A. Lawrence Lowell

“ But it is not on vital questions alone that the government must avoid being beaten, because a defeat, even though not such a one as would cause resignation, nevertheless weakens to some extent the credit of the cabinet. It gives the public the impression that the ministers are losing popularity; either that their followers are becoming rebellious and voting against them, or, at least, that they are so far indifferent or disaffected as to stay away. Nothing succeeds like success; and it is a maxim in politics as well as in war that one must maintain a reputation for being invincible. ”

“ But in order to determine the real import of an attempt to fetter the independence of a member of Parliament, one must consider how far it introduced a new practice into English politics, and for what purposes the claim of the association to call the member to account has been used. The question whether a member of Parliament is the agent of his constituents, morally bound to carry out their wishes, or whether he is to act solely according to his own opinion of the interest of the whole kingdom, is as old as Burke's famous discussion with the electors of Bristol. ”

“ To know how far the opinion of an expert must be followed, and how far it may be overruled; to know what is really general policy, and what is mere detail; to know these things is the most valuable art in life. ”

“ Now to a layman, and even to a foreign lawyer, an English act is often difficult to understand, and sometimes misleading. To penetrate its intent one must frequently be familiar with all previous legislation on the subject. It is no doubt true that "No statute is completely intelligible as an isolated enactment. Every statute is a chapter, or a fragment of a chapter, of a body of law." ”

“ The administration of Ireland has been the conspicuous failure of the English government. Its history for a century has been a long tale of expedients, palliations and concessions, which have never availed to secure either permanent good order or the contentment and loyalty of the inhabitants. Each step has been taken, not of foresight, but under pressure. ”

“ The greatest political dignitary in the British government, the one endowed by law with the most exalted and most diverse functions, the only great officer of state who has retained his ancient rights, the man who defies the doctrine of the separation of powers more than any other personage on earth, is the Lord Chancellor. ”

“ Again, in the United States, the provision that the electoral college shall choose the President has become so modified in practice that the electors must vote for the candidate nominated by the party to which they owe their own election. In choosing the President they have become, by the force of custom, as much a mere piece of mechanism as the Crown in England when giving its assent to acts passed by the two Houses of Parliament. Their freedom of choice is as obsolete as the royal veto. ”

“ The President of the United States, for example, is the representative of a party; but he rules the nation only in part. The legislature is neither in theory or in practice under his control; and this is so far true that even when Congress is of the same party as himself, neither he nor any committee of the party so controls both executive and legislative that any one body can be said to rule the nation. But where the parliamentary system prevails, the cabinet, virtually combining in its own hands, as it does, the legislative and executive authorities, may fairly be said to rule the nation ”

“ If the English system of private bill legislation has its defects, they are far more than outweighed by its merits. The curse of most representative bodies at the present day is the tendency of the members to urge the interests of their localities or their constituents. It is this more than anything else that has brought legislatures into discredit, and has made them appear to be concerned with a tangled skein of private interests rather than with the public welfare. ”

“ The fact is that Irish problems lie beyond the experience of the English member and his constituents. Being unable to distinguish readily a real grievance from an unreasonable demand, he does not heed it until he is obliged to; and the cabinet, with its hands already full, is not inclined to burn its fingers with matters in which the House is not deeply or generally interested. All this is merely one of many illustrations of the truth that parliamentary government can work well only so far as the nation itself is fairly homogeneous in its political aspirations. ”

“ Moreover, the strategy of the leaders of the Opposition has changed. They are not trying merely to persuade the House, or to register their protests there. They are speaking to the nation, striving to convince the voters of the righteousness of their cause, and of the earnestness, devotion, and tenacity with which they are urging it. Hence they take every opportunity for resistance offered by the rules, and fight doggedly at every step. Just as in war the great battle that settled a campaign has been replaced by a long series of stubborn contests behind intrenchments ”

“ The cabinet has its finger always on the pulse of the House of Commons, and especially of its own majority there; and it is ever on the watch for expressions of public feeling outside. Its function is in large part to sum up and formulate the desires of its supporters, but the majority must accept its conclusions, and in carrying them out becomes well-nigh automatic. ”

“ It would be obviously improper, not to say absurd, that the King in the selection of a new Prime Minister should be obliged to follow the opinion of the old one who has just resigned in consequence of a change of party in the House of Commons. That Mr. Balfour, for example, should have had the right to dictate whether Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman or Lord Rosebery should be his successor would have been grotesque. There is usually one recognised leader of the Opposition, and when that is the case the Crown must intrust the formation of the new ministry to him. ”

“ In order that the warfare of parties may be not only safe, but healthy, it must be based upon a real difference of opinion about the needs of the community as a whole. In so far as it is waged, not for public objects, but for the private gain, whether of individuals, or of classes, or of collective interests, rich or poor, to that extent politics will degenerate into a scramble of self-seekers. ”

“ Gladstone over his first Home Rule Bill took up their seats below the gangway on the government side. The House at a great debate resembles a martial array, with the leaders face to face in the van, supported by their troops in ranks behind them. ”

“ No doubt a subordinate in undertaking to decide a question occasionally makes a mistake for which the minister must assume the responsibility; but that is not a serious danger. The besetting sin of bureaucracy is the tendency to refer too much to a higher authority, which cannot become familiar with the facts of each case, and finds its only refuge in clinging to hard and fast rules. It is fortunate, therefore, that the growth in the machinery of central administration in England has been accompanied by greater deconcentration within the departments. ”

