The Twilight of Parliament

I

IT is a fact of universal admission that the prestige of the British Parliament has not been at so low an ebb in living memory as it is to-day. We should have, I think, to go back to the time when George III, in his pursuit of personal government, packed the House of Commons with his creatures, to parallel the disrepute into which the present Parliament has fallen. The House of Commons has lost its authority over the public mind and its influence upon events. The press has largely ceased to report its proceedings, and the scrappy descriptive summary has taken the place of the full-dress verbatim reports with which we were familiar a few years ago. This is no doubt largely due to the revolution in the press which has replaced the sober seriousness of the past by a tendency to keep the public amused with sensation and stunts. But the fact does reflect the public sense of the decadence of Parliament.

And there is an odd touch of irony in this — that the depreciation affects the popular House much more than the House of Lords. For generations the latter has been a threatened institution, the last hope of impossible causes and the bugbear of the reformer. Its record of stupid opposition to every movement of enlightened and rational change has been the tradition of a century; but it seemed that, with the great Budget fight of 1910 and the passing of the Parliament Act, its power for mischief had been finally controlled. It was an ogre that had lost its teeth and its claws, and was henceforth harmless. And behold! Just at the moment when the representative House is at last based on the broadest possible franchise, when the suffrage is universal and women have the vote, we are confronted with the spectacle of a House of Commons so negligible as to be almost beneath contempt, and so mute and servile that, by comparison, the hereditary Chamber stands out in contrast as the guardian of public liberties and free institutions. For long years Liberals have been fighting for a thoroughly representative system and for imposing restraint upon the reactionary tendencies of the Upper House. And having accomplished their aim, they find that they have to turn, for the experience of whatever remnant of enlightened and liberal-minded opinion there remains, from the House of Commons to the House of Lords. There at least an occasional weighty voice is heard in protest against the follies of the government. There at least is some reminiscence of the spirit of independent criticism, which has certainly vanished from a House of Commons that exists simply to register the decrees of a ministry.

If we seek to discover the causes of the decline of the Parliamentary institution, the most general conclusion will be that it is an incident in the convulsion of the war. There can, of course, be no doubt on this point. It is the war that has shaken the pillars of Westminster and left the governance of England more chaotic and indeterminate than it has been for two centuries. But while this is undoubtedly true, it is also true that for some years before the war there had been tendencies at work which had been undermining confidence in Parliamentary government. The transfer of power from the educated middle classes to the mass of the people, while a. just and inevitable development of the democratic idea, was productive of results which were not wholly salutary. The appeal ceased to be to an instructed community, which could be reached by argument, and passed to the millions who had neither the taste nor the time for the consideration of affairs, and became interested in them only when passion was aroused.

The development enormously enhanced the power of the demagogue in politics. It made the appeal to reason more difficult and the appeal to violent emotion infinitely more profitable. And the change in the seat of power was accompanied by another change, which intensified the demagogic tendency. The press became aware of the big battalions and set out to exploit them. An enterprising youth named Harmsworth, having discovered, by the success of Answers and similar erudite publications, that what the great public wanted to know was how many acres there were in Yorkshire, how many letters in the Bible, how far the streets of London put end to end would reach across the Atlantic, and so on, determined to apply the spirit of this illuminating gospel to the conduct of the daily press. His triumph was phenomenal. In the course of a few years the whole character of the English press was changed. It passed mainly into the hands of a few great syndicates, with young Mr. Harmsworth, now Viscount Northcliffe, as the head of the new journalistic hierarchy. It led the public on stunts and sensations. It debased the currency of political controversy to phrases that could be put in a headline and passed from mouth to mouth. The old-fashioned newspaper, which reported speeches and believed in the sanctity of its newscolumns, went under or had to join in the sauve qui peut. Parliament was treated as a music-hall turn. If it was funny, it was reported; if it was serious, it was ignored. With the exception of a few papers, chiefly in the provinces, like the Manchester Guardian and the Scotsman, the utterances of serious statesmen other than the Prime Minister were unreported. The Midlothian campaign of Gladstone, which used to fill pages of the newspapers, would today be dismissed in an ill-reported halfcolumn summary devoted, not to the argument, but to the amusing asides and the irrelevant interruptions.

All this profoundly affected the Parliamentary atmosphere. The power outside the House was no longer a vigilant influence upon events within the House. The statesman ceased to rely upon his reasoned appeal to the facts. He found that the way to dominion over Parliament was not by argument on the floor of the House, but by making terms with the great lords of the press outside, who controlled the machine that manufactured public opinion. Long before the war Mr. Lloyd George had appreciated the changed circumstances and taken advantage of them. A press man was much more important to him than a Parliamentary colleague or a prince of the blood. He might forget to reply to an archbishop, but he would never forget to reply to a journalist. His acquaintance among the craft was more various and peculiar than that of any politician of this day or any other day. There was no newspaper man so poor that he would not do him reverence and entertain him to breakfast. While his former colleague, Mr. Asquith, studiously ignored the press and would no more have thought of bargaining with Northcliffe and Beaverbrook for their support than of asking his butler to write his speeches, Mr. George lived in the press world, knew every leading journalist’s vulnerable point, humored his vanity, and gave him a knighthood or a peerage as readily as his breakfast.

