PARLIAMENT TO-DAY

Greymouth Evening Star, 14 November 1930, Page 12

PARLIAMENT TO-DAY

EXAMINING THE MACHINE.

In the schools of the United States every boy, every girl, is taught to recite the address delivered by Abraham Lincoln on the field of Gettysburg. According to the immortal and challenging declaration, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from earth, writes P. W. Wilson in the “New York Times.” Three revolutions—in the Argentine, Bolivia, and Peru —have demonstrated the failure of the constitutional method; and, worst of all, we have George Bernard Shaw reiterating with accomplishing exactitude bis early Edwardian jibes at an impervious House of Commons. It is said that even Congress is sometimes criticised.

But what is happening to this government of the people, by the people, and for the people? Every day the news suggests that it is perishing from a good many places from this earth. Here is Germany, supposed to be a Republic, yet running a General Election in which the Fascists to the right and the Communists to the left record immense gains over steady citizenship of the centre parties on which tho Republic depends. Here is an Italian Parliament obliterated by Mussolini. Here is the Constitution of Spain in abeyance. Here is a Parliamentary China rent by civil war. Here is a Parliamentary India secluding Gandhi. Here is a Republic in Russia transformed into a Communist Tsardom. Here is an Ottoman Republic summed up in the absolutism of Kemal. Here is the Parliament of a reunited Poland played pianissimo by a Paderewski as a prelude to a dictatorship by Pilsudski. Indeed, even in Nicaragua the candidates during an election have to be protected from the voters and each other by the United States Marines. The ballot is no substitute for the bullet.

Truth to-day is dug from-the soil with a spade and we may apply, perhaps, a little well-meaning archaeology to • this curious phenomenon — the malaise that has come over democracy.

In the dark ages of Queen Victoria there really were forward-looking persons Who, calling themselves Liberals, preached a gospel. They were liberals in economics who held that Free Trade is as obvious as the proposition in arithmetic that twice two are four. They were liberals in religion who believed that churches should be independent of States and equal to one another. They were liberals in education who demanded schools for all children and colleges without ecclesiastical tests. They were liberals in society who ridiculed the peerages that they accepted. They were liberals in history who looked with disdain on eras less enlightened than their own. They were liberals in diplomacy, advocating peace, denouncing armaments, and pleading the cause of small nations, rightly struggling to be free.

THEIR FAITH. But above all they were liberals in politics. The Cavours and the Kossuths, the Victor Hugos, the Mazzinis, the Brights and the Cobdens; the Germans of 1848 and the Irish at any time, insisted on Parliaments. To their minds, it was obvious that a Parliament elected by the people, must be superior in every way to a prince who is only a son of his father. To overcome the Holy Alliance and similar anachronisms and to start as many Parliaments as revolutions permitted, this was the programme. And it caught on. A country was not in the fashion unless it exhibited what Indians in Oklahoma call a reservation, where the Burkes and the Borahs and the Baldwins could utter their ideas on human destiny. Indeed, a cynical old statesman like Palmerston, had he lived to be as old as that veteran prohibitionist, Zaro Agha, now inspecting a juvenile America, would have been amazed by the apparent prevalence of the Parliamentary vogue. “Pam” knew the House of Commons. He had heard, possibly, of Congress. He would have been reconciled, then, to Legislatures in the Dominions, similar to Westminster, but Federal like Washington. He would have been genially tolerant of a Reichstag in Germany, a Chamber of Deputies in France, a Sobranye in Bulgaria, and a Narodna Skupshtina in Yugo-Slavia.

But if any lunatic had been so foolish as to tell Palmerston that, in a few years after his death, Russia would elect a Duma, that the Ottomans would substitute a National Assembly for an Islamic Sultan, that a king of Egypt would imitate the Queen of England, and read “a speech from the Throne,” and most incredible of all, that women of Burma and Madras would vote for a Parliament it Delhi and their provincial Legislatures —any' such idea would have been received by Pam with an insouciant smile over the mentality of the prophet. The epithet for the East was ‘unchanging.” A Parliament in China? A Budget in Japan? Unthinkable.

