, 12 inches in diameter, and weighing 12 cwt. No wonder, then, that there are few things more impressive than “Big Ben” tolling the hour of twelve, in his slow, measured and solemn tones, especially at midnight, when the roar of London is hushed in slumber. And what is said by the full chime of bells before the striking of each hour? Here is the verse, simple and beautiful, to which the chime—a run of notes from the accompaniment to “I know that my Redeemer liveth” in Handel’s Messiah—is set:

Lord, through this hour

Be Thou our guide,

That by Thy Power

No foot may slide.

During the session of Parliament a brilliant steady light, blazing from a lantern over “Big Ben,” may be seen at night from most parts of London. It indicates that the House of Commons is sitting. So long as the representatives of the people are in conclave, the light flashes its white flame through the darkness. It vanishes the moment the House rises. A wire runs from the lantern down to a room under the floor of the House of Commons, and when the question, “That this House do now adjourn” is agreed to, a man stationed below pulls a switch, which instantly extinguishes the light. When this beacon was first set on high, and for many years after, it shone only towards the west, for it was thought unlikely than an M.P. would dwell in, or even visit, any other quarter of the town. But with the extension of the franchise Parliament became democratized, and a new lantern was provided which sheds its beams in the direction of Peckham as well as of Pall Mall. The light should be regarded by all who see it as a sacred symbol of the fire of liberty, law and justice ever burning in the House of Commons. Another comparatively recent innovation is the flying of the Union Jack from the iron flagstaff, 64 feet high, which tops the 336 feet of the Victoria Tower, on days that Parliament is sitting. Only the Royal Standard was seen, before that, on the rare occasions that Queen Victoria came to open Parliament in person. Small as the Union Jack seems to the upturned gaze of persons in the streets, it is of remarkable dimensions, being 60 feet long and 45 feet wide. I saw one day the flag of another country flying for the first time side by side with the Union Jack over the Victoria Tower. It was the Stars and Stripes. The day was April 20, 1917—the day on which the United States joined France, Italy and England in the War against Germany.

5

The Palace of Westminster covers an area of nine acres. Eleven courts or quadrangles give light and air to its 1,200 or 1,300 rooms, its hundred staircases, and its two miles of corridors. In the very heart of the Palace is the great Central Hall, above which rises a tower terminating in a spire, and right and left of the Hall are the two Houses of Parliament—the Commons’ Chamber nearer to the Clock Tower, the Lords’ Chamber nearer to the Victoria Tower—while about them lie the retiring rooms of their respective Members and the homes of their principal officers. There, used to be twenty official residences in the Palace. They have been considerably reduced in order to provide more accommodation for Members. Still, on the Commons side, the Speaker, the Clerk and the Sergeant-at-Arms are commodiously housed. In the old Palace a Minister had no escape from the House of Commons except the Library or smoking-room, which were available to all Members, and one gathers from the published recollections of old parliamentarians that it was not seemly for a Cabinet Minister to be seen there. “The place for a Minister,” it used to be said, “if at the House, is in the House.” In the new Palace every Minister has a private room in the corridors at the back of the Speaker’s Chair, in which he may transact departmental business and receive visitors, when his presence in the House is not particularly required.

The principal entrance to the Palace of Westminster is by St. Stephen’s Porch, in Old Palace Yard. Immediately to the left extends the wonderful and impressive Westminster Hall, the thrilling associations of which must quicken the pulses of the least imaginative. Straight ahead lies St. Stephen’s Hall, leading to the Central Hall of the Houses of Parliament. This noble hall is traversed daily, during the session, by thousands of the public on their way to or from the Legislative Chambers. How many pay heed to its strange vicissitudes? It occupies the site of old St. Stephen’s Chapel (originally the Chapel Royal of the ancient Palace of Westminster), in which, as I have said, the Commons sat regularly from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. In the building of the new Palace, St. Stephen’s Hall was raised on the vaulted foundations of St. Stephen’s Chapel. The positions of the Speaker’s Chair and the Table are marked by brass plates set in the floor of St. Stephen’s Hall. Here it was that one of the most historic of parliamentary incidents took place. On this very spot stood Charles I and Mr. Speaker Lenthal when the King demanded whether there were then present in the House the five Members, including Pym and Hampden, who had promoted the Grand Remonstrance against his unconstitutional action, and the Speaker made his famous reply: “I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am,” and when the angry cries of “Privilege, Privilege!” raised by Members were the presage of civil war. St. Stephen’s Hall fittingly contains statues of twelve of the greatest and wisest statesmen whose voices so often rang through the old House of Commons. The statesmen thus honoured are Selden, Hampden, Falkland, Clarendon, Somers, Walpole, Chatham, Mansfield, Burke, Fox, Pitt and Grattan; and the selection was made by the historians Macaulay and Hallam.

