The object with which debate on the Address was originally devised was to provide convenient opportunity of challenging the existence of the Government, or at least of seriously debating some crucial line of their policy. It was a full-dress affair, chiefly confined to the giants of debate. If business were not meant, the conversation was usually brought to a conclusion before the dinner-hour on the opening night of the Session. It was confined to the mover and seconder of the Address, the Leader of the Opposition who criticised the Ministerial programme, and the Leader of the House who replied. There, as a rule, was an end of it. Even if fighting were meant and a division contemplated, it was only on rare occasions that the combat was carried over a single night. The House cheerfully sat till one or two in the morning to reach a conclusion of the matter.
The last time the House of Commons completed the debate on the Address at a single sitting was in the first Session of the Parliament elected in 1874. That same Parliament saw the birth of a party which, in a few years, changed many things in the ordinary procedure of the House of Commons. It was the Irish members, with Mr. Parnell and Mr. Biggar just coming to the front, who discovered the opportunities latent in the ceremony of debate on the Address for obstructing business and embarrassing the Ministry. The lesson was quickly assimilated by other factions, and of late years it has come to be a matter of course that debate on the Address shall be extended beyond a week. Last year ten of the freshest days of the young Session were thus wasted. If the Address were the only opportunity presented for raising miscellaneous questions of public interest, the procedure would be defensible, even commendable. What happens is, that on the Address prolonged preliminary conversations take place round subjects which already stand upon the agenda of business, and will, in due course, be discussed again at further length, upon a notice of motion or the introduction of a Bill.
MR. FENWICK.
The House of Commons framing its Rules of Procedure, and anxious above all things to provide even overlapping opportunities for speech-making, supplies a final illimitable opportunity on the Appropriation Bill. This is brought in at the close of a Session, and upon its second reading members may discuss any subject under the sun. Any speech a member may have prepared at an earlier period of the Session, upon any subject whatsoever, may, failing the first legitimate opportunity, be worked off on the Appropriation Bill. This measure plays the part of the seven baskets in the parable. All the elocutionary or disputatious fragments that remain after the feast of the Session are picked up and crammed within its ample folds.
That is bad enough. But since discovery was made of potentialities of debate on the Address, that occasion has been utilized in analogous fashion. Now we have an Appropriation Bill debate at the beginning of the Session, with pleasing prospect of another at its close.
INNOVATION.
The present Session will be memorable in the long record, since it witnessed an innovation that is probably the beginning of the end of an absurd custom. From time immemorial it has been ordained that members moving and seconding the Address in reply to the Speech from the Throne shall array themselves in uniform if they have the right to wear it. Failing that, they must strut in the velvet and ruffles of Court dress. This Session Mr. Fenwick was selected to second the Address. The member for the Wansbeck Division of Northumberland is one of the most highly esteemed members of the House of Commons, a man of modest mien and great capacity, an excellent speaker, who has the priceless gift of conveying to an audience conviction that he knows what he is talking about and means what he says.
MOVER AND SECONDER.