To the Liberals, Parliaments were lot merely what a silk hat is to a Turk —a shining signal to all the world of an emancipation that encircles, without invading, the intellect. A Parliament was an organisaion that teemed with a mystical, if not very precise, significance. True, its phere of influence was limited. But vithin its sphere, a Parliament was aipreme. For every ill of which the citizen, as citizen, had a right to complain, the Legislature provided a panacea. Parliament could remove griev-. ances, could adjust taxation, could improve law, could reform abuses, could •safeguard the right of individuals. If hitherto a medieval mankind had lacked a new heaven and, what was more immediately important, a new earth, the reason was simply that there had been no Congresses to read these admirable measures of reconstruction a first, second and third time, with committee and report stages included, according to the standing orders; no Senates, in due course, to sustain the veto of wisdom, a power attributed by the Constitution to one-third of that body; no Supreme Court to sweep away the welfare of the celestial regions, by five votes to four, as an infringement of the State’s rights.

Hence it was, to the Liberal, a kind of breach of privilege to suggest that any Legislature, once set going like a motor-car, could suffer a punctured tyre or any other interruption of unlimited speed on the high road of history. Despotisms might rise and fall like the tide that caresses a certain tea-ridden terrace on the Thames,

but a Parliament, like ‘ Tennyson’s brook with its “chatter chatter” and other advantages over a mute inglorious mankind, would be bound to “go on forever.” What is it, then, that has gone wrong with organised freedom? Why are we worried with all this static in the broadcast of democracy? In Britain, the historic Liberal Pai ty which sent 400 members to the Parliament of 1906 has been reduced to a mere remnant of 50. The Liberalism of Smuts in South Africa and of Mackenzie King in Canada has sustained shocks only less severe. Nor is this all. The immunity from arrest, which the Commons wrung from a reluctant King Charles 1., is disregarded. If a Mazzini were to arise in Italy, his home would be exile or a penal colony, while not a newspaper would print his words. In Russia, Tolstoy would be the guest of the Cheka or the Ogpu. . If Mr Edison’s Boys’ Brigade wish to electrify an, answer to this question, they should begin by recognising a general principle. In any diagnosis of any difficulty anywhere in the world, the first thing to do is to look for the root of the trouble in Great Britain. In advocating Parliaments, it was Britain that Liberals took as their text. If Britain could run a Parliament, so could Bulgaria—why not?

CENTURIES OF WORK. But as usual there was a catch somewhere. The question was not whether a Bulgarian is as clever a politician as a Briton; enjoying the political opportunities of the Balkans, he is probably much cleverer. But there arises the question whether his margin of cleverness is so great that he can develop an institution in twelve months which Britain has only been able, with the utmost difficulty, to develop in twelve centuries. With all their admiration for Legislatures, the Liberals had a very definite idea of what these muchmisunderstood machines would and would not achieve. They were continually careful to limit the Parliamentary function. Parliament could vote money. Parliament could discuss a treaty. Parliament could admit dissenters to Oxford and Cambridge. Parliament could determine the size of the army. After fifty years devoted to a profound study o£ Leviticus, Parliament might go so far as to authorise a man to marry his deceased wife’s sister. But according to the Manchester School, the attitude of Parliament toward industry, wages, hours of labour, insurance, housing, welfare in factories and, particularly, the management of telephones was laissez-faire —“let it alone.” No Liberal of the old school supposed for a moment that any Parliament, even a Parliament with the efficiency of robots, would be capable of assembling an automobile; inserting a new ribbon in a typewriter, or producing an ico cream soda.

If. ever a programe -has been fulfilled, it is this limited programme of Liberalism. Despite all tariffs, there has been developed an interchange of commerce of which, in their wildest enthusiasm, the free traders did not dare to dream.

But the question has arisen whether a Parliament ought to be merely the guardian of the individual in the exercise of his rights as a citizen. What is the use of taking that view when there are 2,000,000 unemployed in a country like Cuba, and a shortage of rain in a State like Ohio? A Legislature in these days has to supply the organisation which no individual by himself or group of individuals can achieve, and organisation means a concentration of executive authority. It means one hand on the lever and one will behind the hand. Hence, dictatorships. Hence, food controllers. Hence, demands that Congress and industry become partners in the promotion of prosperity. HenCe, the Prince of Wales in Argentina and Mr Hoover navigating the floods of the Mississippi. ' In Britain, happily, the position causes no perplexity. If Italy has a dictator and Ireland a Dail Eireann, let England, as the country of compromise, have both. The Civil Service Is Britain’s autocracy, and the House of Commons is' the thermometer which indicates how much of autocracy a suffering people can put up with. When the limit is reached, the Government is changed, and the Civil Service goes on as before.