Beneath St. Stephen’s Hall is the old crypt of St. Stephen’s Chapel. Like the Chapel, it was originally used for religious services. For centuries after the Reformation it was used as a place for shooting rubbish. About a quarter of a century before the fire of 1834 it was converted into a dining-room in which the dinners given by the Speaker to Members took place. After the fire the crypt was restored to its original purpose, and for a time was a place of worship for the numerous residents within the area of the Palace of Westminster. It is the most beautiful place in the Palace, with its altar, inlaid marble floor, walls of mosaic and groined ceiling. It is also a place of solitude and silence. Not for years has it been used as a place of worship. The only sound to which it now re-echoes is the cry of the infant as the water of baptism is poured on its head. One of the few privileges of an M.P. is that a child born to him may be christened in St. Stephen’s Crypt.

A new Member is not many hours in the Palace of Westminster before he has secured the special peg for his hat and overcoat in the beautiful cloisters of old St. Stephen’s, which has been turned into a cloak-room for the Commons; obtained one of the long rows of lockers, or presses, in the corridors, immediately surrounding the Chamber, to which each Member is entitled, for storing books and papers; enjoyed a pipe or cigar in the smoking-room; had a meal in one of the several dining-rooms; read the newspapers in the news-room, or made himself acquainted with some of the contents of the extensive Library; strolled on the Terrace; had tea in the tea-room, and dispatched numbers of letters on the official stationery of the House to relatives and friends giving his first impressions of the scene where glory or obscurity awaits him as a representative of the people.

6

One of the most pleasant adjuncts of the House of Commons is the large and lofty suite of rooms overlooking the Thames, which is devoted to the Library. But there is more in these apartments than books. They also contain some rare and most interesting historical relics, parliamentary and political. Here in a glass case is shown a manuscript volume, stained and mouldered, of the old Journals of the House of Commons. The writing on the pages that are open is not easily decipherable. But it is well worth while endeavouring to peruse it, for it is the official chronicle of the raid of Charles I on the House of Commons. The shaky handwriting tells of the agitation of the Clerk when he made the record.

In the Library is also to be seen a memento of a curious privilege enjoyed of old by Members of Parliament. This is a collection of envelopes franked by eminent Members of both Houses. It comprises about 10,000 signatures, and covers the period from 1784 to 1840, when franking was abolished. By the system of franking, Peers and Commons had the free delivery of letters posted by themselves and their friends. It was introduced in 1660 to relieve Members of some of the expenses incurred in the discharge of their national duties. But this freedom of the Post Office was not confined to letters. Household furniture and even a pack of hounds were sent free through the post by M.P.’s in England, and in Ireland an M.P. franked his wife and children from Galway to Dublin and back on a holiday trip. Members also signed packets of letters wholesale and gave them away to friends. One noble lord thereby franked the tidings of his own death. He died suddenly at his desk after addressing some covers to friends, and the family economically used the covers to tell those friends that he had passed away. Ultimately, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the daily allowance to each Member of both Houses was limited to ten sent by himself and fifteen received by him. All such letters had to bear on their covers the signatures of those who franked them. In the House of Commons collection are to be seen the autographs of archbishops and bishops, of Peers and of Commoners, including such celebrities as Nelson, Byron, Canning, Fox, Peel, Palmerston, Wellington, Clive, Cobbett, Grattan, O’Connell and Gladstone. In the year 1837 as many as 7,400,000 franked letters were posted, at an estimated loss to the revenue of the Post Office of over £1,000,000. At the same time all sorts of devices had to be resorted to by the poor to evade the heavy postage, from 10d. to 1s. 6d., which was then charged for letters. Rowland Hill, the author of the penny postal system, used to underline words in newspapers which he sent home—a Whig politician’s name to indicate that he was well, and a Tory’s that he was ill. Franking was abolished in 1840, on the establishment of the penny post. Members, however, are still entitled to the privilege of sending free through the post a limited number of copies of a Bill to their constituents, by endorsing the covering wrapper with their signatures.

The table of the old House of Commons, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1706, and at which Burke, Pitt, Fox, Canning and Peel stood while addressing the House, was found in the ruins, after the fire of 1834, almost uninjured. It is now preserved in the tea-room. In one of the smoking-rooms is to be seen an interesting memorial of Henry Broadhurst, one of the first of the Labour members. In a glass case are the mallet and chisels used by him as a stonemason employed on the buildings of the new Palace of Westminster, which he was afterwards to enter, not only as a Member, but as a Minister, for he served as Under-Secretary of the Home Department in 1886.

7

The old Houses of Parliament had no such pleasant lounge as the Terrace, which extends the whole length of the river front. On summer nights Members who desired a blow of fresh air promenaded old Westminster Bridge. “It was a beautiful, rosy, dead calm morning when we broke up a little before five to-day,” wrote Francis Jeffrey, M.P. and editor of the Edinburgh Review, to a friend on April 20, 1831, in reference to a late and stormy sitting over the first Reform Bill, “and I took three pensive turns along the solitude of Westminster Bridge, admiring the sharp clearness of St. Paul’s, and all the city spires soaring up in a cloudless sky, the orange-red light that was beginning to play on the trees of the Abbey and the old windows of the Speaker’s house, and the flat green mist of the river floating upon a few lazy hulks on the tide and moving low under the arches. It was a curious contrast with the long previous imprisonment in the stifling, roaring House, amid dying candles, and every sort of exhalation.” If Jeffrey could return from the Shades and see the Terrace, especially on a fine afternoon in June or July, when “five o’clock tea” is being served, how amazed he would be, and how he would curse his fate that he should have been born a century or so too soon! Perhaps? For there are legislators who think that “Tea on the Terrace” is a function lowering to the dignity of Parliament. A part of the Terrace is reserved for their sole use by a notice, “For Members Only,” where they may ruminate in gloomy aloofness undisturbed by the smiles of beauty and the rustle of her skirts.

