SPEECH – METERS

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 4, 5 July 1922, Page 16

SPEECH - METERS

DEVICE FOR PARLIAMENT MARATHON SPEAKERS OF THE PAST. From time to time some of cm* longsuffering members of Parliament take heart to protest against the exuberance of their colleagues' verbosity. In the spacious d»ye before the war, says the London Daily Telegraph, there used to be a hardy annual of a motion moved by the ; late Sir Came Rasch imposing a time-limit on speeches. Everyone thought it an admirable scheme for somebody else, _ but it failed to bring about a change in Parliamentary practice. Now Commander Bellairs has thought of another method. He proposes to work upon honourable members' cense of shame. As in the great age of pulpit oratory a. preacher took an hour-glass with him into tho pulpit, bo Commander Bellairs would have the House fitted with "time-recorders for speeches. Thus, the fluent orator would ever have before his eyes a warning of the draft which he had made on the patience of his colleagues. It ia recorded of some great preachers that wh >n the sand in the pulpit hour-glass had all run out they would bo encouraged by the murmurs of their oongregation to turn the instrument upnde down and continue for another hour. We tope that it is not a breach of privilege to suggest that there are but few members of Parliament whom the House hearing for sixty minutes would desiws to hear for as. long again. The taste for pratory, whether in or out of the pulpit has changed. How many of our modern Ministers would hold the attention of the House through a speech of five hours? Yet sixty years ago such length was not uncommon. Disraeli was up five hours introducing his first Budget. Palmerston took five hours for hie "civis Romanus sum" speech. And neither of these orators was ever accounted verbose, but rather each in his way a master of tact in handling the Hor.se. The tradition is that long speeches came in with the first William Pitt. His "two or three hours'" allowance was claimed by Burke, though Burke was ever a dinner-bell in the House of Commons, and by smaller men till it became a. fashion "by which," said Grattan, "oratory has gained little and business less." The last master of this style was Mr. Gladstone, and no one doubts that his prolixity is the chief reason why this generation finds it difficult to understand how his speeches could have made the effect which indisputably they did. The great speakers nowadays have no affection for this vast scale of oratory, It is sometimer _ said that they use a meaner style, without dignity or grace or any literary quality. But length is not what makes a speech literature. Thoro can be no doubt that our own time has heard pieces of oratory which, for all their comparative brevity and restraint, are as likely to be remembered as anything in the looser Victorian style. But it is not of the leaders that Commander Bellairs and his friends are thinking. What they groan, over is the unconscionable exuberance of some of the rank and file And, indeed, in these days it is almost an axiom that the better the speaker the less time he is speaking. Mr. Lawson, supporting the galant commander from tho ranks of Labour, complained that nothing less than a sledge-hammer wouJd get some members to resume their seats. Ho has our sympathy, but the only consolation we can offer is that someone must suffer to make debaters. Charles Fox used to say, "In my first five sessions I spoke every night but one, and I regret only that I did not speak tost night too." But the feelings of his audience are not recorded. : ' ' ;'• .