But it is idle to argue with the higgle of the market. 'Things are what they are,' said Bishop Butler in a passage which has lost its freshness; that is to say, they are worth what they will fetch. 'Why, then, should we desire to be deceived?' The test of truth remains undiscovered, but the test of present value is the auction mart. Tried by this test, it is plain that Hansard has fallen upon evil days. The bottled dreariness of Parliament is falling, falling, falling. An Elizabethan song-book, the original edition of Gray's Elegy, or Peregrine Pickle, is worth more than, or nearly as much as, the 458 volumes of Hansard's Parliamentary Debates. Three complete sets were sold last Tuesday; one brought £110, the other two but £70 each. And yet it is not long ago since a Hansard was worth three times as much. Where were our young politicians? There are serious men on both sides of the House. Men of their stamp twenty years ago would not have been happy without a Hansard to clothe their shelves with dignity and their minds with quotations. But these young men were not bidders.
As the sale proceeded, the discredit of Hansard became plainer and plainer. For the copyright, including, of course, the goodwill of the name—the right to call yourself 'Hansard' for years to come—not a penny was offered, and yet, as the auctioneer feelingly observed, only eighteen months ago it was valued at £60,000. The cold douche of the auction mart may brace the mind, but is apt to lower the price of commodities of this kind. Then came incomplete and unbound sets, with doleful results. For forty copies of the 'Indian Debates' for 1889 only a penny a copy was offered. It was rumoured that the bidder intended, had he been successful, to circulate the copies amongst the supporters of a National Council for India; but his purpose was frustrated by the auctioneer, who, mindful of the honour of the Empire, sorrowfully but firmly withdrew the lot, and proceeded to the next, amidst the jeers of a thoroughly demoralized audience. But this subject why pursue? It is, for the reason already cited at the beginning, a painful one. The glory of Hansard has departed for ever. Like a new-fangled and sham religion, it began in pride and ended in a police-court, instead of beginning in a police-court and ending in pride, which is the now well-defined course of true religion.
The fact that nobody wants Hansard is not necessarily a rebuff to Parliamentary eloquence, yet these low prices jump with the times and undoubtedly indicate an impatience of oratory. We talk more than our ancestors, but we prove our good faith by doing it very badly. We have no Erskines at the Bar, but trials last longer than ever. There are not half a dozen men in the House of Commons who can make a speech, properly so called, but the session is none the shorter on that account. Hansard's Debates are said to be dull to read, but there is a sterner fate than reading a dull debate: you may be called upon to listen to one. The statesmen of the time must be impervious to dulness; they must crush the artist within them to a powder. The new people who have come bounding into politics and are now claiming their share of the national inheritance are not orators by nature, and will never become so by culture; but they mean business, and that is well. Caleb Garth and not George Canning should be the model of the virtuous politician of the future.
[ 1] March 8, 1902.
CONTEMPT OF COURT
The late Mr. Carlyle has somewhere in his voluminous but well-indexed writings a highly humorous and characteristic passage in which he, with all his delightful gusto, dilates upon the oddity of the scene where a withered old sinner perched on a bench, quaintly attired in red turned up with ermine, addresses another sinner in a wooden pew, and bids him be taken away and hung by the neck until he is dead; and how the sinner in the pew, instead of indignantly remonstrating with the sinner on the bench, 'Why, you cantankerous old absurdity, what are you about taking my life like that?' usually exhibits signs of great depression, and meekly allows himself to be conducted to his cell, from whence in due course he is taken and throttled according to law.
This situation described by Carlyle is doubtless mighty full of humour; but, none the less, were any prisoner at the bar to adopt Craigenputtock's suggestion, he would only add to the peccadillo of murder the grave offence of contempt of court, which has been defined 'as a disobedience to the court, an opposing or despising the authority, justice, and dignity thereof.'
The whole subject of Contempt is an interesting and picturesque one, and has been treated after an interesting and picturesque yet accurate and learned fashion by a well-known lawyer, in a treatise [1] which well deserves to be read not merely by the legal practitioner, but by the student of constitutional law and the nice observer of our manners and customs.