THE SKETCHER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2622, 15 June 1904, Page 71

THE SKETCHER.

HOW A MINISTRY IS BROKEN. (M.A.P.) — A Question of the Hour. — How oomes it that a Ministry with a majority of over 100 is left in a minority of 11, as took place in the English Parliament the other week? How ; in fact, does it come at all that a Ministry is defeated? This is a question which must often have occurred to those outside the House of Commons when' the world was ringing with the news that Mr Balfour had been left in a minority, and that the most powerful of modern Ministries seemedi for the moment to be toppling down to the abyes. — The Power of a Ministry. — It is not less difficult to understand why a Ministry should ever be beaten if you be a member of the House of Commons. For there you see the huge network ot interests and forces that always stand between a Ministry and destruction. In the first place the Ministers are always sure of between 20 and 30 votes from their own ranks. It is one of the hardest- parts of the duties and labours of a Cabinet. Minister that he has always to remain in the precincts of the House whenever Government business is being discussed, so as to be present at all divisions. In addition to the votes of the Cabinet ' Ministers there are the votes of the Under-Secretaries, the Whips, the private ' secretaries ' of- -MiiiistefsT— all that vast body of men that' compose, an administration. It would be almost as much as his; place was worth to any one of these subordinate members of. ?. Ministry if he werg absent, from a single division.. ' ' -^-Its Huge Patronage. — . In. addition to this fact, there is the even more momentous consideration that the Government of the day has the great • patronage of an Empire — world-wide and infinitely ramified — at its disposal. Ther<s are viceroyalties; there are judgeships; there aro bishopric? ; there are a thousand and one things which a Ministry has to give away, and which hundreds of people are anxious to get. I have spoken of the ramifications of the Empire ; very often one remembers some of them for the first time when it is announced that some member of Parliament has been appointed to a foreign post. One day you hear that a member has been made a Consul in some South American city; the next day you read in tho papers that some young barrister, whose practice has been ruined by attention to his parliamentary duties, and wkose small fortune has been wasted in Parliamentary contests, has been -appointed Chief Justice or Attorneygeneral to some colony, "-the name of which, possibly, you had never heard before. India alone has hundreds of rich prizes for those who desire to give up active politics and to obtain some easy and well-paid post. The Crown colonies are a very network of all kinds of offices; and so one might go on heaping up lists of places which Go- . vernments can give to those' who support . them. In face of such mighty ' patronage, ■ it is difficult' to understand, how it is that they are ever allowed to leave office so long as they have a normal majority. 4 v — Effect of Bye-elections. — And yet, in spite of aIK these things, and of the majority of 100, the Government ■was defeated. Where is the explanation to be found? * First one must look to the bye-elections. If bye-elections begin to go against the Government, their majority soon dwindles. The average Parliament man thinks first of himself and then of his party; and if he desires to return to the House of Commons again, and if he sees that the bye-elections are going against his party, he begins to get slack in his attendance, and he is especially slack when some question is under discussion which evidently excites a good deal of hostile feeling in the constituencies. Very few -of these members go the length of voting against their party and against the Government. That is an extreme step which is rarely taken, unless a member has definitely decided to change his political party and to go over to the other side. For the member knows very well that if his vote helps to destroy the Ministry of which he lias been a supporter, he is sure to be disowned' by the party organisation in his constituency, and that another man will be chosen in his place to fight the Conservative or Liberal battle. And therefore, as I say, unless he has made up liis mind to change his sid.e t vejy few members will vote against their Ministry. What members of this type do is to abstain. If, for instance, you look down the list of the divisions which have recently wiken place on the fiscal question, you will find the ordinary supporters of the Government divided into three classes. There are, first, of course, the main body, which goes into the lobby and supports the Government. Then there is much, bodvj the Free Fooders,

