But the House of Commons is meant to be a deliberative assembly! It holds still the highest place among the democratic assemblies of the world, and its rules and forms and customs have been adopted with unquestioning veneration, wherever democratic communities have set up legislating for themselves. In point of personnel, recent Parliaments have shown no falling off from the standards of other days. In manners, in public spirit, in devotion to parliamentary duty, and in the range of their knowledge and experience, the members of the present Parliament compare most favourably with their predecessors in any Parliament in our history. If they are gagged and closured and guillotined, it is not because their speeches would be unworthy of the place or of the occasion. The simple reason is that there is no time for them. The mother of Parliaments is trying to do the work of four or five Parliaments, and is signally failing in the attempt.

Let this be noted. Though the outcry against the guillotine closure, whenever it is proposed to be exercised, is loudest on the opposition side of the House, the guillotine operates just as much to the disadvantage of private members on the Government side. They are expected to support the Government Bill in broad outline, but they are under no obligation to support it in every detail. They entertain, and are entitled to entertain, their own views as to points of detail, [pg 380] and are no more willing than members opposite that their pet amendments should be sacrificed arbitrarily at the end of an allotted day. Indeed, since they are, ex hypothesi, devoted to the main principles of the Bill, they are likely to be even more solicitous than members of the Opposition that the Bill should be as perfect in detail as in its general scope. Little wonder that under the operation of the guillotine, private Ministerial members tend more and more to become passive and, in the long run, indifferent spectators of the drama that is enacted on the floor of the House when a great Bill is going through, and it is in this respect and not in any other, I think, that modern Parliaments are inferior to others.

There are other aspects of the question that might be dwelt on at some length, if this were the proper occasion. Since it is recognised in all parts of the House that a great measure is not and cannot be adequately discussed under the guillotine closure, a dangerous practice has grown up of leaving difficult matters to be decided by Government departments or by new authorities set up under the Act. Under the National Insurance Act, for instance, the Commissioners are invested for certain purposes with all the legislative prerogatives of the three estates of the realm! I must leave that matter to the constitutional authorities. I am concerned for the moment merely to show that the guillotine closure is a clumsy, unbusinesslike, and dangerous expedient that cannot be regarded as having solved in any satisfactory degree the eternal problem of congestion in a Parliament that attempts to cope at the same time with the local affairs of three or four provinces, and with the affairs of an empire.

Relief might doubtless be found in the more frequent [pg 381] use of what is known as the “kangaroo” closure. This method of dealing with business in Committee was first regularized in 1908. Under this system, power is given to the Chairman to select such Amendments as he believes to be really important, to the exclusion of others. The burden of responsibility thus thrown on the Chair is felt to be enormous, and it is chiefly on this account that the kangaroo closure has been very sparingly exercised.

I say that the setting up of four Standing Committees, and the institution of the guillotine closure have so far failed to relieve appreciably the pressure of business in the House of Commons. Another method has been tried that might reasonably have been expected to produce more fruitful results. I refer to the prolongation of the session of Parliament. In 1906 we had an autumn sitting. In 1907 we sat until August 28th. In 1908 we had an autumn sitting. In 1909 we sat for practically the whole year. The session of 1910 was agreeably diversified by a strenuously contested General Election at either end of it. In 1911 we had yet another autumn sitting, and this year we are threatened with a continuous session extending from February until Christmas time. True enough, a good part of the work of these sessions was wasted by the action of a House of Lords which has since lost some of its powers for obstructive mischief, but it will be observed that of the first class measures destroyed by the Lords, only two—the Education Bill (in a different form), and the Scotch Small Holders Bill—have subsequently made considerable demands on the attention of the House of Commons. The time gained by extending the sittings of these several Parliaments has been chiefly wanted for new legislation. Even if the House of Lords had found it convenient to [pg 382] pass the Liberal measures which it rejected, the pressure of business in the House of Commons must have necessitated the resort to autumn sittings in two or three of the years under consideration. Now, it is a commonplace that autumn sittings are permissible only in very exceptional circumstances. From the point of view of all Members of Parliament, autumn sittings are an unqualified disadvantage. Members, like other folk, want their holidays, and, unlike other folk, have constituencies to look after. Ministers of the Crown who are members of the House of Commons stand in even greater need of holidays than private members, and are not less under obligation to cultivate their constituencies. In addition, they need leisure for the preparation of the great Government measures that are to figure in the King's Speech, Departmental Bills for the ensuing session, and generally for the overhauling of the work of their departments. It is astonishing that the work of the great administrative departments should have been done so well in recent years when regard is had to the extreme pressure under which Ministers have been working. If Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Asquith had not had at their command an abundance of administrative talent of a high quality, there must have been during the last six years many cases of failure in the management of the important Parliamentary Offices of State. One of the chief functions of a Parliamentary Minister in charge of a department is the infusion of new ideas, the re-assembling and adaptation of old machinery, the bringing up to date of an organisation that may have served its purpose well in the past but is no longer adequate to the enlarged requirements of modern times. For such work as this there must be time for cool deliberation. It is scarcely possible for the most [pg 383] capable Minister to devise schemes of administrative reform amidst the excited rumours of the lobbies and the innumerable distractions of life in the House of Commons. Less responsible members of the House of Commons than Ministers find that it is well-nigh impossible to think clearly during the session of Parliament.