As the new Member explores the corridors and rooms, he will see the walls hung with portraits of all the Prime Ministers, all the Speakers, and a long line of Chancellors of the Exchequer, besides those of other distinguished politicians who never attained to office. Apart from their innate interest as counterfeit presentments of great statesmen, in mezzotints or line engravings, these pictures should stimulate the ambition of the new Member to make a name for himself. There is one way in which the new Member may employ his leisure at Westminster with profit to the tax-payer. That is to follow the excellent example set by Passmore Edwards, the philanthropist, who sat in Parliament for a number of years in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Writing in his autobiography, A Few Footprints, he says:

I would write the words “Waste not, want not” over the doors of parliament houses, palaces, cottages, workshops and kitchens; and if the spirit and meaning of the motto were put in practice the world would spin through space with a double joy. While a Member of Parliament I always, when opportunity offered, lowered the gas within reach that was burning to waste. I did so for a double reason—to prevent waste and to preserve the purity of the air of the House; but I never saw or heard of any other Member or servant of the House doing a similar thing.

“True political economy,” Edwards adds, “is in reality true moral economy. I hate waste anywhere and everywhere.”

CHAPTER VIII
ASSEMBLING OF THE NEW PARLIAMENT

1

The procedure of Parliament is very ancient. An old-world spirit animates especially the quaint and curious ceremonies that mark the assembling of a new Parliament. The House of Commons is crowded. What a number of strange faces are in the throng! It is easy to distinguish the new Members by the eager looks of curiosity and wonder, not unmixed with triumph, with which they gaze on every feature of the historic Chamber and follow every movement of the officials, and the shyness with which they cheer, or indulge in forms of applause unfamiliar to the House, such as the clapping of hands, as their leaders appear and take their places on the two front benches—the Treasury Bench on one side and the Opposition Bench on the other. But this shyness soon disappears. There is a story told that an old Member was thus addressed by a new Member at the opening of a new Parliament: “If you please, sir, where do the Members for boroughs sit?” The incident was told to Disraeli, who was much diverted. “Yes,” said he, “and in three months we shall have that Member bawling and bellowing and making such a row there will be no holding him!” At one time county Members and borough Members were distinct not only in class, but in manners and dress. The ancient distinction between “Knight of the Shire,” “Citizen of the City,” “Burgess of the Borough,” was removed by the Ballot Act of 1872, all representatives being grouped as “Members of the House of Commons.”

As yet they are without a head. They have no Speaker. In fact, the House of Commons has not yet been constituted. It is only when the Speaker is elected and the Members have taken the oath of allegiance and signed the Roll that the House really begins its corporate existence. The first thing to be done, therefore, is for this throng to obtain that coherency, that solidarity, which is given to an assembly by the appointment of a president. Until the Speaker is elected, the Clerk, sitting in wig and gown at the Table, assumes the direction of affairs. But before the Commons can appoint a Speaker they must have the consent of the Sovereign, and that is given them at the Bar of the House of Lords.

Suddenly the buzz of conversation, the interchange of jokes, and the laughter which follows, are stilled by a stentorian cry of “Black Rod.” It comes from the door-keeper in the lobby outside. Presently “Black Rod,” the messenger of the House of Lords, appears. He is never allowed free access to the House of Commons. The doors are closed in his face by the Serjeant-at-Arms, and he has to knock for admission before it is granted to him. He walks slowly up the floor, carrying in his right hand a short ebony rod tipped with gold, the emblem of his office. On reaching the Table “Black Rod” delivers his message, which is an invitation to the Commons to come to the House of Lords. Then, retreating backwards down the floor to the Bar, he waits until joined by the Clerk, when the two officials walk across the intervening lobbies to the House of Lords, followed by a struggling crowd of new Members, determined not to miss anything, shoving and jostling each other in their eagerness to secure good places in the “Gilded Chamber.”

“Gilded Chamber,” indeed! Gladstone’s most appropriate description of the House of Lords springs at once to the mind, such is its gorgeous colouring in which gold predominates, and its glow and sparkle, especially when the electric lights are on. The first thing that arrests the eye of the spectator is the Throne, provided with two chairs for the King and Queen, and emblazoned with the Royal Arms, on a dais at the top of the Chamber. It is unoccupied, but seated on a bench beneath it, all in a row, are five Lords, arrayed in ample red robes, slashed with ermine or white fur, and three-cornered hats. These are the Lords Commissioners, to whom the King delegates his authority in matters parliamentary when his Majesty is not present in person.

