Читать книгу The Constitutional History of England from 1760 to 1860 - Charles Duke Yonge - Страница 6

At first the duration of the bill was limited to seven years; but in 1774 it was made perpetual by a still larger majority, the experience of its working having converted many who had at first opposed it, but who now bore willing testimony to its efficacy. Unhappily, though the House could make the bill perpetual, at least till formally repealed, it could not invest its good effects with equal durability. After a time, the same complaints were advanced against the decision of election committees that had formerly been employed to discredit the judgments of the whole House. The success or failure of a petition again became a party question; and as in a committee of an odd number the ministerialists or the Opposition must inevitably have a majority of at least one member, before the end of the reign it had become as easy to foretell the result of a petition from the composition of the committee as it had been in the time of Walpole. And it was with the approval of almost all parties—an approval extorted only by the absolute necessity of the case—that, after one or two modifications of Mr. Grenville's act had been tried, Mr. Disraeli induced the House to surrender altogether its privilege of judging of elections, and to submit the investigations of petitions on such subjects to the only tribunal sufficiently above suspicion to command and retain the confidence of the nation, the judges of the high courts of law.

We shall probably be doing the House of Commons of the day no injustice, if we surmise that the degree in which public attention had recently been directed to the representation, and the interest which the people were beginning to show in the purity of elections, as the principle on the maintenance of which the very liberties of all might depend, had some share in leading the House to establish the wholly new, though most necessary, precedent of punishing a constituency for habitual and inveterate corruption. It may be called the first fruits of Mr. Grenville's act. At the end of the same year in which that statute had been passed, a select committee had sat to try the merits of a petition which complained of an undue return for the borough of New Shoreham. And its report brought to light an organized system of corruption, which there was too much reason to fear was but a specimen of that which prevailed in many other boroughs as yet undetected. It appeared from the report, founded as it was on the evidence and confession of many of the persons inculpated, that a society had long existed in New Shoreham, entitled the Christian Club, which, under this specious name, was instituted, as they frankly acknowledged, for the express purpose of getting as much money as possible at every election from the candidates they brought in. The members of the club were under an oath and bond of £500 not to divulge the secrets of the club, and to be bound by the majority. On every election, a committee of five persons was nominated by the club to treat with the candidates for as much money as they could get. And, in pursuance of this system, when, on the death of Sir Stephen Cornish, one of the members for the borough, five candidates offered themselves to supply the vacancy, this committee of five opened negotiations with them all. The offers of the rival purchasers were liberal enough. One (General Smith) proposed to buy the entire club in the lump for £3000, adding a promise to build 600 tons of shipping in the town. A second (a Mr. Rumbold) was willing to give every freeman £35; and his offer was accepted by the committee, who, however, cautioned him that no freeman was entitled to the money who was not a member of the Christian Club. He willingly agreed to this limitation of his expenditure, and both he and the club regarded the matter as settled. He paid every freeman who belonged to the club his stipulated bribe, and on the polling day they tendered eighty-seven votes in his favor, the entire constituency being something under one hundred and fifty. The general, finding his £3000 declined, did not go to the poll; but a Mr. Purling and Mr. James did, the latter polling only four votes, the former only thirty-seven. What bribe Mr. Purling had given was never revealed; but by some means or other he had contrived to render himself the most acceptable of all the candidates to Mr. Roberts, the returning officer. Roberts had himself been a member of the Christian Club, but had quarrelled with it, and on the day of the election, as Rumbold's voters came up, he administered to each of them the oath against bribery. They took it without scruple; but he took it on himself to pronounce seventy-six of them disqualified, and to refuse their votes; and, having thus reduced Mr. Rumbold's voters to eleven, he returned Mr. Purling as duly elected.

Mr. Rumbold, not unnaturally, petitioned against such a return; when Mr. Roberts admitted the facts alleged against him, but pleaded that he had acted under the advice of counsel, who had assured him that it was within his own discretion to admit or to refuse any votes that might be tendered, and that he might lawfully refuse any "which in his own mind he thought illegal." It is a striking proof of the laxity which prevailed on every quarter in electioneering practices, that the House, to a great extent, admitted his justification or excuse as valid. By a strange stretch of lenity, they gave him credit for an honest intention, and contented themselves with ordering him to be reprimanded by the Speaker. But the case of the bribed freemen and of the borough generally was too gross to be screened by any party. All agreed that the borough must be regarded as incurably corrupt, and deserving of heavy punishment. The Attorney-general was ordered to prosecute the five members of the managing committee for "an illegal and corrupt conspiracy;" and a bill was brought in to disfranchise and declare forever incapable of voting at any election eighty-one freemen who had been proved to have received bribes, and to punish the borough itself, by extending the right of voting at future elections to all the freeholders in the rape of Bramber, the district of Sussex in which New Shoreham lies, an arrangement which reduced the borough itself to comparative insignificance. Mr. Fox opposed the bill, on the ground that the offence committed could be sufficiently punished by the ordinary courts of law. But he stood alone in his resistance; the bill was passed, and a salutary precedent was established; the penalty inflicted on New Shoreham being for many years regarded as the most proper punishment for all boroughs in which similar practices were proved to prevail.