Other methods have been proposed for saving time in an overburdened House of Commons. There is the proposal that measures that have reached a certain incomplete stage in one session should be revived at the same stage in the next session of the same Parliament. A Select Committee of unusual authority discussed this matter in 1890. Among the members of the Committee were Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Balfour, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Goschen, Sir William Harcourt, the Marquis of Hartington, Mr. Dillon, Sir Edward Clarke, Mr. T. W. Russell, Mr. Labouchere, and Mr. Sexton. Proposals for abridging the procedure on partly considered Bills had been mooted in 1848, in 1861, and again in 1869, but the objects in view of the earlier Committees entirely differed from those of the Committee of 1890. The proposal emanated from the House of Lords, and the original design was to give the Upper House power to hang up Bills coming from the House of Commons. The Lords complained, as they have often complained since, that Bills were sent up to them at a period of the session too late to admit of the exercise of the Lords' rights of revision and amendment. They urged, too, and with some force, that Bills were frequently sent up to them which had not been adequately discussed in the lower House. They desired, therefore, to possess themselves of the power to hold over such Bills to another session. Needless to say, such a proposal as this excited fierce [pg 384] opposition in the House of Commons, and the deliberations of 1848, 1861, and 1869 came to nothing. The Committee of 1890 set out with wholly different intentions. Its object was merely to obviate reiterated arguments in the House of Commons on the same subjects and to save the time of the House. Thanks in a large measure to Mr. Balfour's advocacy the Committee reported that the carrying over of Bills should become the practice of the House, as it is indeed the practice of almost every Parliament in Europe. A formidable minority, however, led by Mr. Gladstone, reported against the proposal, and nothing has yet been done to give effect to the wishes of the majority. To this day the “massacre of the innocents” is a melancholy feature of our proceedings at the end of a session. I doubt myself whether “carrying over” will ever be adopted as a part of the established and regular practice of the House of Commons. Ministers look with cold disfavour on the proposal. They are generally suspicious of private members' little Bills, and private members themselves are not ordinarily enthusiastic about the legislative bantlings of other private members.

One other remedy has been suggested for hastening the dispatch of business in the House of Commons—the limitation of speeches. For every member who made speeches in the House of Commons half a century ago fifty make speeches now. It is not, I think, that we are more loquacious than our ancestors or more greedy of the ready publicity that is accorded to any sort of speech in Parliament. Many interests are now represented in Parliament that were not directly represented at all in the earlier days, and the problems of a more numerous population and of a more complex civilisation make corresponding demands on the time [pg 385] of the House of Commons. The serious man who represents these great new interests in the House of Commons never consciously squanders the time of the House in unnecessary speech. No doubt the prevailing fashion of oratory is marked by diffuseness and lack of discipline, but it is to the comparatively modern scandal of deliberate obstruction by speech that we owe the guillotine and all its attendant evils. From time to time there has been earnest debate as to whether a time limit to speeches should be fixed. That any such policy is difficult of achievement is proved by the fact that even the existing Standing Order against irrelevance and tedious repetition has fallen into almost complete abeyance.

What is the ultimate remedy for the congestion of business in the House of Commons? Who can doubt that it is the delegation of provincial business to provincial assemblies? There has been, I say, no lack of expedients. The setting up of four Grand Committees, the institution of the guillotine as a regular feature of House of Commons procedure in regard to every first-class measure, the frequent resort to autumn sittings—these methods have been tried and found wanting. Little prospect of relief is afforded by any projected limitation of speeches or by the carrying over of Bills. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the legitimate claims on the attention of Parliament grow with the needs of a growing population and of an expanding empire. In part it is the problem of new wine in old bottles. Our Parliament was not constructed for its present purposes. Originally it was the legislature for England alone. The provincial affairs of Scotland were first imposed on it, and then those of Ireland. Concurrently, the management of an empire, as varied in its legislative and administrative requirements [pg 386] as the various climates it enjoys, has been added to our responsibilities. You may if you like regard our present House of Commons as an Imperial Legislature stooping from time to time to the consideration of provincial business, or as a provincial Parliament rising in its moments of inspiration to the discharge of high Imperial duties. The same Parliament that has to decide to-day some small matter of purely local Irish or Scottish concern must settle a national strike to-morrow, approve the naval strategy of the Empire, or frame the constitution for a people. To the executive that is responsible to the same Parliament are entrusted all the tremendous issues of peace and war. It is a supreme testimony to the genius of the British peoples for government that we have voyaged so far without shipwreck everywhere except in the region of Irish affairs.

By all admissions we have made a mess of Ireland. With singular and unwonted perverseness we have refused for more than a hundred years to apply to Ireland the principles of self-government that have justified their application in every province of the Empire that is mainly inhabited by people of our own race. We have risked and we have incurred the disaffection of the Irish themselves; we have imposed on them and on ourselves untold suffering and expense; we have imperilled the whole fabric of our Parliamentary institutions.

It is this last aspect of the problem to which earnest consideration is invited in these few pages. The efficiency of Imperial Parliament is a matter of Imperial concern. By no other means than by maintaining Imperial Parliament at the highest pitch of efficiency can we be assured of good government throughout the empire. I do not myself shrink from any of the [pg 387] logical consequences of the line of argument I have adopted. A truly Imperial Parliament representing England, Ireland and Scotland and, it may be, each of the more important Dependencies of the Crown—that is the goal towards which we should press. But the Irish claim, so far as the claims of the United Kingdom are concerned, was first presented, is most urgent, and must first be satisfied. If we could but rid our minds of party bias, Home Rule for Ireland would be universally regarded as the first step forward in the direction of Imperial efficiency. It is unquestionably a condition precedent to the re-establishment of our control over our own legislative machine.