When the Commons, headed by the Clerk, stand huddled together at the Bar, the Lord Chancellor—the central personage among the Lords Commissioners—without rising from his seat or even lifting his hat by way of salutation, informs them that his Majesty has been pleased to issue Letters Patent under the Great Seal constituting a Royal Commission to do all things in his Majesty’s name necessary to the holding of the Parliament. He then addresses the Members of the two Houses of the Legislature in the following words:

My Lords and Gentlemen,—We have it in command from his Majesty to let you know that his Majesty will, as soon as the Members of both Houses shall be sworn, declare the causes of his calling this Parliament; and it being necessary that a Speaker of the House of Commons shall be first chosen, it is his Majesty’s pleasure that you, gentlemen of the House of Commons, repair to the place where you are to sit and there proceed to the choice of some proper person to be your Speaker, and that you present such person whom you shall so choose here to-morrow at twelve o’clock for his Majesty’s Royal approbation.

Then the Clerk and the Members of the House of Commons, without a word having been spoken on their side, return to their Chamber.

2

The election of Speaker is at once proceeded with in the House of Commons. There is no ceremony at Westminster more novel and interesting, and none that illustrates more strikingly the continuity through the centuries of parliamentary customs. The Clerk of the House of Commons presides. He sits in his own seat at the Table. Immediately behind him is the untenanted high-canopied Chair of the Speaker. The Mace, that glittering emblem of the Speaker’s authority, is invisible. The Clerk may not speak a word in the discharge of his duties on this great occasion. All he is permitted to do is to rise and silently point with outstretched finger at the Member who, according to previous arrangement, is to propose the candidate for the Chair, and later on to indicate in the same dumb way the Member who is to second the motion. If there is to be no contest, and at the assembling of a new Parliament the former Speaker is invariably re-elected unanimously, the motion that he “do take the Chair of this House as Speaker” is made by a leading unofficial Ministerialist, and seconded by an old and respected Member of the Opposition. The Government take no part in the ceremony so far, in accordance with an old-established tradition that the election or re-election of a Speaker is the independent and unfettered action of the House. The motion is not put to the House in the customary manner. The Clerk does not say, “The question is that James William Lowther do take the Chair of this House as Speaker.” The Speaker-designate rises in his place on one of the back benches and humbly submits himself to the will of the House. The Commons express their unanimous approval of the motion by cheers without question put. Thus the Speaker-Elect is literally “called” to the Chair by the House.

In one respect only has time altered the symbolic details of the ceremony. In the long, long ago it was the custom for the Member chosen for the Chair humbly to protest that of all the House he was the least suited for the exalted position. An amusing instance of this modest declaration of unfitness comes down to us from the days of Queen Elizabeth. The House of Commons having met for the choice of a Speaker, Mr. Serjeant Yelverton was proposed by Sir William Knowles. “I know him,” said Knowles, “to be a man wise and learned, secret and circumspect, religious and faithful, every way able to fill the place.” “Aye, aye, aye,” cried the whole House; “let him be Speaker.” Then rose the modest, blushing Yelverton. He said he was at a loss to account for his selection for the Chair, lacking as he did every quality that was necessary in a Speaker. He had no merit and no ability. He was moreover a poor man with a large family. Nor was he of a sufficiently imposing presence. The Speaker ought to be a big man, stately and comely, well-spoken, his voice great, his carriage majestical, his nature haughty, and his purse plentiful and heavy. But, contrarily, he was of a small body, he spoke indifferently, his voice was low, his carriage of the commonest fashion, his nature soft and yielding, and his purse light. He adjured the House to consider well before it made the grievous mistake of appointing to the Chair a man so totally unfitted for the post. But the House, mightily impressed by these humble expostulations, so becoming in a candidate for the Speakership, persisted in unanimously electing Mr. Serjeant Yelverton; as, indeed, Mr. Serjeant Yelverton, despite all his protestations of unworthiness, well and gladly knew they would do.

It is not so long since another amusing piece of comedy used to be enacted on this otherwise serious and solemn occasion. The proposer and seconder of the Speaker-designate were required in the prescribed parliamentary phrase to “take him out of his place” and conduct him to the Chair; while he was obliged to wriggle his shoulders as if he were struggling to free himself from their hands and escape from the House. Surely they were not serious—he meant to convey—in conferring upon one so lowly and unworthy an office so dignified and exalted? This display of mock modesty is now a thing of the past. The only part of it that survives is that the proposer and seconder approach the Speaker-designate, and when they are within a few paces of him, the Speaker-designate rises and walks to the Chair, his sponsors following close behind. The Speaker-designate does not, however, immediately go into the Chair. Standing on the dais, he again thanks the House for the high honour conferred on him, and then takes his seat as “Speaker-Elect,” as he is called at this stage of his evolution. The glittering Mace, which all the time lay hidden under the Table, is now placed by the Serjeant-at-Arms in its usual position within sight of all eyes to indicate that the House is sitting. Then follow congratulations generally offered by the Leader of the House and the Leader of the Opposition, after which the House adjourns. The first day’s ceremony of the opening of the new Parliament is over.