as' they are called, who go into the Opposition lobby and vote against their iwn Government. They number something like ■26. And then comes the third' section — that is to say, the members who abstain and do not vote either for or against the Government. They run up sometimes to as high a number as 20 or 30. -• —Curiosities of Parliament. — These gentlemen, of coarse, are largely responsible for the breakdown of the Government, but, at the same time, they place themselves in a much more favourable position with their party organisation than if they had) voted against the Government. They can always continue to demand the support of their associations, because they have not violated party discipline, and if there be a strong current of opinion which , takes the same unfavourable view as they do of some act of the Government; they I will be able to divide their associations, and to wrest the nomination from the majority. To* the list of abstentionists must be added ' another large section of absentees — viz., : : those members who have had enough of Parliament, who do not intend to stand i again, and who", therefore, will not take the : trouble of coming down to the House of . • Commons unless it suits them. When a : political party is very much divided — as is ■ the case now, when bye-elections seem to be going against them, — there is always a daily growth of slackness ; and the poor . Whips are driven to distraction in the attempts to get troops to gome up who much prefer to stop at home. I dare say the • constituencies would be horrified if they only knew how ' little some' of their. • repre-sentatives-attend to 'their business There have be^en cases where members returned to a Parliament haver never given a vote in a single division.- ; That sometimes, of course, may.be the '.result of accident." The member may be seized with illness before he 'is able to- take his seat. There was a curious case in the-'first Parliament of which T was a member — the Parliament of 1880. ' j There was a member for a northern constituency who never gave a single vote in ( a single division during the five long years kof this Parliament's duration. The sad explanation in his case was that imme- , diately after he had been elected he lost | his reason, and that all through thedura- , tion of the Parliament he *was an inmate <»f J a lunatic asylum. At that time there was . no provision in the Law of Parliament for [ vacating the seat of a lunatic— the law, 1 [ believe, has since been changed, — and so this constituency had to remain unrepre- , eented during all those five years. ■ — A Snap Division. — Now, assuming the conditions that I have described, it is easy to see how a majority begins gradually to dwindle and to become by degrees beautifully less. But still there 'is a majority left, and a substantial one ; . ; how does that in the end disappear? And this brings me to the explanation of how a snap division is token. The House of , Commons has several very different lives , during the course of a single sitting. There are hours when it is nearly always fairly i full, there are hour 3 when it is nearly •always fairly empty. It used to-be always full at question time when the House began , '.questions at half -past 3; but now that the House meets at the early hour of 2 quesj tion time is an empty instead of a full season. Then the House is nearly always I pretty full between 7 and half-past 7,- for < t that is the period' of divisions, and, however members may desire to keep away from I the House when there are debates but no divisions, they are always anxious to be | present when they can have a division, and, Jat the same time, miss the speech. "Again, ithe House is nearly always empty from j 9 to 10 o'clock at night; there are no s divisions, as a rule, to be expected at so early an hour. j The first thing, then, a party has to do lif it wants to take a snap division is judit ciously to choose the hour for the division. , That hour will, of course, be the hour j when the attendance is likely to be small ■instead of large. The other day, for instance, when the Government was left m : a minority of 11, the division took place at ■ half-past 2— that is to say, at an early , hour, when, as a rule, the House "of Com- ; mons is comparatively empty. * Another good time for a snap division would be between 9 andi 10 o'clock at night. It , would then be the moment when most mem- , bers were still lingering over their dinners, i and if a party were in full force on the j other side, they would be pretty sure ot [ having the majority. —What the Whips Do — But even yet the chances of beating a Government are not great. Some "other pre- , [ cautions are necessary to moke the thing ' sure. And the first of these precautions is ■ to use the devices which cover your own ! strength, and deceive the enemy as to the ' real proportions between their forces and ; yours. This is not an easy thing to do in | the House of Commons, for the arrange- • ments are elaborate for keeping the Govermnent Whips jfell in/ornicd. from hour

