Parliamentary Prolixity

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 39, 26 September 1907, Page 9

Parliamentary Prolixity

We sometimes refresh our soul by dipping, though not deeply, into the Pierian fount- of ' Hansard '. And then we discover sundry appropriate reasons why the speeches of the friends of poor, patient Job were writ- - ten with an iron point on sheets of lead. We realise, too, that he who invented the time limit deserves ashare in the blessing which Sancho Panza invoked upon the < man who invented sleep. The time limit saves the Legislature from the intolerable tedium of. the pump-handle oralor, - ' <. 1 Who coolly spouts and spouts and spouts away, In one weak, washy, everlasting flood '. Every legislature has its Thurston Tilley, who, (in ' Darxell of the Blessed Isles '') ' had a story of which no one' ever heard the end"'. And -in the tariff debate, the limit rule snipped the lengthening thread of sundry, members' stories while they were spinning the preface, when they ougbt %o have reached the part where ' they lived happily ever after '. The preface is your jarliamentary Thurston Tilley's specialty. To change the metaphor, he is' Tightening his girths or doing his "preliminary canter when he ought to be flying in full career past the winning post. , The contemplation of the ills of .others tends to make us resigned with our own. And it 4 is some comfort, though of a negative kind, to know that other countries suffer even more than ours "from, the plague of parliamentary prolixity. ■ 'la a recent session of the United States Congress ', says a London secular contemporary, ' 40,000,000 words were uttered in the seven months. The official record contains frequent instances of sixty columns of speeches for a six Hours' sitting, an average of 165 words a minute. The Senate devoted seventy days to a debate on the' Railway Rates Bill . a Your Thurston Tilley orator is usually gifted with the tedious manner that would make • even a fine speech as dry as a chip and as lifeless as a stone. . Many of our readers will recall Kinglake's account of the English Cabinet Ministers- who dozed and nid-nid-nodded ' over the monotonous, hum-drum, reading of the momentous despatches of the Duke of Newcastle ordering the invasion of the Crimea. As Sarrivel Weller would have said, ' Poppies were nothing to it \_ But every creature has its use in the economy of creation. And the place and use of the long, dull, prosy speaker was (according to Dean Ramsay) found what time one of the Earls ofLauderdale was sick nigh unto death. The most dangerous symptom of his malady was insomnia in its most aggravated form. He could not recover without sleep, said the doctors. Then up spoke the patient's little son. '. Send for the preaching mion frae Livmgr ston ', quoth he, ' for fayther aye sleeps -v^hen the minister is in ,the pulpit. The doctors acted on the suggestion. The meenister was immediately brought.He hum-hum-hummed through a sermon that was - a stream of extract of poppy and irandragora. ° The ' Earl slumbered, slept— slept on, and recovered.