And it might have continued to be thought so, had corruption been confined to the smaller boroughs; but there was no doubt that in many large towns corruption was equally prevalent and inveterate, while there were also many counties in which the cost of a contest was by far too large to be accounted for by any legitimate causes of expenditure. And consequently, as time wore on, severer measures were considered necessary. Some boroughs were deprived of the right of election altogether; in others, whose population or constituency was too numerous to make their permanent disfranchisement advisable, the writ was suspended for a time, that its suspension might serve both as a punishment and as a warning, a practice which is still not unfrequently adopted. But no plan could be devised for dealing with the evil in counties, till what seemed hopeless to achieve by direct legislation was, in a great degree, effected by the indirect operation of the Reform Bill of 1832. The shortening of the duration of an election, which was henceforth concluded in a single day, and the multiplication of polling places, which rendered it impossible to ascertain the progress of the different candidates till the close of the poll, were provisions having an inevitable and most salutary effect in diminishing alike the temptation to bribe on the part of the candidate, and the opportunity of enhancing the value of his vote by the elector. The vast increase of newspapers, by diffusing political education and stimulating political discussion, has had, perhaps, a still greater influence in the same direction. And, as bribery could only be brought to bear on electors too ignorant to estimate the importance of the exercise of the franchise by any higher test than the personal advantage it might bring to themselves, it is to the general diffusion of education among the poorer classes, and their gradually improved and improving intelligence that a complete eradication of electoral corruption can alone be looked for.

Notes:

[Footnote 1: "Constitutional History," vol. iii., p. 380; ed. 3, 1832. The first edition was published in 1827.]

[Footnote 2: Grampound. Corrupt voters had been disfranchised in New Shoreham as early as 1771, and the franchise of the borough of Cricklade had been transferred to the adjoining hundreds in 1782.]

[Footnote 3: Parliament was dissolved March 19. Lord Bute succeeded Lord Holdernesse March 25.]

[Footnote 4: The greater part of Lord Bute's colleagues did, in fact, retain their offices. Lord Egremont and Lord Halifax continued to be Secretaries of State; Lord Henley (afterward Lord Northington) retained the Great Seal; Lord North and Sir John Turner remained as Lords of the Treasury; and Mr. Yorke and Sir Fletcher Norton were still Attorney and Solicitor General.]

[Footnote 5: Parliament was prorogued April 19, and The North Briton (No. 45) was published April 23.]

[Footnote 6: A letter of the Prince Consort examines the principle of ministerial responsibility with so remarkable a clearness of perception and distinctness of explanation, that we may be excused for quoting it at length: "The notion that the responsibility of his advisers impairs the monarch's dignity and importance is a complete mistake. Here we have no law of ministerial responsibility, for the simple reason that we have no written constitution; but this responsibility flows as a logical necessity from the dignity of the crown and of the sovereign. 'The King can do no wrong,' says the legal axiom, and hence it follows that somebody must be responsible for his measures, if these be contrary to law or injurious to the country's welfare. Ministers here are not responsible quâ ministers, that is, quâ officials (as such they are responsible to the crown), but they are responsible to Parliament and the people, or the country, as 'advisers of the crown.' Any one of them may advise the crown, and whoever does so is responsible to the country for the advice he has given. The so-called accountability of ministers to Parliament does not arise out of an abstract principle of responsibility, but out of the practical necessity which they are under of obtaining the consent of Parliament to legislation and the voting of taxes, and, as an essential to this end, of securing its confidence. In practice, ministers are liable to account for the way and manner in which they have administered the laws which they, conjointly with the Parliament, have made, and for the way they have expended the moneys that have been voted for definite objects. They are bound to furnish explanations, to justify their proceedings, to satisfy reasonable scruples, and the answer, 'We have, as dutiful subjects, obeyed the sovereign,' will not be accepted. 'Have you acted upon conviction, or have you not?' is the question. 'If you have not, then you are civil servants of the crown, who counsel and do what you consider wrong or unjust, with a view to retain your snug places or to win the favor of the sovereign.' And this being so, Parliament withdraws its confidence from them. Herein, too, lies that ministerial power of which sovereigns are so much afraid. They can say, 'We will not do this or that which the sovereign wishes, because we cannot be responsible for it.' But why should a sovereign see anything here to be afraid of? To him it is, in truth, the best of safeguards. A really loyal servant should do nothing for which he is not prepared to answer, even though his master desires it. This practical responsibility is of the utmost advantage to the sovereign. Make independence, not subservience, the essential of service, and you compel the minister to keep his soul free toward the sovereign, you ennoble his advice, you make him staunch and patriotic, while time-servers, the submissive instruments of a monarch's extreme wishes and commands, may lead, and often have led, him to destruction.

