The Dominion. MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1911. THE PARTY SYSTEM.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1098, 10 April 1911, Page 4

The Dominion. MONDAY, APRIL 10, 1911. THE PARTY SYSTEM.

have already noticed in these columns the attitude of protest against the party system which was assumod some little time ago and is still maintained by that brilliant

young writer and sometime member of tho House of Commons, Me. Hilaihe Belloc. We have before us now the comments of the Spectator and the Westminster Gazette on the book in which, with the collaboration of Mr. Cecil Chesterton (brother of ths more famous Gilbert), Mr. Belloc sets forth his thesis that Great Britain is governed by a few families who keep up a sham fight for the purpose of hiding from the public their real conspiracy to share the spoils of office amongst themselves on thp Portuguese principle of Kotativism." Their differences of opinion are, according to Mr. Belloc, only a pretence, the programmes which they put before the country being arranged in illusion, and their only real policy being to keep their own little family group on tho, front benches. Each "team," to use ■ Mr/ 'Belloc's word, is to have a period in office and then a period in opposition, and so on, according to a prearranged plan. The 540 British members who-are not in the conspiracy are kept in submission by a "profound corruptioa"— waiting for titles, honours, and money rewards. The Westminster Gazette states effectively the strange conclusions to which this theory leads:

The reality is always exactly the opposite of tho plausible aud deceptive appearance. You might suppose, for instance, that the leaders of the Tory party really objected to Mr. Lloyd-George's ■Budget, really wanted Tariff Reform, really disliked the Veto Bill of the present Government, really would prefer to have won tho last election, and to have fe'ot back into office after an exclusion long enough to satisfy any fair-minded lfotativist on the so-called Liberal side. Or you might suppose that the failure of tns Conference and the subsequent election meant that there really were points of divergence between even the front benches.- But all this would be a delusion. Tho Budget and the House of Lords question and all other questions at issue in the last five years have been mutually agreed upon by the "secret alliance," and the fight has been kept going merely to keep alive the corrupt party system on which both of them batten.

Behind the "secret alliance," Me. Belloc thinks he divines the still more secret power of money. The two party organisations "agree to appeal to different sections of the plutocracy," such as the cocoa manufacturers on the one side and the brewers on the other. The resultant policies arc what nobody really wants, but it is part of the business of the front benches to see that nothing else gets a chance. As for the voters, they arc simply ''ten thousand apathetic men," who "are seized by the paid agents of the machine and worried to the polls in groups as nearly equal as can be arranged by tho managers of the show." _ The Westminster Gazette calls this Mk. Belloc's "high-water mark," and observes: "If. anyone who has seriously been through a contested election will believe this, he will believe anything." "Briefly, we may dismiss the whole of this fabric of conspiracy," says the Westminster Gazette, "as an optical illusion of Mr. Belloc's." The Spectator, a little more kindly, thinks it "strange that a man "of Me. Belloc's remarkable acumen should rush to conclusions which the ordinary reader will find as clearly unjustifiable as they are clearly expressed." After admitting that there is "a certain truth in all his aiguments, , tho Spectator declares that "his total of inference is quite beyond belief"—an opinion in which, we should think, most sensible people would agree. In one respect tho Spectator finds the book admirable—"in the description of tho manner in which power has slipped away from private members in the' House of Commons." "Every voter would be the better for reading what a former Liberal member says of the complete dominance of the Cabinet and the complete impotence of tho House to check it." it is just on this point that Mr. Belloc's protest against party government, may hold a useful 'lesson for New Zealand. If his short political career had been in this country not even a predisposition towards_ "optical illusions" could have led him to announce that our two front benches are continuously occupied by members of a few governing families, or to see in twenty years of "Liberal" administration an example of Eotativism. But he would have found that hero, moro completely perhaps than at, St,

Stephens, the Cabinet dominates a House which is impotent (o check it. The .Spectator regards the referendum as the only practical check which lias been proposed, bub it

is fairly evident that the Elective Executive system would go a long way towards making Ministerial domination impossible. In New Zealand, not only does the Cabinet rule the House, but one man rules the Cabinet, and Mr. Seddon's stratagem of choosing weak men as colleagues and keeping them to a great extent in the dark as to his intentions is still being employed by his successor. In this, as in some other respects, his party has a real gricv-

ance against him, and it is rather remarkable that its members generally do not look to the application of some form of the Elective Executive principle as the remedy. Their submissiveness, up to the present, has been truly pathetic.