Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work

by C. Creighton Mandell; Edward Shanks

These, then, are the two great simple truths which underlie Mr. Belloc's whole attitude towards the public affairs of the England of to-day:

First, we are economically unfree.

Second, we are politically unfree.[23]

The causes of the existence of the first condition are analysed, as we have seen, in The Servile State; the causes of the second are analysed in The Party System.

With the prime truths of this book every man possessing but the most elementary knowledge of political science and constitutional history is familiar. They were proved by Bagehot many years ago, and no observant man of average intelligence can fail to realize them for himself to-day. Briefly, they are these. The representative system existing in England, which was meant to be an organ of democracy, is actually an engine of oligarchy. "Instead of the executive being controlled by the representative assembly, it controls it. Instead of the demands of the people being expressed for them by their representatives, the matters discussed by the representatives are settled, not by the people, not even by themselves, but by the very body which it is the business of the representative assembly to check and control."

These truths are to-day common knowledge. We all know that the power of government does not reside in practice with the people, but with some body which remains for most of us undefined. It is the peculiar service of the authors of The Party System to have defined that body for us and to have exposed its nature and composition. Bagehot referred to this body as the Cabinet; in The Party System it is shown that this body is really composed of the members of the two Front Benches, which form "one close oligarchical corporation, admission to which is only to be gained by the consent of those who have already secured places therein." The greater number, and by far the most important members, of this corporation enter by right of relationship, and these family ties are not confined to the separate sides of the House. They unite the Ministerial with the Opposition Front Bench as closely as they unite Ministers and ex-Ministers to each other. There is thus formed a governing group which has attained absolute control over the procedure of the House of Commons. It can settle how much time shall be given to the discussion of any subject, and therefore, in effect, determine whether any particular measure shall have a chance of passing into law. It can also settle what subjects may be discussed and what may be said on those subjects. Further, this group has at its disposal large funds which are secretly subscribed and secretly disbursed, and, by the use of these funds, as well as by other means, it is able to control elections and decide to a considerable extent who shall be the representatives of the people.

Can this system be mended? Is any reform possible within the system itself? As long ago as 1899, in the first important book he published, Mr. Belloc wrote these words:

... the Mandat Impératif, the brutal and decisive weapon of the democrats, the binding by an oath of all delegates, the mechanical responsibility against which Burke had pleaded at Bristol, which the American constitution vainly attempted to exclude in its principal election, and which must in the near future be the method of our final reforms.

It is a striking example of the solidity of Mr. Belloc's opinions to find him expressing, twelve years later, exactly the same views. He went into Parliament in 1906 holding this view; he came out of Parliament in 1910 confirmed in it. In 1911, the only possible means of reforming our Parliamentary system, so far as he can see, is this:

It might be possible, by scattering and using a sufficient number of trained workers, to extract from candidates definite pledges during the electoral period.... The principal pledge which should and could be extracted from candidates would be a pledge that they would vote against the Government—whatever its composition—unless there were carried through the House of Commons, within a set time, those measures to which they stood pledged already in their election addresses and on the platform.