3

But although the Commons have chosen one of their number “to take the Chair of this House as Speaker,” the Constitution requires that before he can enter upon the duties of his office he must submit himself in the House of Lords for the Sovereign’s ratification of his election. Until the approval of the Crown has been signified he continues to be styled “Mr. Speaker-Elect.” Next day sees the completion of the ceremony of Mr. Speaker’s election. He enters the Chamber, by way of the lobby, heralded by the ushers who preceded him, crying “Way for the Speaker-Elect” with an emphasis on “elect,” and attended by the Serjeant-at-Arms. It is also evident from the dress of the choice of the Commons, that his evolution as Mr. Speaker is not yet complete. He is still, as it were, in the chrysalis or transition state. He is seen to be only half-made up, wearing, it is true, the customary Court dress—cutaway coat, knee-breeches, silk stockings, and shoes—but not the customary full-flowing silk gown, and with only a small bob-wig—that is, the short wig of counsel when practising in courts of law—instead of the customary full-bottomed wig with wings, which fall over his shoulders. Further, it is noticeable that the Serjeant-at-Arms does not carry the Mace on his shoulder—as he usually does—but holds it reclining in the hollow of his left arm, his right hand grasping its end.

The Lords assemble on the second day of the new Parliament at the same hour as the Commons, and once more is “Black Rod” despatched to invite the attendance of Members of the Lower House to the House of Peers, to hear the Royal will in regard to the election of the Speaker. On arriving at the Upper Chamber, the Speaker-Elect stands at the centre of the Bar, with “Black Rod” to his right, the Serjeant-at-Arms (who has left the Mace outside) to his left, and his proposer and seconder immediately behind in the forefront of the crowd of Commons who have followed him across the lobbies. He bows to the Lords Commissioners, who, in all the glory of scarlet robes and cocked hats, are again seated on the form in front of the Throne, and they who yesterday encountered the Commons without lifting a hat, now acknowledge the salutation of the Speaker-Elect by thrice respectfully bending their uncovered heads. Then the Speaker-Elect addresses them as follows:

I have to acquaint your Lordships that, in obedience to his Royal commands, his Majesty’s faithful Commons have, in the exercise of their undoubted right and privilege, proceeded to the choice of a Speaker. Their choice has fallen upon myself, and I therefore present myself at your Lordship’s Bar humbly submitting myself for his Majesty’s gracious approbation.

To this the Lord Chancellor, addressing the Speaker-Elect by name, replies:

We are commanded to assure you that his Majesty is so fully sensible of your zeal for the public service, and your undoubted efficiency to execute all the arduous duties of the position which his faithful Commons have selected you to discharge, that he does most readily approve and confirm your election as Speaker.

His election having thus been ratified by the Sovereign, Mr. Speaker “submits himself in all humility to his Majesty’s royal will and pleasure”; and if, says he, in the discharge of his duties, and in maintaining the rights and privileges of the Commons’ House of Parliament, he should fall inadvertently into error, he “entreats that the blame may be imputed to him alone, and not to his Majesty’s faithful Commons.” Assertions of the rights and privileges of the House of Commons follow fast on expressions of loyalty to the Throne during the ten minutes that the Speaker, surrounded by “the faithful Commons,” stands at the Bar of the House of Lords, and holds this significant historical colloquy—which has been repeated at every election of Speaker on the assembling of a new Parliament for many centuries—with the Lord Chancellor, not as the President of the House of Lords, but as the representative of the Sovereign; for the next duty of the Speaker is to request from the Sovereign recognition of all the ancient rights and privileges of Members of Parliament, which are “readily granted” by the Sovereign, speaking through the Lord Chancellor. This ends the ceremonial. The Speaker and the Commons return to their Chamber as they came. But, see, the Mace is now borne high on the shoulder of the Serjeant-at-Arms, and hear the usher announcing “Mr. Speaker” and “Way for Mr. Speaker.” The Speaker passes through the Chamber to his rooms, and in a few minutes comes back arrayed in the complete robes of his office. Then, standing on the dais of the Chair, he reports what took place in the House of Lords. It is one of the curious customs of Parliament that the Speaker always assumes that he has been to the House of Lords alone, and that the Commons are in absolute ignorance of what has happened there. Without the slightest tremor of emotion, or the faintest indication of satisfaction, the Commoners learn that their “ancient rights and undoubted privileges” have been fully confirmed, particularly freedom from arrest and molestation, liberty of speech in their debates, and free access to the Sovereign. They know full well that if they do anything criminal they may feel the dread touch of the policeman on their shoulders—freedom from arrest for debt was abolished long ago—and they know also that even if they would they could not disturb the domestic privacy of the King. So the solemn announcement evokes not a solitary cheer. But there is loud applause upon the Speaker thus finally concluding: “I have now again to make my grateful acknowledgments to the House for the honour done to me in placing me again in the Chair, and to assure it of my complete devotion to its service.” The ancient and picturesque ceremony of the election of Speaker of the House of Commons is completed.

4

At the assembling of every new Parliament the Members for the City of London, in accordance with an ancient custom, have the privilege of sitting on the Treasury Bench with the Ministers, though for the opening day only. I have frequently read in the newspapers that this privilege was given to the City of London by way of commemorating the protection afforded to the Five Members on that historic day, January 4, 1642, when Charles I came down to the House of Commons to arrest them for their opposition to his will, and found to his discomfiture that “the birds had flown,” to use his own words. The statement is not well established. It is a singular thing that no written record of the origin or existence of the custom is to be found at the Guildhall any more than at the House of Commons. But there is authority for saying that the right was exercised in the time of Elizabeth, and over seventy years before the conflict between Charles I and the Parliament.