to hour, and even from moment to moment, as to the exact numbers of the different parties. In the first place, there are the Whips themselves. Two of them are nearly always posted at the door leading into the lobby, through which every member, as a rule, passes, or by which every member, as a rule, goes out. In addition to the Whips, there is a whole corps of attendants who watch members as they enter and leave. These attendants have in their hand printed lists of the members ; and they tick off the names of members as they enter and leave. They are the eyes and ears of the Whips; they keep full and constant count of the temperature of the House ; and they ought to foe able to tell the exact number of members in every part of the House. Armed with this information, the Whips usually axe able to tell to within one or two what will be the number if a division be taken. — Arts and Devices. But here it is that the arts of parliamentary strategy come into play. 1 have spoken of that door which leads into, the centre lobby. It is quite true, as I have said, that this is the door through which nearly every member of the House enters and by which he leaves. It is the most convenient way of entering ; and a member wouKl have to depart from his usual habits, if he entered in any other way. But members, of course, would not mind submitting to a- little inconvenience in order to carry out so delightful a pastime . as springing a snap division upon a Government. And the favourite stratagem is for members to enter the House by some of the other avenues which lie open to them. For instance, a member need not enter the Chamber at all ; but, going into the Courtyard opposite the Speaker's house, and along to the lower smokeroom and the Terrace, he may 4je ready for the division bell downstairs in the subterranean parts' of the building while the poor Whips upstairs know nothing of his presence. This is the stratagem which was employed by Mr Chamberlain and some of his friends on the famous night when they sprang the division as to cordite upon the House, and, by beating C-8., then Secretary for War, brought to an end the Rosebery Government. - — Strategical Disappearances. — It is said that the same strategy was used by the Irish Party the other day . when they prepared their coup, but I do not believe that that was the case.- What they did was to tell their men quietly the day before to be in the House at half-past 2 o'clock sharp ; they gave the same information to the Liberals, and at half-past the two parties that make up the Opposition were present in full force. I did not hear of a single member entering the House bjr any other but the door, into the Central lobby. ' But the Irishmen' adopted other stratagems' which are well-kno-^n to parliamentarians. About the time when the division was to be iung, they began to melt away on their benches. Some went to the libraries, some to the Terrace ; in any case, " wherever .tbay Avent, they left the Irish 3eats empty, and in this way managed to convey the idea that " there . -n«ere . very few of them in -the House, and that those few did not take any special interest in what was going on. If they had remained in full force on the seats of the House the eye of the Government Whips would immediately have seen that there tv <*s something wrong, and, in any case, the signs of excitement would have been a warning which no.sana or far-seeing Whip could afford to disregard. —The Role of Mr Redmond.— Mr Redmond played his part in the little ambuscade with great adroitness and skill. When -he got lip from the empty benches around him he spoke as though he just wished to make a formal protest against what he considered an act of unfairness on the part of the Government, and his language was brief and almost perfunctory. He evidently managed to convey to Mr Wyndham and to the. Whips the idea that suited' his purpose — namely, that there was nothing serious on handy and that he and his friends meant no mischief. Mr Wyndham at once fell into the trap. He assumed that all that Mr Redmond required was some kind of a pledge which would make things niors satisfactory at another epoch. And Mr Wyndham made a few pleasant and honeyed observations which, in ordinary circumstances, would have been quite enough to have prevented a division. Mr Redmond got up again, and, still in a studiously casual and perfunctory style, made a mild protest against the action of the Government, and then suddenly, but very quietly, made the announcement that he would have to g<s£o a division. —Too Late! Too Late!— Mr Wyndham saw, too late probably, the mistake he had' made. It had been* easy for him to have passed another 10 minutes or quarter of an hour in a more elaborate answer, and by that time the forces of the Government would have been in the House, and lie would .have been secure of his majority. But he sat down after his few honeyed; words, and thus, before anybody knew what was to befall, the division was called, and the division bells were ringing all over the House. The division bells in the House of' Commons are like the knell of doom. After they have once begun to ring, everybody is silenced ; the fatal hour has come; no human power can give a moment's respite. And thus it was that, while Tory members were rushing in cabs to the 'House, while soon after they were beating their hands against the doors closed against them, while a few minutes later they were in force able to beat all comers, it was then all too late. The Irish coup had told ; the Government were in a minority ; and that is how Governments are beaten and broken in the House of Commons. — T. P.