The proposition that Parliaments should be chosen more frequently in order that they may preserve a closer touch with the people should be earnestly pressed forward. In the early days of the House of Commons annual Parliaments were practically the rule, an assembly being summoned to vote supplies and do certain necessary business and then dissolved. When matters were put upon a more certain footing, after the Great Rebellion, Parliaments elected for three years were ordained, and this term was extended to seven years shortly after the Hanoverian Accession, in order to guard against a Jacobite success at the hustings, which might seriously have endangered an unstable throne. The time has now come to ask that a term adopted in a panic, and for reasons which have long passed away, should be shortened. A four years’ Parliament has been found to be long enough for France, Germany, and the United States; and as the average of the last half-century has proved a seven years’ period to be unnecessarily long for England, the briefer should be enacted. Now that the suffrage is on so wide a basis, it is essential that members of Parliament should be in as close touch with the people as possible. Once elected, members frequently forget that they are not the masters of those who have chosen them, and that, though called in one sense to rule the country, there is another sense in which they are called to serve. It is necessary that this truth should be enforced upon such members as are apt to ignore it, and shorter Parliaments would enforce it.
There are some who believe that by payment of members a better representation of the people would be secured. The example of other countries can certainly be quoted in favour of such a proposition, but there appears no necessity for any general payment in England. As, however, it is in the highest degree desirable that representatives of every class in the community should appear at Westminster, some provision should be made by which members, upon making a statutory declaration of the necessity for such a course, would be able to claim a certain moderate allowance for their expenses during the session. There would be nothing revolutionary in this; the fact of members being paid would be merely a return to the practice which prevailed for close upon four centuries after the House of Commons was established upon its present basis.
XIII.—IS OUR ELECTORAL SYSTEM COMPLETE?
Many would be surprised if told that there remained serious deficiencies in our electoral system; and would ask, “How can that be? We now have the ballot at elections, household suffrage in both counties and boroughs, and a nearer approach to equal electoral districts than the most sanguine Radical ten or even five years ago would have thought possible?”
But has the suffrage really been extended to every householder? As a fact, it has not; it is largely a merely nominal extension; and tens of thousands of qualified citizens are disfranchised for years at a time by the needless restrictions and petty technicalities which now clog the electoral law. Registration should be so simplified that every qualified person would be certain of finding his name on the list; and the duty of compiling a correct register should be imposed upon some local public official, compelled under penalty to perform it.
The common belief is that a twelvemonth’s occupation qualifies for a vote, but all that it does is to qualify for a place on the register, which is an altogether different matter, the register being made up months before it comes into operation. At the very least, a man must have gone into a house a year and a half before he has a vote for it, and it often happens that he has to be in it for two years and a quarter, and even more, before he possesses the franchise. Let me state such a case. A man goes into a house at the half-quarter in August, 1888; he will not be entitled to be placed on the register in the autumn of 1889, because he was not occupying on July 15 of the previous year; if he continues to occupy, he will, however, be placed there in the autumn of 1890; but it is not until January 1, 1891, that he will be able to exercise the suffrage. So that all taking houses from July 15, 1888, are in the same position as those who take them up to July 15, 1889, and will have to wait for a vote until 1891.
“But,” it may be said, “when a man once has his vote he is able to retain it as long as he holds any dwelling by virtue of ‘successive occupation.’” That is so only as long as he remains within the boundaries of the constituency wherein he possessed the original qualification. He may move from one division of Liverpool to another, or from one division of Manchester to another, or from one division of Birmingham to another, and retain his vote by successive occupation; but if he goes from Liverpool to Birkenhead, from Manchester to Salford, or from Birmingham to Aston, his vote is lost for the year and a half or the two years and a quarter before explained. The effect of this is most apparent in London, where thousands of working men are continually moving from one district to another, treating the whole metropolis as one great town, but by passing out of their original borough they are disfranchised. And this is the more a grievance because the Redistribution Act, though dividing the larger provincial towns into single-member districts, left them as boroughs intact; while the old constituencies in London were not merely divided, but split up into separate boroughs. Lambeth thus became three boroughs—Lambeth, Camberwell, and Newington—each with its own divisions; Hackney was severed into the boroughs of Hackney, Shoreditch, and Bethnal Green; Marylebone into the boroughs of Marylebone, Paddington, St. Pancras, and Hampstead; and so throughout the metropolis. And the consequence of the purely artificial nature of the boundary lines thus created is that many a man who merely moves from one side of the street to the other, or even from one house to another next door, is disfranchised for a couple of years. The obvious remedy for this peculiar evil is that London should be treated as one single borough, like Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham; but the remedy for the whole evil is that when a man has once qualified for a place on the register, proof of successive occupation in any part of the country should suffice to give him his vote in the constituency to which he moves.
When we pass from the household to the lodger franchise, we are faced by one of the hugest shams in the electoral system. There are certain constituencies which contain hundreds of lodgers, and of these not more than tens are on the register. The reason is twofold: it is not merely a trouble to get a vote, but there is a yearly difficulty in retaining it. For a lodger, as for a household vote, a twelvemonth’s occupation is necessary to qualify, and the purely nominal nature of this qualification is the same in both; but the lodger has the additional hardship of being deprived of even as much benefit as “successive occupation” gives the householder, for if he moves next door, though with the same landlord, he is disfranchised, while the landlord retains his vote. And, further, he has to make a formal claim for the suffrage every succeeding summer, an operation too troublesome for the vast majority of lodgers to undergo, and one from which the householder is spared. And thus this particular franchise is a mockery, and the proportion of lodger voters to qualified lodgers is absurdly small.