Public General Acts, 1891-1910.
| United Kingdom. | State. | Total. | |
| 1891-1900 | 295 | 336 | 631 |
| 1901-1910 | 252 | 206 | 458 |
| Total | 547 | 542 | 1,089 |
It will be noticed that there is a curious approximation between the numbers in the two columns, and nearly half the legislative output of Parliament thus takes a form which is at any rate contrary to the spirit of the Act of Union. Excluding financial measures during the few years when the exchequers of Great Britain and Ireland continued to be separate, it would have been anticipated that the legislation under the Union would be uniform, or at least tend to uniformity, and it is very significant that, after more than a hundred years, so much separate legislation should still be required for the several portions of the United Kingdom. But I will postpone any further comments on this situation until I have shown how the “State” Acts are divided up as between the three countries and what are the principal subjects with which they deal.
From my classification of the “State” Acts according to countries, I have omitted the twenty-one Acts which apply solely to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, one Scottish and Irish Act, and one Welsh Act; and, as to Wales, I may take the opportunity to say that I do not prejudge its claim to separate treatment in any measure of Home Rule all round, but that I shall not specifically mention Wales in this paper, [pg 394] partly in order to avoid the repeated enumeration of the four countries in the place of England, Scotland and Ireland, partly because the claim of the Principality, so far as it may be based on laws and administration that are distinct from those of England, is exceedingly weak. Education, however, is already separately administered, separate Insurance Commissioners have been appointed for Wales, and an important Welsh Intermediate Education Act was passed in 1889, just before the period that is covered by the following table.
“State” ACTS, 1891-1910.
| England. | Scotland. | Ireland. | Great Britain. | England and Ireland. | Total. | |
| 1891-1900 | 140 | 74 | 72 | 17 | 21 | 324 |
| 1901-1910 | 78 | 37 | 57 | 14 | 9 | 195 |
| Total | 218 | 111 | 129 | 31 | 30 | 519 |
The above table shows, so far as mere numbers are concerned, how far the pressure upon the Parliament of the United Kingdom would be removed if it were relieved of the responsibility for English, Scottish and Irish legislation, respectively; and, in view of the relative population of the three countries, we cannot be surprised at the conclusion to be drawn from the figures that the main cause of the legislative congestion lies in the fact that the laws relating exclusively to England and those applying to the United Kingdom as a whole, have to be passed by one and the same Parliament. We should, then, seek for some form of delegation which would remove English and Scottish, as well as Irish legislation, from the purview of the existing Parliament; but, in the meanwhile, the figures show [pg 395] that the removal of the Irish business would relieve matters appreciably, and it is probable, without counting the Home Rule Bills, which should not be regarded as exclusively Irish measures, that the Irish legislative proposals take more of the time of the House of Commons than would be represented by the proportion which they bear to the total legislative output.
I now pass to the subject-matter of the Acts of Parliament; and I again turn to Mr. Spalding's book. He has made a most interesting analysis of the statutes up to the year 1890, from which it appears that Parliament had been unable to legislate by Acts applying over the whole of the United Kingdom whenever it had had to deal with the administration of justice and the laws relating to any of the following subjects: the tenure and occupation of land; the holding, transfer, and devolution of property (including land); the Church; the poor; local government, rural and urban; roads, railways, and canals; and education.[160] These are the subjects, that is to say, on which Parliament had been obliged to pass separate laws for the different parts of the United Kingdom, and the study of this centrifugal tendency seemed to me so important that I have continued (on the next page) the analysis for the following twenty years.
The first impression derived from this table is that the division between the subjects on which the legislation covers the whole of the United Kingdom, and those on which it has a narrower application, is much the same as during the earlier period. Parliament continues to legislate separately for the “States” in the matters in which it has been its practice so to do, and this in itself is a very significant consideration in view of the strong contrary inducement resulting from [pg 397] the growing congestion of Parliamentary business. Thus, taking the last three headings on the list, we see that in regard to Education, the Poor, and the Church, all the legislation during the twenty years was of a “State” character, while the very numerous Acts relating to Local Administration were in almost every instance equally limited in their application. When we pass to Law and Justice, and to Land and Agriculture, we find that the “State” predominance is not quite so marked, but even so, there were three times as many “State” as “United Kingdom” laws, and we conclude that, though the pressure of Parliamentary business is against it, “State” legislation continues to hold the field over a wide and varied range of legislative activity.
Public General Acts.—United Kingdom.[161]