“ Party works, therefore, inside, instead of outside, the regular political institutions. In fact, so far as Parliament is concerned, the machinery of party and of government are not merely in accord; they are one and the same thing. The party cabal has become the Treasury Bench. The ministers are the party chiefs, selected not artificially but by natural prominence, and the majority in the House of Commons, which legislates, appropriates money, supervises and controls the administration, and sustains or discards ministers, is the party itself acting under the guidance of those chiefs. ”

“ The men who win places in the ministry have usually, although by no means invariably, made their mark in debate. It is a strange assumption that a good talker must be a good administrator, and that a strong government can be formed by parcelling out the offices among the leading [62] debaters in the legislative body. At first sight it appears as irrational as the other corollary of the parliamentary system, that the public service is promoted by dismissing an excellent foreign minister, because the House of Commons does not like an unpopular clause in an education bill. ”

“ A voter at the last election who objected strongly to any change in fiscal policy, and equally strongly to any concessions on the subject of Home Rule, found himself on the horns of a dilemma. He was compelled to make up his mind which issue he thought most important, and trust to Providence about the other. In a party government, where the cabinet must resign if any of its vital measures are rejected, those measures cannot be considered by individuals on their merits. ”

“ On the contrary, one is much more impressed in ordinary times by the efforts of an organising secretary, spurred on from above, to interest people in forming associations in unpromising districts, than by struggles for power in the most active associations. In England the stage at which public interest awakes is the election, the process of selecting the candidates arousing little attention. While, therefore, the franchise is wide, and the number of people who vote is very great, the nomination is really made by a body of men no larger than the voters in an ordinary borough before 1832. ”

“ Hope springs eternal in the legislative breast, and every assembly undertakes more work than it can accomplish thoroughly. In some legislatures this results in a headlong rushing through of measures almost without discussion at the end of the session. But while, under closure by compartments and the supply rule, this may be true in England of certain clauses of bills and of large parts of the appropriations, it is not true of bills as a whole. Parliament is, primarily, a forum for debate, rather than a machine for legislation, and bills that cannot be discussed at some length are dropped. ”

“ I define a party vote arbitrarily as one where more than nine tenths of the members of the party in power, who take part in the division, vote together on one side, and nine tenths of the Opposition who take part vote together on the other side. ”

“ Now the very accentuation of party has made it easier for the peers to resist a Liberal ministry, because in doing so they are evidently opposing, not the people as a whole, but only a part of the people, and a part that is a majority by a very small fraction. In this way it has happened that the House of Lords, without ceasing to have an opinion of its own on other matters, has become for party purposes an instrument in the hands of the Tory leaders, who use it as a bishop or knight of their own colour on the chess-board of party politics. ”

“ It tends to lose all powers except the power to criticise and the power to sentence to death. Parliament has been called the great inquest of the nation, and for that purpose its functions have of late been rather enlarged than impaired. Nor are the inquisitors confined to any one section of the House, for while that part is played chiefly by the Opposition, the government often receives a caution from its own supporters also. If the parliamentary system has made the cabinet of the day autocratic, it is an autocracy exerted with the utmost publicity, under a constant fire of criticism ”

“ The rulers of the country, and those who both have been and will be her rulers, fight at close range across a table for six months of the year, and during the rest of the time they carry on the ceaseless war by public speaking. As in the Athenian democracy, the citizens witness a constant struggle among rival statesmen for supremacy, but in England they are merely spectators until a general election summons them to give their verdict. One can hardly conceive of a system better calculated to stimulate interest in politics without instability in the government. ”

“ Freedom of speech was not acquired without a long struggle; but since the Bill of Rights of 1689 it has been a settled principle that "the freedom of speech, and debates or proceedings in Parliament, ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament." A man cannot, therefore, be prosecuted criminally, or made civilly responsible, for anything he has said in the House; although the House itself may punish what it deems an abuse of the forms of debate. ”

“ But more important from a political point of view than the disqualifications for the upper chamber is the fact that a peer cannot escape from the peerage. This is sometimes a misfortune when a man, who has made his mark in the House of Commons, has an obscure greatness thrust upon him by the untimely death of his father. In such a case he loses at once and forever his seat in the House where the active warfare of politics goes on, and this although he may be a Scotch peer, who has no seat in the House of Lords. ”

“ But clearly if the government is to be one of law, if public officers like private citizens are to be subject to the courts, if the people are to be protected from arbitrary power, the servant who acts on behalf of the Crown must be held responsible for illegal conduct from the consequences of which the King himself is free. Hence the principle arose that the King's command is no excuse for a wrongful act, and this is a firmly established maxim of the Common Law in both civil and criminal proceedings. ”

“ Each minister is responsible to the cabinet for the conduct of his department. He is constantly meeting with problems which may involve criticism in Parliament, and where a mistake might entail serious consequences for the whole government. In such cases he must decide how far he can assume to settle the question in accordance with his own opinion, and what matters he ought to bring before the cabinet. He must not, on the one hand, take up its time in discussing trivialities, and he must not, on the other, commit his colleagues to a course of action which really involves general policy. ”

“ Often in the course of a debate upon some amendment to a government bill, one hears a member, rising behind the Treasury Bench, appeal to the leader of the House not to put pressure upon his supporters on that question. He means that the government whips shall not be made the tellers, in which case each member is free to vote as he thinks best without a breach of party loyalty, and the result, whatever it may be, is not regarded as a defeat for the cabinet. ”

“ The policy of one party or the other must be supported as a whole. This is certainly a limitation on personal freedom of action, and it acts as a restraint just to the extent that the government is conducted strictly on party lines. The party system certainly involves compromise of opinion; but then there is some compromise required for the enactment of every public measure, whether parties exist or not, for it never happens that the legislators who vote for any bill are all perfectly satisfied with every one of its clauses.
[447] Government by party is not an ideal regimen. ”