2
Everything is now in readiness for the dissolution of Parliament. The two Houses of Lords and Commons are dissolved by Royal Proclamation issued by the King “by and with the advice of Our Privy Council” (which means the Ministers) and under the Great Seal of the United Kingdom. In order to keep the existence of Parliament as nearly continuous as possible, a new Parliament is summoned at the same moment that the old is dissolved. Hence in the Royal Proclamation the Sovereign declares his desire to meet as soon as may be his people, and to have their advice in Parliament, and accordingly requires the Lord Chancellors of Great Britain and Ireland to issue forthwith the writs for causing the Lords spiritual and temporal and Commons who are to serve in the said Parliament to be duly returned and give their attendance. Thereupon the machinery of a General Election is put into motion by the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery (an officer of the Crown in attendance upon the Lord Chancellor in Parliament, with offices in the precincts of the House of Lords), and does not cease working until the two Houses are again constituted and in session.
Various kinds of writs are issued from the Crown Office. There are the writs of summons to attend in Parliament, which are sent to the temporal and spiritual peers. There are three classes of peerages which carry an hereditary right to a seat in the House of Lords—peerages of England created before 1707; peerages of Great Britain, created between the Union with Scotland in 1707 and the Union with Ireland in 1801; and peerages of the United Kingdom created since 1801. The twenty-six Bishops who hold peerages by right of office and the twenty-eight Irish representative peers who are elected for life by the peerage of Ireland also receive writs, but sixteen Scottish representative peers elected for each Parliament by the peerage of Scotland assembled at Holyrood House, Edinburgh, do not. However, the writs with which we are now more particularly concerned are those for the election of the Commons of Great Britain. They are sent by the Clerk of the Crown to the returning officers of the constituencies—in county areas the sheriffs, in urban areas the mayor or chairman of the borough council—commanding them, in the name of the King, to “cause election to be made according to law” of Members to serve in the new Parliament; and “to cause the names of such Members, when so elected, whether they be present or absent, to be certified to us in Our Chancery without delay.” The writs for a General Election are, in fact, always prepared in the Crown Office and ready to be issued in case there might be any sudden dissolution of Parliament before it has run its prescribed term of five years. They are printed on parchment in imitation copper-plate handwriting, with blanks for names and dates to be filled in by a penman, and are oblong in shape, about 15 inches across by 12 inches in length.
Years ago the transmission of the writs was a dignified and onerous and also a profitable duty. Messengers of the Great Seal, as they were called, were despatched through the country post-haste with the writs for personal delivery to the returning officers, and they collected five guineas for a writ for a borough and ten guineas for a writ for a city or a county. Under this system grave irregularities prevailed. Candidates schemed to get early possession of the writs in order to forestall, by hastening the election, any threatened opposition; and the Messengers of the Great Seal, it was said, were disposed to give a writ to the candidate who would pay most for it. But an Act passed in 1813 provided for the conveyance and delivery of the writs through the prosaic but purer agency of the Post Office. Precautions are taken to avoid any chance of their going astray. They are placed in envelopes of strong cartridge paper with a lining of glazed calico, each addressed to the respective returning officer, and are conveyed to the General Post Office, London, by one of the clerks of the Crown Office, designated for this occasion, “Messenger of the Great Seal,” who receives from an official appointed by the Postmaster-General a written acknowledgment of the delivery of his precious charge. The writs are then despatched through the first available post as registered letters. With each there is sent an injunction to the postmaster of the place where the returning officer resides to have the writ safely and speedily delivered, and to get a receipt from the returning officer. This receipt the local postmaster transmits to the Postmaster-General, who in turn has the particulars entered in a book which is available for inspection by any person interested. In what is known as the London Metropolitan area, extending into four counties—Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Essex—personal service of the writs to the returning officers of the divisions by the Messenger of the Great Seal is still in vogue, the messenger travelling in a motor-car instead of on horseback, and demanding no fees for his services.