The earliest reference to it is contained in a Report on the Procedure of the English Parliament prepared in 1568 at the request of the then Speaker of the Irish Parliament by Hooker, a well-known antiquarian of the time, who was a Member both of the English and Irish Parliaments. This report was printed and presented to the Irish Parliament, and was reprinted in London about 1575 under the title of “The Order and Usuage of the Keeping of a Parliament in England.” It is set out fully in Lord Mountmorres’s History of the Principal Transactions in the Irish Parliament from 1634 to 1666, published in 1792. Hooker, describing the seating of Members in the House of Commons, says:

Upon the lower row on both sides the Speaker, sit such personages as be of the King’s Privy Counsel, or of his Chief Officers; but as for any other, none claimeth, or can claim, any place, but sitteth as he cometh, saving that on the right hand of the Speaker next beneath the said Counsels, the Londoners and the citizens of York do sit, and so in order should sit all the citizens accordingly.

It will be noticed that the representatives of York as well as those of London sat, according to Hooker, on the Front Bench to the right of the Speaker. Probably the privilege was conferred upon London and York as being the first and second cities of the Kingdom. But it seems clear that the privilege was not at first confined merely to the opening day of a new Parliament, but was exercised at every sitting of the House of Commons. The only other authoritative statement on this subject which I have found is in Oldfield’s Representative History of Great Britain and Ireland, published in 1816. The passage is as follows: “It (York City) sends two Members to Parliament, who are chosen by the freemen in general, and who enjoy the privilege of sitting in their scarlet gowns next the Members for London on the Privy Councillors’ bench on the first day of the meeting of every new Parliament.” In 1910, the then representatives of York, A. Rowntree and John Butcher, with a view to asserting this privilege in the same manner as it is asserted by the representatives of the City of London, laid the facts before Mr. Speaker Lowther. After a full consideration of the matter he gave it as his opinion that, assuming the right to have once existed, it must be considered, in the absence of any evidence of having been used in modern times, to have lapsed, and could not now be properly claimed or exercised.

5

On the morning of the day that the new Parliament meets for business—the day on which the King’s Speech is read—the corridors, vaults and cellars of the Palace of Westminster are searched to see that all is well with the building and safe for the King, Lords and Commons to assemble within it—a ceremony (for it is now only that) which is repeated on the opening day of every session. It recalls the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up the Parliament in 1605.

The Commons possess but one memento of Guy, that most notorious of all anti-parliamentarians. In a glass case in the Members’ Library may be seen a long, narrow key with a hinge in the centre for folding it up—so that it might be carried more conveniently in the pocket—which was found on Fawkes when he was captured. It was the key to the cellar of gunpowder extending under the House of Lords, though it was really part of an adjoining empty house which the conspirators had taken for their purpose. The custom of searching the Houses of Parliament is popularly supposed to date from the Gunpowder Plot, but it did not commence until eighty-five years later. According to a document preserved in the House of Lords, an anonymous warning received in 1690 by the Marquess of Carmarthen, setting forth, “There is great cause to judge that there is a second Gunpowder Plot, or some other such great mischief, designing against the King and Parliament by a frequent and great resort of notorious ill-willers at most private hours to the house of one Hutchinson in the Old Palace Yard, Westminster, situate very dangerous for such purpose,” led to a thorough examination of the buildings, and though nothing was then found, from that time to this the search appears to have been regularly made year after year.

The search party consists of twelve Yeomen of the Guard from the Tower in all the picturesque glory of their Tudor uniforms, accompanied by representatives of the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Office of Works, and the two police inspectors of the Houses of Lords and Commons. They tramp through the miles of corridors and lobbies, looking carefully into every nook and corner, and down in the equally extensive basements they examine everything with the utmost minuteness, going among gas pipes, steam pipes, hot-water pipes, electric-light conductors, to make sure that no explosives have been deposited there. When the search was first ordered, years and years ago, the Yeomen of the Guard were directed to carry lanterns to light their way through the dark passages. The corridors and cellars are now flooded with electric light. But the search party, still obeying the old order, march along swinging their lanterns. And still the solemn function ends up with service of cake and wine to the old Beefeaters, and the drinking of long life to the King, with a hip-hip hurrah! Only in one respect is there a departure from the old procedure. At one time it was customary, when the inspection was over, for the Lord Great Chamberlain to send a mounted soldier with the message “All’s well” to the Sovereign. The mounted soldier no longer rides post-haste to the King at Buckingham Palace; but every year the Vice-Chamberlain lets his Majesty know, by private wire, that everything is ready for his coming to meet the Lords and Commons in the House of Lords to announce from the Throne the business for which he has summoned Parliament to meet.