By these ingenious arts, which I have had the pleasure of watching at pretty close quarters for twenty years past, he built up that press legend of himself which has been so invaluable an asset to him. It has not only enabled him to establish his own political fortunes: it has enabled him to destroy the political fortunes of one set of colleagues after another — unhappy gentlemen, who did not know the secret doors of Fleet Street, and found themselves frozen out of the public affections by a mysterious wind that emanated from they knew not where.

It may be worth while to mention the chief figures of the press bodyguard with which Mr. George has displaced the authority of Parliament and made himself more nearly a dictator than the country has seen since the days of Cromwell. They are really very few, but between them they influence the opinion and control the news-supply of nineteen twentieths of the people of the country. They are Lord Northcliffe, whom he made a viscount; his brother, Lord Rothermere, whom also he made a viscount; a third brother, Sir Leicester Harmsworth, whom he made a baronet; Mr. George Riddell of the News of the World, whom he made Lord Riddell; the manager of the Times, Sir Stuart Campbell, whom he made a knight; the manager of the Mail, whom he made a knight; Sir H. Dalziel of the Daily Chronicle and Pall Mall; Sir William Robertson Nichol (also made a knight), who, as editor of the British Weekly, keeps him right with the Nonconformist public; Sir Edward Hulbar, the owner of a great group of papers in London and Manchester (a baronetcy for him); Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express, who was given a peerage for engineering the overthrow of the Asquith ministry. There are others, but these are the leaders of the claque through which Mr. George rules England and, in larger degree than any man living, the continent of Europe. It is a great achievement. The press lords have so indoctrinated the public mind with the Lloyd George legend that it is doubtful whether they themselves can destroy their own creation. Lord Northcliffe, disappointed at not being chosen, as a part of his contract, to represent England at the Peace Conference, has tried to destroy it, but has found that he did his work too thoroughly to undo it easily. The public has become so attached to the legend that they find it hard to surrender it until the press can agree upon a new legend to put in its place. That, will not be easy, for no other man living has anything approaching Mr. George’s genius for manipulating the press, and he has had five years of power in which to consolidate his hold upon the machine of government and to establish his friends in all the strategic positions of influence.

II

But, side by side with this transfer of real power from Parliament to the press, there has been another tendency operating to discredit the House of Commons. This tendency has no doubt been aggravated by the disrepute of Parliament itself. It is the idea of direct action. The Labor movement, just when it seemed to have the control of Parliament within its grasp, developed a school which aimed at repudiating Parliament altogether, or, at least, at subordinating it to the exercise of direct industrial power outside. The view of the leaders of this movement was that Parliament was an institution which, however democratic its basis, became inevitably the instrument of the capitalist interests, and that the realities of government must pass to the organized industrial classes before Labor could get justice or achieve the aims it had in view. Between the mutually destructive ideas of possessing Parliament and dispossessing Parliament, Labor has temporarily lost its way. The rank and file of the movement, I think, is still overwhelmingly in favor of a Parliamentary system; but the intellectual energy is largely behind the new school of thought, and the discredit that has fallen upon the present Parliament has strengthened the motive of direct action. The result has been disastrous both to Labor and to Parliament. The cleavage of politics tends more and more to be between Labor and Capital, with the latter in control of Parliament and the former increasingly disposed to make its power felt outside by the interruption of the processes of industry.

This insurgent disposition of the advanced section of Labor is aggravated by the subservience of the press to the money interest. The present condition of journalistic production makes it practically impossible for newspapers to be run in the interests of the men; and the conviction that both the press and Parliament are against them gives impetus to the preachings of direct action.

Another consideration that has helped to make Labor distrust Parliament is its own failure as a Parliamentary factor. There are some seventy Labor members in the present House of Commons; but it is notorious that they are, as a whole, the least efficient body in the Chamber. The fact is due to two things. While it is the intellectual who dictates the abstract policy of the party, it is the mass of the party that nominates and elects the members; and it is the practice to send to Westminster trade-union secretaries of third-rate ability and generally without either political training or Parliamentary instinct. Nor is this the only handicap. They are deprived of all independent action, and enter the House committed to a certain collective course on any given issue, regardless of what the debates may reveal. All this has made Labor a singularly negligible influence in the House, and has increased its disposition to distrust an instrument it has failed to use.

