Can It Be Mended?, Part Two

Back in August 2018, I posted Can It Be Mended? Part One. I began my next post,

I was going to post the second part of 'Can it be Mended?' by Belloc and GKC's brother Cecil today. However, The ChesterBelloc Mandate never published Part Two, so I bought the book and am in the process of laboriously copying and pasting it into a post. It should be finished in a day or so. When it is, I shall post it with a link back to the first part.

The 'day or so' lengthened into 18 months, but here it is, finally!

Part Two, 'Can it be Mended'.

By Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton

A law which we are inclined to think would be even more to the purpose would be one whereby the duration of Parliament should be limited within a certain short fixed period (four years at the very most), and should be indissoluble within that period.

The effect of this reform, were it made law, would be immediate. A vote of censure upon the executive of the day (the King, as our forefathers called the thing) would not entail upon those who passed it the expense, disturbance, and personal peril of a general election. They would be free to vote; and the executive, that is the two Front Benches, would have to bow to their will.

The mere appearance of an adumbration of independent voting made the late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and the other professional politicians give way in the matter of the Trades Disputes Bill. The principle has already entered the House of Commons, and all that is necessary is to seat it firmly by forbidding the professional politicians the right to dissolve Parliament. excellent pamphlet, " What is the Use of Parliament ?" (1) Mr Jowett would abolish the Ministry with its collective responsibility altogether, and substitute a number of Departmental Committees of the House, similar to those that transact business on local councils. All parties would be represented on these, and to them political " crisis " ; the Ministry would not resign, neither would there be any dissolution. This last condition is essential, for otherwise the Minister could always secure a majority both on the Committee and in the House by threatening resignation or dissolution ; and the Party System would remain almost unaltered. If, therefore, Mr Jowett's plan is to succeed, it must be accompanied by the provision already discussed of fixing by law the duration of Parliament, and taking from the Front Benches the right of arbitrarily forcing a dissolution.

With this reservation, it may at once be allowed that Mr Jowett's scheme, if freely and honestly carried out, would not only smash the Party System, but provide a proper working machinery for a free deliberative assembly.

But, as things stand, what chance is there of honestly carrying out such a scheme, even if it could get accepted on paper ?

If the Committees were packed with partisans, placemen, and place-hunters, the Minister would give them only such information as he chose, and would dictate the policy which they would obediently endorse. The Committees might even be used to increase (if that be possible) the modern irresponsibility of members, by affording a buffer between them and the House. As to independent members, it would be easy to keep them off Committees, or at any rate off the particular Committees where they might be dangerous. Mr Victor Grayson has told the world how he applied to be put on a Committee of Social Reform, and was immediately told that he had been appointed to sit on the Committee to consider the Irish Linen Marks Bill.

That is perhaps no insignificant indication of what might happen if Mr Jowett's plan were adopted in a House still dominated by the Party System. Candidates by their localities would be valuable enough ; but it must be remembered that it will be no easy task to graft primaries with their postulate of popular initiative on to English society, as it is at present.

Another suggestion made for the democratisation of our politics is the Referendum. This proposal, excellent in itself, has of late been rendered a trifle ridiculous by its sudden and obviously insincere exploitation by one of the party teams. Mr Balfour's "Referendum," so far as its nature can be guessed at, amounts to no more than that the " bosses " of the two sides acting, as always, in collusion, should from time to time entertain the people by submitting to their judgment proposals in which they take no interest whatsoever, a course which might also prove convenient as a means of burying some highly unpopular proposal insisted on by a wealthy subscriber or a too-persistent colleague. The only Referendum which will prove of the slightest value to the people will be the Referendum accompanied by the Initiative ; in other words, the right of the people (as expressed by a certain number of electors) to determine on what subjects they shall vote. Such a right would indeed be of incalculable value; but before it is likely to be obtained the people must develop a sufficiently alert political sense to make their initiative a reality. It would seem, then, that changes in political machinery will prove either impossible or ineffective, unless the people can be awakened to political consciousness and to a resolution resolution to make their will prevail. An alert democracy, even with unchanged machinery, could knock the bottom out of the Party System to-morrow by refusing to elect party hacks and by sending to Parliament men fully determined to make an end of the corruption and unreality of our politics. In proportion as the mass of men understand the nature of the present system, and resolve to replace it by a better, the Party System will become more and more difficult to work.

The political education of the democracy is therefore the first step towards a reform. corruption is of course dangerous in the extreme ; the rash man who might be tempted to employ this weapon would find himself bankrupted or in prison, and probably both. But the general nature of the unpleasant thing can be drilled into the public by books, articles, and speeches. True, the Press will do its utmost to prevent prevent the dissemination of the truth with regard to public life; for the Press, as we have seen, is one of the chief accomplices in this side of the national decline. But it is an error to imagine that publicity, because it is at first restricted, will be ineffectual.

So suspicious is an increasing section of the public growing of the whole political scheme, and of the printed support of it, that the continued exposure of the evil, even if it be undertaken by comparatively few men, has a wide effect.

It may have for its organs of expression only a few and ill-capitalised papers ; but one man speaks to another, and truth has this particular quality about it (which the modern defenders of falsehood seem to have forgotten), that when it has been so much as suggested, it of its own self and by example tends to turn that suggestion into a conviction.

You say to some worthy provincial, "English Prime Ministers sell peerages and places on the Front Bench."

He is startled, and he disbelieves you; but when a few days afterwards he reads in his newspaper of how some howling nonentity has just been made a peer, or a member of the Government, the incredible sentence he has heard recurs to him. When in the course of the next twelve months five or six other nonentities have enjoyed this sort of promotion (one of whom perhaps he may know from other sources than the Press to be a wealthy man who uses his wealth in bribery) his doubt grows into conviction.

That is the way truth spreads, and that, by the way, was why this book was written.

The truth, when it is spoken for some useful purpose, must necessarily seem obscure, extravagant, or merely false ; for, were it of common knowledge, it would not be worth expressing. And truth being fact, and therefore hard, must irritate and wound ; but it has that power of growth and creation peculiar to itself which always makes it worth the telling.

Again, exposure (within the limits which the machine is compelled to allow — and the machine is not without its power over the judiciary) works in a manner less just, but still of some value ; it works by ridicule.

Men love to laugh, and if you can present your liar, your coward, your place-hunter, your hypocrite, not as hypocrite, place-hunter, coward, and liar, but as a buffoon, though the action may be unjust, you have not done wholly ill. As a buffoon he is well advertised ; once advertised, a discovery of all that he really is will follow.

1 This little pamphlet, of no more than thirty pages, should be in the hands or everyone who is interested in the present decay of Parliament, and concerned to find a remedy. The futility of the Commons procedure, the effect produced by the House of Commons on a member submitted to that procedure, has never been more lucidly or accurately put. The examples chosen are peculiarly striking and typical. The remedy Mr Jowett proposes is not only worthy of debate, but will provoke it, and there will be conflict of opinion upon it : there can be no conflict on the value, sincerity, and effect of the exposure upon which the tract is based. It is the second of the Pass On pamphlets, published by the Clarion Press, of 44 Worship St., E.G., and may be purchased for a penny, or by post 1 £d.