WORLD-POLITICS.

LONDON: ST. PETERSBURG: BERLIN: WASHINGTON.

LONDON, February, 1905.

THERE is an interest attaching to a fresh session of the British Parliament such as the American Congress, I am told, can never command. Congress makes laws. Parliament not only makes laws but unmakes governments; and it is the ever-present chance that the latter prerogative may be enforced that makes the House of Commons so full of dramatic possibilities and human attractiveness. That attractiveness is still felt, in spite of the steady and progressive decline of Parliament in popular respect and (it is not too much to say) in popular confidence. Within the last twenty years, the attitude not only of the people but of Members of Parliament towards the House of Commons has unmistakably changed. To be a Member of Parliament is still an honor, but not the honor it was. It is a claim to consideration, where it used to be a claim to distinction. It carries with it a position, but the position has been robbed of much of its old prestige. It is a commonplace of English politics that the people no longer read Parliamentary debates. The political instruction of the nation is carried on outside the walls of the House of Commons. Men still look to Members of Parliament for guidance, and guidance is abundantly supplied to them-I know of no country where the average citizen has more or better opportunities of hearing both sides—but it is not from the Front Bench at Westminster, but from the platform at huge popular meetings, as a sort of perambulating lecturer on politics, that the rising statesman, and even the statesman who has already risen, now addresses the country. Again, Parliament nowadays has to compete for popular interest with a new and multiplying host of minor assemblies. There has been within the last twenty years

a vast extension of local government in England. County Councils, Borough Councils and municipalities have not only increased in numbers, but have quintupled their activities. Men who prefer the reality of power to its semblance and its appanages find a readier scope for their energies, can really achieve more, and, above all, can see their achievements bear immediate fruit, if, instead of entering Parliament, they throw themselves into the work of local administration. The sphere is smaller, but its opportunities are more individual; and its duties, as Lord Rosebery has often insisted, at least as interesting and far more intimately related to the welfare of society. But, though a beginning has been made with decentralization, the pressure and the complexities of public business remain more formidable than ever. The widening sphere of local activities has been more than counterbalanced by the growth and insistency of national and Imperial affairs; and the plain fact that Parliament can no longer do its work, that it is hopelessly overburdened and congested and has ceased to be an efficient assembly, lies very near the root of popular impatience and indifference. The record of the last few years, with its blazing proofs of official incompetence, has, I need hardly say, raised alienation to positive and disgusted contempt. The English people have outgrown, perhaps forever, their old innocent and touching faith in the capacity of British Ministers merely because they are British Ministers. They are demanding, almost for the first time in their history, something like a fair return for their money. They feel the need of a higher standard of administration, and they are conscious that Parliament grows yearly less competent to provide it.

Nor is this all. The difference between the outside and the inside view of things political is always great. In England, it is perhaps greater than in any other country. But in this matter of the authority, efficiency and repute of Parliament, I note a most unusual approximation between the views of the average M. P. and the views of the average elector. I have heard in the lobbies of the House of Commons expressions of weariness and discontent at least as whole-hearted as any that are uttered by the man in the street. The more earnest a Member of Parliament is, the more quickly does he become convinced that of all reforms the reform of Parliament is the most urgent. The rights and opportunities of the private member have been almost ex

tinguished. The Cabinet grows yearly more and more autocratic and the House of Commons more and more subservient. The last eighteen months have abundantly shown that the only question which interests the country can, by a skilful use of Parliamentary forms, be almost denied discussion by the people's representatives. The less crowded times when a measure could be debated clause by clause, almost sentence by sentence, have completely passed by. Nowadays, the closure is automatically applied at the discretion of the Government, whole clauses are voted en bloc without debate, and from a deliberative assembly the House is relapsing more and more into an assembly that merely ratifies and registers the decrees of the inner Cabinet. From the point of view of achievement, of the possibility of getting things done, the private member to-day is nothing and the Cabinet Minister, if he belongs to that little group which really constitutes a Cabinet-within-the-Cabinet, everything. I see no way out of the toils, unless and until Parliament relieves itself of the vast masses of purely local business that still encumber its workings, and delegates Irish questions to Ireland, Welsh to Wales and Scotch to Scotland. For matters to continue as they now are must ultimately mean the extinction of Parliamentary government of the old type and the substitution for it of Cabinet Government.