III

And there is another cause of the decline of the Parliamentary institution. I do not think it can be doubted that it is not to-day attracting the best intellectual and moral material of the country to the extent to which it attracted it a generation or two ago. The pushful and clever lawyer is still there in abundance; but the great public-spirited citizen, who entered Parliament, not for what he could make out of it, but from a disinterested passion for the commonwealth, — the man of the type of Cobden and Bright, — has disappeared. No first-rate Parliamentary figure, has emerged during the past twenty years, with the exception of Mr. Churchill, a mere swashbuckler of politics.

This, I fear, is not an accidental circumstance. It is due to the changed conditions. In the past the private member of distinction had an opportunity of making his influence felt, which is no longer possible. If he had anything to say, he was able to say it, and he was assured that through the press he would reach the mind of the country. All this is changed. The private member has few chances of being heard and no chance of being reported. Though he speak with the tongue of angels, the popular press, occupied with important matters like the forthcoming prize-fight or the latest society divorce suit, will be deaf to his pleadings. If he is to make any impression, he must be a noisy nuisance, who cannot be suppressed. The effect of this is to make Parliament increasingly unattractive to the men who would give it distinction, but who are not prepared to devote their time and their energies to an unprofitable and not very elevating service.

I remember Lord Morley, when he was at the India Office, deploring the disappearance of the great private member, who consecrated distinguished abilities of mind and character to the service of the State without any desire for office.

‘You mean a man of the type of Cobden,’ I said.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘I would be satisfied with something less than Cobden. I would be content if the House of Commons produced one private member of the type of Bradlaugh: powerful in speech, courageous in action, with a large understanding of affairs, and no eye upon the front bench. But there is no such man to-day.’

There is no such man, because there is no room for such a man. Burke would be almost as much out of his element in the House of Commons to-day as the Archbishop of Canterbury would be out of his element on the race-course. The change in the character of the House of Commons is, of course, largely due to the enormously increased activities which modern developments have imposed upon it. The tide of business that flows through the House is so impetuous, that the large issues of conduct are lost in the mass of multitudinous detail, and the appeal to the moral standards of public conduct has become almost as irrelevant as a sermon on the stock exchange. Those who are concerned about these things find a more fruitful field for their activities in the social and intellectual world outside than they could hope to find in the House of Commons of to-day.

But in spite of these general tendencies, which have slowly and insensibly transformed the spirit and procedure of Parliament, it remains true that the low esteem in which it is held to-day is mainly due to the war. On the 3rd of August, 1914, the House of Commons was put into cold storage, and from that condition of frozen inactivity it has never emerged. Recalling that unforgettable scene when Sir Edward Grey made the speech that committed England to the war, one seems to look across a gulf that can never again be spanned. Power so completely passed from the House of Commons to the executive, that the merest murmur of criticism was enough to send a man into political exile for the rest of his days. Mr. Ramsay MacDonald made such a murmur when Sir Edward Grey sat down, and he has not recovered from the consequences to this hour. He is marked with the indelible stain of having said what half the Cabinet were saying in private the day before, and what many of them, including Mr. Lloyd George, were saying only three hours before. For four years and more the iron law of unquestioning obedience was imposed on the House of Commons. It became a registering machine. It was drilled and disciplined to the service of the executive. Its power of initiative vanished. The function of the opposition to oppose was abolished. The liberties of the Chamber were blotted out, and the House lost the very instinct of free criticism and independent thought. This paralysis continued so long that it became the habit of men’s minds. They were unconscious of their chains. It would almost be true to say that they came to wear their chains proudly, as the symbol of their patriotic self-surrender. The more they clanked them, the more they asserted their devotion to the country. The very tradition of a free Parliament passed away.

That tradition might have been recovered at the end of the war, if power had been in the hands of men who reverenced the Parliamentary institution. But Mr. Lloyd George had no disposition to restore to Parliament the unprecedented authority with which the war had invested him at the expense of Parliament. The events of the years of the war and his skillful adaptation of them to his aim of personal government had made him dictator in all but name. The fiction of Parliament continued, but he ruled the country through the press and through his control of the official machine, and he seized the moment of hysteria that came with the end of the war to rush an election that enabled him to secure a House of Commons exactly adapted to his purpose.

The squalor and shame of that election, with its coarse appeals to the worst appetites of the mob, is a humiliating memory. Its fruit continues in a House of Commons that is without precedent since the days of the pocket boroughs. Not a single Liberal statesman of front-bench rank was returned, and for the first time in modern annals the representative chamber was without an organized opposition. Two small fragments of the Liberal and Labor parties were returned, but they consisted of new and inconspicuous men, and as they acted in isolation, the small influence they might have exercised upon events was dissipated.

