Again a happy thought occurred to him. Suppose he were to put on an overcoat and so hide his collarless condition? But his overcoat was in the cloak-room, a flight lower down. The spectacle of a learned and somewhat adipose Q.C. rushing downstairs in shirt and trousers might lead to misapprehension. There was, however, nothing else to be done, and the flight was successfully accomplished. The hon. member safely reached the cloak-room, was helped on with his coat, and, with collar turned up closely buttoned at the throat, he passed through the Division Lobby, an object of much sympathy to his friends, who thought his cold must be bad indeed to justify this extreme precaution on a summer night.
PRIVILEGE.
It is a well-known fact, much appreciated in quarters personally concerned, that no action for libel may be based upon words spoken in the House of Commons. This understanding has been confirmed by an action to which Mr. Arthur Balfour was an involuntary party. In the course of debate, in which he took part as Chief Secretary, he had spoken disrespectfully of a midwife in the south of Ireland. The lady's friends rallied round her, and guaranteed funds to cover the expenses of a civil action for damages brought against the Chief Secretary. Had the case come before a Cork jury, as was inevitable if it went to trial, it would doubtless have proved a profitable transaction for the plaintiff. Mr. Balfour appealed to a higher Court, on the ground that the words spoken in Parliamentary debate are privileged. The Court sustained this view, and the trial was set aside.
I have high judicial authority for the statement that in spite of this rule the position of a member of Parliament in the matter of libel is not impregnable. He is quite safe, not only as far as words spoken in the House are concerned, but is not responsible for their publication in the newspapers, or their subsequent appearance in "Hansard." "Hansard," however, is accustomed to send to each member a report of his speech, leaving to him the option of revision. If the proof be not returned within a few days it is assumed that no correction is desired, and the speech goes down to posterity in the form it was handed in by the reporter. When a member has revised his speech the fact is intimated by a star.
It is herein the distinction in the matter of legal liability is established. A member having voluntarily revised his speech is assumed, by the fresh and independent action taken outside the House of Commons, to have assumed a liability he would otherwise have escaped. An action would lie against him, not for the speech delivered in Parliament, but for the publication of the libel under his revision, and upon his authority, in a widely circulated periodical. Verb. sap.
A PRECIOUS VOLUME.
A glance over any volume of "Hansard" shows that it is only the new or inconsiderable member, whose speeches are not likely to become the texts of subsequent debate, who is at pains to revise reports of his Parliamentary utterances. Old Parliamentary hands like Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Balfour, and Mr. Chamberlain are, in the first place, too busy, and, in the second, too wise, to commit themselves to the task.
Mr. Chamberlain once suffered from yielding to the temptation to secure an accurate report of his deliverances on important political questions. In 1885, on the precipice below which unexpectedly lay the fissure in the Liberal Party, Messrs. Routledge brought out a series of volumes containing reports of the speeches of some six or eight statesmen on questions of the day. It was an "authorized" edition, the various contributors revising their speeches. At this epoch Mr. Chamberlain was the risen hope of the Radical Party. His vigorous argument and incisive invective were directed against the Conservative Party, its history, ancient and modern. It is from this little volume that Mr. Gladstone, in his speech at Edinburgh just before the Winter Session, drew the citation of Mr. Chamberlain's indictment of the House of Lords. It was not the first time it had been remembered. But Mr. Gladstone's joyous discovery sent it trumpet-tongued throughout the English-speaking world. It is this compilation that rescued from the obscurity of daily newspaper reports the happily conceived, perfectly phrased, and now classical similitude drawn between Mr. Gladstone and a mountain.
"Sometimes I think," Mr. Chamberlain said in a passage the perfect literary form of which tempts to quotation, "that great men are like mountains, and that we do not appreciate their magnitude while we are still close to them. You have to go to a distance to see which peak it is that towers above its fellows; and it may be that we shall have to put between us and Mr. Gladstone a space of time before we shall know how much greater he has been than any of his competitors for fame and power. I am certain that justice will be done to him in the future, and I am not less certain that there will be a signal condemnation of the men who, moved by motives of party spite, in their eagerness for office, have not hesitated to treat with insult and indignity the greatest statesman of our time—who have not allowed even his age, which entitles him to their respect, or his high personal character, or his long services to his Queen and his country, to shield him from the vulgar affronts and the lying accusations of which he has nightly been made the subject in the House of Commons. He, with his great magnanimity, can afford to forget and forgive these things. Those whom he has served so long it behoves to remember them, to resent them, and to punish them."
The speech in which this gem lies entombed was delivered at Birmingham, on the 4th June, 1885. In the intervening nine years Mr. Chamberlain has had opportunities of regarding the mountain from other points of view, and has discovered quite new aspects.