A new Member is not many hours in the Palace of Westminster before he has secured the special peg for his hat and overcoat in the beautiful cloisters of old St. Stephen’s, which has been turned into a cloak-room for the Commons; obtained one of the long rows of lockers, or presses, in the corridors, immediately surrounding the Chamber, to which each Member is entitled, for storing books and papers; enjoyed a pipe or cigar in the smoking-room; had a meal in one of the several dining-rooms; read the newspapers in the news-room, or made himself acquainted with some of the contents of the extensive Library; strolled on the Terrace; had tea in the tea-room, and dispatched numbers of letters on the official stationery of the House to relatives and friends giving his first impressions of the scene where glory or obscurity awaits him as a representative of the people.
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One of the most pleasant adjuncts of the House of Commons is the large and lofty suite of rooms overlooking the Thames, which is devoted to the Library. But there is more in these apartments than books. They also contain some rare and most interesting historical relics, parliamentary and political. Here in a glass case is shown a manuscript volume, stained and mouldered, of the old Journals of the House of Commons. The writing on the pages that are open is not easily decipherable. But it is well worth while endeavouring to peruse it, for it is the official chronicle of the raid of Charles I on the House of Commons. The shaky handwriting tells of the agitation of the Clerk when he made the record.
In the Library is also to be seen a memento of a curious privilege enjoyed of old by Members of Parliament. This is a collection of envelopes franked by eminent Members of both Houses. It comprises about 10,000 signatures, and covers the period from 1784 to 1840, when franking was abolished. By the system of franking, Peers and Commons had the free delivery of letters posted by themselves and their friends. It was introduced in 1660 to relieve Members of some of the expenses incurred in the discharge of their national duties. But this freedom of the Post Office was not confined to letters. Household furniture and even a pack of hounds were sent free through the post by M.P.’s in England, and in Ireland an M.P. franked his wife and children from Galway to Dublin and back on a holiday trip. Members also signed packets of letters wholesale and gave them away to friends. One noble lord thereby franked the tidings of his own death. He died suddenly at his desk after addressing some covers to friends, and the family economically used the covers to tell those friends that he had passed away. Ultimately, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the daily allowance to each Member of both Houses was limited to ten sent by himself and fifteen received by him. All such letters had to bear on their covers the signatures of those who franked them. In the House of Commons collection are to be seen the autographs of archbishops and bishops, of Peers and of Commoners, including such celebrities as Nelson, Byron, Canning, Fox, Peel, Palmerston, Wellington, Clive, Cobbett, Grattan, O’Connell and Gladstone. In the year 1837 as many as 7,400,000 franked letters were posted, at an estimated loss to the revenue of the Post Office of over £1,000,000. At the same time all sorts of devices had to be resorted to by the poor to evade the heavy postage, from 10d. to 1s. 6d., which was then charged for letters. Rowland Hill, the author of the penny postal system, used to underline words in newspapers which he sent home—a Whig politician’s name to indicate that he was well, and a Tory’s that he was ill. Franking was abolished in 1840, on the establishment of the penny post. Members, however, are still entitled to the privilege of sending free through the post a limited number of copies of a Bill to their constituents, by endorsing the covering wrapper with their signatures.
The table of the old House of Commons, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1706, and at which Burke, Pitt, Fox, Canning and Peel stood while addressing the House, was found in the ruins, after the fire of 1834, almost uninjured. It is now preserved in the tea-room. In one of the smoking-rooms is to be seen an interesting memorial of Henry Broadhurst, one of the first of the Labour members. In a glass case are the mallet and chisels used by him as a stonemason employed on the buildings of the new Palace of Westminster, which he was afterwards to enter, not only as a Member, but as a Minister, for he served as Under-Secretary of the Home Department in 1886.
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The old Houses of Parliament had no such pleasant lounge as the Terrace, which extends the whole length of the river front. On summer nights Members who desired a blow of fresh air promenaded old Westminster Bridge. “It was a beautiful, rosy, dead calm morning when we broke up a little before five to-day,” wrote Francis Jeffrey, M.P. and editor of the Edinburgh Review, to a friend on April 20, 1831, in reference to a late and stormy sitting over the first Reform Bill, “and I took three pensive turns along the solitude of Westminster Bridge, admiring the sharp clearness of St. Paul’s, and all the city spires soaring up in a cloudless sky, the orange-red light that was beginning to play on the trees of the Abbey and the old windows of the Speaker’s house, and the flat green mist of the river floating upon a few lazy hulks on the tide and moving low under the arches. It was a curious contrast with the long previous imprisonment in the stifling, roaring House, amid dying candles, and every sort of exhalation.” If Jeffrey could return from the Shades and see the Terrace, especially on a fine afternoon in June or July, when “five o’clock tea” is being served, how amazed he would be, and how he would curse his fate that he should have been born a century or so too soon! Perhaps? For there are legislators who think that “Tea on the Terrace” is a function lowering to the dignity of Parliament. A part of the Terrace is reserved for their sole use by a notice, “For Members Only,” where they may ruminate in gloomy aloofness undisturbed by the smiles of beauty and the rustle of her skirts.
As the new Member explores the corridors and rooms, he will see the walls hung with portraits of all the Prime Ministers, all the Speakers, and a long line of Chancellors of the Exchequer, besides those of other distinguished politicians who never attained to office. Apart from their innate interest as counterfeit presentments of great statesmen, in mezzotints or line engravings, these pictures should stimulate the ambition of the new Member to make a name for himself. There is one way in which the new Member may employ his leisure at Westminster with profit to the tax-payer. That is to follow the excellent example set by Passmore Edwards, the philanthropist, who sat in Parliament for a number of years in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Writing in his autobiography, A Few Footprints, he says:
I would write the words “Waste not, want not” over the doors of parliament houses, palaces, cottages, workshops and kitchens; and if the spirit and meaning of the motto were put in practice the world would spin through space with a double joy. While a Member of Parliament I always, when opportunity offered, lowered the gas within reach that was burning to waste. I did so for a double reason—to prevent waste and to preserve the purity of the air of the House; but I never saw or heard of any other Member or servant of the House doing a similar thing.
“True political economy,” Edwards adds, “is in reality true moral economy. I hate waste anywhere and everywhere.”