The disaster to the opposition was completed by the dramatic course of affairs in Ireland. The Nationalist party had for generations formed a formidable opposition bloc in the House; but the election swept the Nationalist party out of existence, and in its place, Nationalist Ireland elected a solid phalanx of Sinn Fein candidates, who, adopting the policy of repudiating the English Parliament, have made no appearance at Westminster. Mr. George was therefore left in possession of Parliament with a completeness unlike anything in history. Not only was there no opposition confronting him, but the unwieldy mob of members sent to support him came, not as free representatives freely elected, but as his personal adherents who, in accepting his ‘coupon,’had practically undertaken to disestablish Parliament and endorse his personal dictatorship without challenge.

It is needless to say that a House of Commons elected in these circumstances and under these conditions was of a quality new to the walls of St. Stephen’s. It was composed for the most part of men who had done well out of the war and expected to do still better out of the peace. The wiser mind of the nation was wholly absent from it, and the scum thrown up by the war was left in undisputed possession. Owing their seats entirely to the strategy of Mr. George, depending for the retention of these scats entirely upon his maintenance in office, at once ignorant of and indifferent to the traditions of Parliament, they provided a perfect instrument for his purpose. In the previous Parliament, opposition had been silenced by the supposed requirements of the war; but in this Parliament it has been suppressed as a sort of blasphemy against the divine right of dictatorship. No proposal has been too grotesque to be swallowed with servile and uncomplaining obedience. Even Mr. George’s fantastic fifty-per-cent tax on German imports — every copper of which came out of English pockets — was accepted almost without discussion, although the whole business community was panicstricken at so inconceivable a form of commercial suicide. The folly perished by its own silliness within a fortnight, but it has been duly followed by other follies, like the Anti-Dumping bill, which has been received with the same complacent imbecility. Cabinet responsibility has ceased to exist, the safeguards of the constitution have gone one by one; ministers have declined into mere clerks, responsible, not to Parliament, but to their chief; treasury control has vanished from finance, and an orgy of unchecked extravagance runs riot through the departments; the benches of the House are crowded with placemen, for whom new offices have been created in such abundance that Mr. George can vote down the feeble opposition with his salaried supporters alone. We are in the presence of an experiment in personal government which would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Two issues will show how completely Parliament has abdicated. The story of the events in Ireland during the past year has no parallel in our annals for more than a century. The facts, denied or travestied with impudent effrontery by Sir Hamar Greenwood, are no longer in doubt. Every day adds its dreadful chapter to an indictment such as no civilized government in modern times has been subjected to. In other and better days one incident of the thousand that have occurred would have stung Parliament to an indignant anger that would have swept the government that authorized it from office. One has only to invoke the great name of Gladstone to appreciate the moral death that has fallen upon an institution that sits day by day and month by month in guilty and approving complicity with the chief authors of this indelible crime.

Or take the enormous disaster that has paralyzed industrial England this summer. Whatever share of responsibility the unions have for that catastrophe, it is small in comparison with the share of the government. They made vast profits by controlling the coal-trade, and used them to conceal the deficiency in their accounts. Nothing was set aside from the coal profits for the purpose of restoring the trade to normal conditions when the slump came. It came as the result, largely, of Mr. George’s surrender to the French demands at Spa, which glutted France with German coal and brought about the collapse of the English coal-trade. And with this collapse, almost at a moment’s notice, coal was decontrolled, and the miner was left to bear the whole burden of the government’s gross improvidence. The wrong was open and palpable, but the House of Commons, in this as in every other crucial test, abdicated all its functions of criticism and appeasement. It was plainly in sympathy with the idea of using the occasion to destroy organized Labor, at whatever cost to the community. Probably the idea will prevail. Labor may be left beaten, impoverished, and sullen. But in thus destroying the last element of confidence among the working-classes in its good faith, Parliament will have suffered no less heavy a blow.

The future is incalculable. Parliamentary government, of course, there will continue to be; but whether Parliament can recover from the atrophy of years of war and the ignominy of years of peace to anything approaching the prestige of other days is more than doubtful. The rot has gone far, and we are in the presence of disruptive forces which cannot be measured. The Cæsarism of Mr. Lloyd George on the one hand, and the challenge of direct action on the other, seem to be crushing the institution between the hammer and the anvil. Apart from the abnormal happenings of the past seven years, the social and industrial changes of the last generation have foreshadowed a reshaping of the machine of government. Decentralization is in the air, and the demand for an instrument less remote and cumbrous, more sensitive and immediately responsive to local needs, is increasingly made.

The universal loss of faith — in men, in institutions, in creeds, in theories — which is the devastating product of the war has touched nothing, not even the Church, more blightingly than it has touched Parliament. It would have suffered less had there been a great moral influence, to which the constitutional idea was as sacred as it was to Hampden, or Burke, or Gladstone, in control of affairs when the tempest came. But the upheaval of the war left it the sport of a nimble genius to whom the soul of Parliament is nothing and the manipulation of mob emotion through the press the only vehicle of statesmanship.