Nomination day is the same in all constituencies, as provided by the Representation of the People Act, 1918. On the day appointed, the eighth day after the date of the Royal Proclamation, the returning officer attends at the municipal buildings, or the courthouse, within certain fixed hours—usually from 10 a.m. till noon—to receive nominations of candidates. The nomination paper sets out the name, abode, profession or calling of the candidate, and the names and addresses of two registered electors, who propose and second him, and of eight other assenting burgesses. Each candidate provides himself with several nomination papers, filled up by electors from various classes or sections of the constituency, with a view to show the representative character of his supporters, and also to secure himself from the risk of the nomination being declared null and void by the returning officer owing to some irregularity in the original nomination paper. The Ballot Act requires that the nomination paper must be handed in to the returning officer by the candidate personally, or by his proposer or seconder. At one election the nomination paper was given in by the agent of the candidate, and this was held to be fatal to the nomination. It was a small technical point, and since then it has come to be understood generally by agents of all Parties that no advantage is to be taken of such slips or oversights.
3
Membership of the House of Commons is remarkably free and unrestricted. Under the American Constitution it is necessary for a Member of Congress—whether he sits in the House of Representatives or in the Senate—to reside in the state by which he is returned. There is no such rule in the case of Members of Parliament. It was provided by a statute of Henry V that “knights of the shires and citizens and burgesses should be dwelling and resident” within the constituencies they represented. But this residential qualification had been evaded or fallen into disuse long before 1620, when a committee of the House of Commons recommended its abolition. It was not formally repealed, however, until 1774. The Act (14 Geo. III, C. 58) declared that the laws as to residence, passed in the fifteenth century, “have been found by long usage to be unnecessary and have become obsolete”; and in order to “obviate all doubt that may arise upon the same” it was ordered that the statute book should be cleared of all enactments relating “to the residence of persons to be elected to serve in Parliament.”
In view of the common interests of the country and its complete coherence in social and economic life, it would be idle to limit the electors in their choice of representatives to local residents. Moreover, such a restriction would tend to the exclusion from Parliament of able and distinguished men whose reputation is national rather than local. But one regrettable result of this freedom of selection is that the varying idiosyncrasies of the different parts of the country are no longer reflected, distinctly and sharply, in the House of Commons. The representatives are not, in many cases, racy of the soil of their constituencies. Each of them is not permeated with the spirit of the place for which he sits—thinking its local thought, speaking its dialect, having its accent on his tongue. A man with an Irish brogue may sit for a London constituency. A South of England man may represent the northernmost constituency in Scotland. This typical Yorkshireman finds a seat in the West of England; that unmistakable Devon man speaks for a place in Lancashire. The manufacturer is returned by an agricultural county; the country squire by an industrial borough. It is true that in the main the representatives of Wales and Scotland are essentially Welsh and Scottish, though less so with respect to Scotland than with respect to the other Celtic fringe. The English membership, which constitutes the vast bulk of the House, is also strong in English characteristics; but the views, feelings and interests of a particular locality are seldom expressed in its voice and with its manner by its representative. Though a local man is still supposed to be, more or less, a strong candidate, in truth local representation in Parliament is fast losing its local character and ceasing to have any local purpose at all under the operation of the Caucus, or the system of rigidly organized political Parties. Members of Parliament are no longer chosen specially to safeguard the local interests of their constituencies. Their chief purpose is to have the country governed and administered by the light of their political principles. This Member is said to sit for Hodgeshire, that other for Cottonopolis. What they really represent, generally speaking, is the Conservative Central Office, or the Liberal Central Office, or the Labour Executive. But while membership of the House of Commons is now thoroughly political, it is, for that very reason, also thoroughly national. “Every Member, though chosen by one particular district, when elected and returned serves for the whole Realm.” So wrote Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, about the middle of the eighteenth century. It was, then, perhaps, but a pious aspiration. It is now undoubtedly an accomplished fact, at least in the sense that the representative serves for the whole Realm according to the political principles which he is returned to uphold.
The property qualifications which formerly made a seat in the House of Commons the privilege of the rich were abolished in 1858. At no time was it possible for any man but a man of substantial means to gain access to the House. But it was not till 1711, in the reign of Queen Anne, that an Act was passed providing that all Members—except the eldest sons of peers and the representatives of the Universities and of Scottish constituencies—must possess an income from land to the extent of £600 a year in the case of a knight of the shire, and of £300 a year in the case of a citizen of a city and a burgess of a borough—the three classes into which Members of the House of Commons were then divided. The enactment was designed to perpetuate the ascendancy in the House of Commons of the country or Tory Party, which they themselves feared was being threatened by the rich manufacturers and traders who were being returned by the cities and towns. Swift described it in the Examiner as “the greatest security that was ever contrived for preserving the Constitution, which otherwise might in a little time be wholly at the mercy of the monied interest.”