CHAPTER IX
TAKING THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE

1

Let us linger awhile in the Upper Chamber to note what happens when, on the second day of the opening of a new Parliament, the Commons return to their own House, having at their head no longer a mere “Speaker-Elect,” but a fully-fledged “Mr. Speaker,” who has been completely evolved from the chrysalis state by the magic influence of the Royal approbation. As the noise of the retreating feet of the exultant Commons irreverently breaks for a minute or so the solemn stillness of the House of Lords, the five Lords Commissioners rise from their bench, and with slow, toilsome footsteps, as if the weight of their ample scarlet robes trailing on the ground behind them impede their progress, disappear behind the Throne. After a brief interval the Lord Chancellor reappears, attired in his customary robes—which, like the Speaker’s, consist of a full-bottomed wig and a flowing black gown worn over levee dress—and takes his seat on the Woolsack. The junior bishop among the Lords Spiritual present reads the prayers, while the peers stand with bowed and reverent heads. Then the process of swearing-in begins. The Lord Chancellor is the first to come to the table; and, with a copy of the New Testament in his right hand, and a large paste-board card containing the words of the oath, in his left, he repeats, after the Clerk of the Parliaments, the declaration that he will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty; after which he kisses the book, and writes his name on the Roll of Parliament. It is the first signature on the virgin sheet. The roll is of a different kind in each House. In the Upper Chamber it is really a roll. It consists of one long sheet of paper, about 16 inches in width, which winds round a roller. The peers simply write their ordinary signatures, such as “Birkenhead,” “Morley,” “Rosebery,” “Salisbury,” or “Lansdowne.”

As the Lord Chancellor returns to the Woolsack, Garter King of Arms (the head of The Heralds’ College), appears, in his gorgeous tabard, emblazoned back and front with the Royal Arms and many quaint devices, and delivers to the Clerk the Roll of the Lords. The Clerk of the Crown in Chancery, wearing wig and gown, also enters and presents a certificate of the return of the sixteen representative Scottish peers, who are elected for every new Parliament by the peerage of Scotland. Then the peers come to the table without any order or precedence being observed, and each, having first handed over his writ of summons, a small piece of limp parchment, to the Clerk, takes the oath, and subscribes the Roll.

“Once a peer, a peer for life,” it is said, truly enough, and yet every Lord of Parliament must receive, at the dissolution, a fresh summons from the Crown, and must take a fresh oath of allegiance, before he can resume his legislative duties in the new Parliament. The writs are issued from the Crown Office at Westminster to “the Lords spiritual and temporal” individually. The mediæval quaintness of the summons—it has been in use for over six centuries—is shown in its principal passage:

We strictly enjoining, command you upon the faith and allegiance by which you are bound to Us, that the weightiness of the said affairs and imminent perils considered (waiving all excuses), you be at the said day and place personally present with Us, and with the said Prelates, Great Men, and Peers, to treat and give your council upon the affairs aforesaid. And this, as you regard Us and Our honour and the safety and defence of the said United Kingdom and Church and dispatch of the said affairs, in no wise do you omit.

The writ sent to the spiritual peers is the same, save that they are commanded to attend upon their “faith and love” instead of their “faith and allegiance,” as in the case of the peers temporal. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and the Bishops of London, Durham and Winchester, become Lords of Parliament immediately on their consecration, but the other prelates of the Church Establishment must await, in the order of seniority of consecration, writs of summons to the House of Lords, according as vacancies arise by death or resignation in the estate of the Lords spiritual. The number of spiritual peers is limited to twenty-six, and as there are thirty-six dioceses in the Established Church, ten of the prelates are therefore not Lords of Parliament, but all of them—save the Bishop of Sodor and Man—may hope, in time, to have seats in the House of Lords by succession. It is an interesting fact that the making of an affirmation instead of taking the oath—a not infrequent occurrence in the Commons—is rarely to be seen in the Lords. The only time I have witnessed it was when Viscount Morley of Blackburn (better known in literature and politics as John Morley) came to the table on his first introduction to the House of Lords in May 1908, and the Clerk produced, in the usual course, the New Testament and the copy of the oath. Lord Morley refused to be sworn, and insisted on making affirmation instead. As there was no precedent for such a demand in the House of Lords, no form of affirmation was available; but after a hurried consultation between the Lord Chancellor and the Clerk, the terms of the oath, with the appeal to the Almighty, “So help me, God” omitted, were made to serve the purpose.

2

In the House of Commons the procedure of swearing-in members is somewhat different. The Speaker is the first to take the oath. As soon as he returns to the Chair, in the full garb of his office, he stands on the dais, and repeats the words of the oath after the Clerk. It is a very simple declaration, and is the same in both Houses:

I, —— ——, swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty King George, his heirs and successors, according to law. So help me, God.

The Speaker then signs the Test Roll, which, differing in form from the Roll of Parliament in the Upper House, is a large book strongly bound in leather, with brass clasps, opening at the bottom instead of at the sides, and with a sheet of blotting-paper between every two leaves. A new Test Roll is provided for each new Parliament.

After the Speaker, Members are sworn in in batches. To expedite matters, two tables are brought into the Chamber, and, being placed in line with the Clerk’s Table, are each supplied with copies of the New Testament and five large paste-boards, on which the oath is printed in bold type. At each table one of the clerks-assistant stands, and administers the oath to the Members, as they present themselves in groups of five, two or three holding between them a Testament, and each having in his left hand one of the oath-cards, the words of which they repeat, and then kiss the book. The first to take the oath and sign the roll after the Speaker are the Leader of the House and the Leader of the Opposition. Members of “his Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council,” and the Ministers, past and present, next have precedence, and take the oath separately from the other Members.