Nevertheless, as I began by saying, the House can still make its attractiveness felt as an arena of passionate personal contention; and, at times when political feeling runs high, it is still able to command the thoughts and interest of the British nation. Such a time is the present. The session that opened on February 14th could only be regarded with indifference by a people that had ceased to concern itself in politics. The mere fact that the reassembling of Parliament found Mr. Balfour's Government still in being is, in itself, one of the wonders of politics. By what desperately dexterous mystifications he has contrived to maintain a Ministry that for eighteen months has been without a majority in the country, observers in America are probably as well aware as we in England. It is at least a tribute to his mastery of the art of political legerdemain that people should be asking to-day the very questions they were asking in 1903. Is Mr. Balfour for or against Mr. Chamberlain? Is his policy of Retaliation a stepping-stone to Protection and Colonial Preference, or something complete in itself, or intended as a shelter in which Free-Traders

may take cover until the storm has blown by? Every possible variety of reply is returned to these queries by Free-Traders, Protectionists and Retaliationists, just as a dozen men will, with equal positiveness, give a dozen different versions of the personal and political relations that exist between Mr. Balfour and Mr. Chamberlain. And such matters but touch the fringe of the vast area of speculation that lies open to every Englishman who takes the trouble to read the newspaper. Mr. Chamberlain, for instance, has let it be known that he favors an early dissolution. His command of two hundred members of the Unionist party gives him the power to force a dissolution at any moment of his own choosing. But dare he use it? Would it be policy to risk the bitterness that would infallibly ensue from any attempt to supplant Mr. Balfour, or to compel him to dissolve against his own wishes? On the other hand, can he agree to an indefinite postponement of a dissolution without a virtual confession that his Fiscal programme has failed?

Such are but a few of the problems that are agitating, not merely the quidnuncs, but men who are usually the most farseeing of observers; and, after canvassing opinions on many sides, I find myself forced back on the unsatisfactory conclusion that nobody really knows anything. It is just this ignorance as to which, out of a score of possible developments, will be the one to take place, that gives to the present session its peculiar interest. People are prepared for anything. They are prepared for a dissolution next month and for one next year. A final rupture between Mr. Balfour and the Unionist Free-Traders; a final rupture between Mr. Balfour and the Unionist Protectionists; so prolonged and persistent a battering by the Opposition as will make further escape from dissolution impossible; a continuation of the present state of affairs, with each section of the Unionist party claiming Mr. Balfour as its own, with the Government losing by-election after by-election, yet still maintaining a sufficient majority in the House and still able to frame and to pass important measures;-not one of these developments is impossible. There are those who think, not without reason, that the Government will be out in a few weeks, and there are those who are confident it cannot survive the Budget, which falls due in April; but I do not think any one would be greatly amazed if a year hence the position proves not to have changed in any

thing but the unessentials. There would be, perhaps, surprise, but it would easily stop short of amazement-so flattering an opinion have people come to form of Mr. Balfour's resource in evading pursuit. I do not underrate his difficulties. He has to face an Opposition that is determined to force the fighting, and that is inspirited by the consciousness of having popular instincts and the popular judgment wholly on its side. He has to keep up to the mark some seventy Unionist Members of Parliament, who, for one reason or another, are not seeking reelection, and whose attendance and interest in the affairs of the party only clear and strong leadership could prevent from being intermittent. He has still at any cost to avoid a decisive break, either with the Free-Traders or the Protectionists. He has to beat down the knowledge that he is fighting a losing battle, and that the appeal to the country can only end in his overthrow. Nor is this the limit of the Balfourian sea of troubles. Mr. Arnold-Forster, earnest and energetic though he is, has not shown himself to be the War Minister that we all hoped he might prove. His latest scheme of Army Reorganization appears to be very little of an improvement on those famous Six Army Corps which Mr. Brodrick called into phantom being. There is a battle-royal in progress among the experts as to the merits or demerits of the new Army rifle; and on both these points Mr. Balfour, before the session closes, possibly before these lines are in print, will have to meet the attack of his own followers. Again, the Unionists in Ireland are profoundly dissatisfied. They cannot reconcile themselves to their new position of isolation and abandonment. They complain bitterly that Ireland is being governed in accordance with Irish, instead of English, ideas, and that the Under-Secretary, Sir Anthony MacDonell, a Catholic and a Home-Ruler, is really playing the Nationalist game under the protection of a Unionist administration. They, too, will prove a thorn in Mr. Balfour's side. It seems incredible that he should emerge unscathed from such a concentration of onsets and difficulties. But I do not expect that he will yield easily. He is a Scotchman, and therefore a fighter, and therefore never more dangerous than when he has his back to the wall.

Anglo-German relations are to-day, as they have been for the past ten years, disquieting and unsatisfactory. How much so, may be judged from the recent "scare" over Mr. Arthur Lee's