GULPING THE MEDICINE

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 140, 10 December 1918, Page 6

GULPING THE MEDICINE

Some years ago the intermittent agitation for better housing, better habitation laws and by-laws, and better living generally, culminated in an organised town-planning movement, which was earnestly taken up, and to which Government and Parliament rendered lipservice only. Yet to-day, after years of neglect, a Public Health Bill, snatching pieces out of the old, old story, is rushed, through the House in|a few hours. This is not legislation-by-Parliament; it is legislation-b'y-draughtsmail. What Parliament has done is this: It has deliberately and persistently refused to legislate in its own time and by virtne of its own brains; then—in a panic moment —it legislates by virtue of the brains of people whose proper task is not deliberative but administrative. Proceedings of this natnro can have only one result, and that is to lead people to wonder wliether Parliament has any use at all. In the leisure years, when constructive work might be deliberately built up—so as to be preventive of evil to come—Parliament acts as a passive register; and when the anticipated trouble in due course arrives, Parliament acts as a passive approver, signing with drugged conscience whatever is submitted to it. It is true that some pretence was made at a Committee consideration of the Public Health Bill, but in a few hours the Bill .was through the House from beginning to end, and one of- the most important measures ever passed is likely to become law not because of Parliament, but in Bpite of Parliament. This Bill contains much that is good, and a great deal that is boldly experimental. It is a blank cheque enabling the administrative elements —the central or the local—to do almost everything to secure better housing and better living. And no doubt many benefits are, under it, made possible. But no one can thank either Government or Parliament for the manner in which their duties have been done; nor will the principle of legislation By deliberative elective bodies derive therefrom any conspicuous endorsement.