In the Lords, as we have seen, each peer, before taking the oath and subscribing the Roll, gives the Clerk his writ of summons. But in the Commons no proof of identity—no evidence that they are duly elected M.P.’s—is required from the gentlemen that present themselves at the Table to take the oath and subscribe the Test Roll. It is true that the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery receives at his office at Westminster from the returning officer of every constituency what is called the return of the writ—that is, actually the writ of election, with the name of the elected representative certified on the back—and that the names of the Members, with the constituency each represents, are inscribed in a book, called the “Return Book,” which is delivered by the Clerk of the Crown to the Clerk of the House of Commons on the day the new Parliament opens.

But though ordinarily all the approaches to the Chamber are guarded by vigilant policemen and door-keepers, who know every Member of the House, it is obviously impossible at the opening of a new Parliament—when there is a large influx of new Members—for the officials on duty to be able to discriminate between those who say they are representatives and those who may be strangers. It would not be difficult, therefore, for an impostor of nerve and audacity, with some knowledge of the House and its ways, to enter the House by personating some Member whom he knew could not be in attendance, to vote in a division on the Speakership, should there be a contest for the Chair, and even to take the oath and subscribe the Roll. There is no case of personation on record, but it is possible in the circumstances. The Return Book is a conspicuous object on the Table during the swearing-in of Members. It is there for reference by the Clerk, in the event of a question arising as to the identity of any person who may present himself. However, as it contains merely the name of each Member and his constituency, and not his portrait and description, it is hardly an insuperable bar to personation, and accordingly, in the case of new Members, the question of identity has to be taken on trust by the Clerk. But there is no doubt that a Member who for any reason did not want to take the oath could quite easily evade the obligation.

3

In the case of a contested election for the Speakership, Members would of course have to vote without having been sworn. What, it may be asked, would happen in the event of a Member, after the election of the Speaker, sitting and voting without having taken the oath and signed the Roll? The penalties provided by an Act passed in 1866 are a fine of £500 for each commission of the offence of voting, and the immediate deprivation of the seat, which, ipso facto, becomes vacant. The payment of the fines, when the offence has been committed through mistake, ignorance, or inadvertence, can be remitted by an Act of Indemnity, but it is contended that nothing can avoid the instant vacating of the seat. I remember hearing it persistently whispered that one Member elected at a certain General Election had never taken the oath or signed the Roll. The matter, however, was never brought to the notice of the House. A peer who takes his seat and votes without having previously subscribed to the oath is likewise liable for every such vote to a penalty of £500. Peers have so inadvertently violated the law. Each explained that having taken the oath and signed the Roll on his accession to the peerage he thought he was not obliged to do so again when a new Parliament assembled. This excuse was accepted in the case of four peers in 1906. Bills of Indemnity were then said to be no longer necessary.

The swearing-in of Members returned to the House of Commons at the General Election of 1918—the first after the World War—had one new feature. It was introduced owing to changes in the law of election made by the Reform Act of 1918. It is provided by that Act that a candidate must lodge £150 with the returning officer at his nomination, which sum is not given back until the returning officer is officially informed that the candidate, if elected, has taken the oath and signed the Roll. Accordingly, to provide a means of ready discovery as to whether a particular Member had or had not subscribed to the oath, two clerks sat at the Table, with printed lists of the names and constituencies, which they ticked off as the name and the constituency of each Member was announced by the Clerk of the House in the course of the introduction of the Member to the Speaker.

4

As Members take the oath, they proceed, in single file, to subscribe the Test Roll, over which the Clerk stands sentinel. Each Member writes his full name and that of his constituency. He is then introduced by the Clerk to the Speaker, who shakes hands with him. So the process of swearing-in goes on for two or three days. It is slow and tedious work, and the House is not a lively place while it is in progress. Occasionally a special incident relieves the tedium of the proceedings. Some Members claim to make an affirmation instead of being sworn, on the ground that he has no religious belief, or that the taking of an oath is contrary to his religious belief. The affirmation is in the same form as the oath, except that the words “Solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm” are substituted for the word “swear,” and the words, “So help me, God” are omitted. These have to sign their names on a different part of the Test Roll. It is no unusual thing either to see a Member, wearing his hat, sworn on a book provided by himself. He belongs to the Jewish persuasion, which requires the oath to be taken with covered head on a copy of the Pentateuch, or first five books of the Old Testament. Others prefer to swear with uplifted hand instead of by kissing the New Testament. The oath is administered in about a minute to each batch. It is in signing the Test Roll that time is consumed. The Member who has not his glasses adjusted, or who searches on the Table for the pen that suits him best, with which to inscribe his name on the roll of fame in bold and lasting caligraphy, may block a group anxious to get to the lunch-rooms or smoking-rooms, and may prove the same kind of nuisance to his fellows as the man who wants to change a five-pound note at the railway booking-office, though there is a long and impatient queue behind, and the train is on the point of starting.