"But to revert to the law of responsibility. This ought not to be in effect a safeguard for law itself. As such, it is superfluous in this country, where law reigns, and where it would never occur to any one that this could be otherwise. But upon the Continent it is of the highest importance; as, where the government is an outgrowth of a relation of supremacy and subordination between sovereign and subject, and the servant, trained in ideas natural to this relation, does not know which to obey, the law of the sovereign, the existence of such a law would deprive him of the excuse which, should he offend the law, and so be guilty of a crime, is ready to his hand in the phrase, 'The sovereign ordered it so, I have merely obeyed,' while it would be a protection to the sovereign that his servants, if guilty of a crime, should not be able to saddle him with the blame of it."—Life of the Prince Consort, v., 262.]

[Footnote 7: "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," c. cxliii.]

[Footnote 8: Indeed, the opinion which Lord Campbell thus expresses is manifestly at variance with that which he had previously pronounced in his life of Lord Northington, where he praised the House of Lords for "very properly rejecting the bill passed by the Commons declaring general warrants to be illegal, leaving this question to be decided (as it was, satisfactorily) by the Courts of Common Law."]

[Footnote 9: From a speech of Mr. Grenville delivered at a later period (February 3, 1769, "Parliamentary History," xvi., 548), it appears that the Secretaries of State who signed this general warrant did so against their own judgment. "They repeatedly proposed to have Wilkes's name inserted in the warrant of apprehension, but were overruled by the lawyers and clerks of the office, who insisted that they could not depart from the long-established precedents and course of proceeding." And in one of these debates, Mr. Pitt, while denouncing with great severity Grenville's conduct in procuring the issue of this particular warrant, was driven to a strange confession of his own inconsistency, since he was forced to admit that, while Secretary of State, he had issued more than one general warrant in exactly similar form.]

[Footnote 10: Strange to say, it does not seem absolutely certain that Wilkes was the author of the "Essay on Woman." Horace Walpole eventually learned, or believed that he had learned, that the author was a Mr. Thomas Potter. (See Walpole's "George III.," i., 310; and Cunningham's "Note on his Correspondence," iv., 126.)]

[Footnote 11: These are the words of the resolution.—Parliamentary History, xvi., 537. But it does not appear what the three libels were. The "Essay on Woman" was one, the paraphrase of "Veni Creator" was a second; no third of that character is mentioned.]

[Footnote 12: The last resolution is approved by Mr. Hallam. "If a few precedents were to determine all controversies of constitutional law, it is plain enough from the journals that the House has assumed the power of incapacitation. But as such authority is highly dangerous and unnecessary for any good purpose, and as, according to all legal rules, so extraordinary a power could not be supported except by a sort of prescription that cannot be shown, the final resolution of the House of Commons, which condemned the votes passed in times of great excitement, appears far more consonant to first principles."—Constitutional History, iii., 357.]

[Footnote 13: Adolphus, "History of England," i., 484.]

[Footnote 14: An idea of the license which the newspapers complained of had permitted themselves at this time may be derived from the manner in which one of them had introduced a speech of Mr. Jeremiah Dyson, M.P. for Weymouth, and a Commissioner of the Treasury: "Jeremiah Weymouth, the d——n of the kingdom, spoke as follows." And it may seem that the Opposition (for the affair was made a party question) can hardly be acquitted of a discreditable indifference to the dignity of the House in supporting a resolution of Colonel Barré, that "Jeremiah Weymouth, the d——n of this kingdom, is not a member of this House." On which the previous question was moved by the ministers, and carried by 120 to 38.—Parliamentary History, xvii., 78. And an instance of rather the opposite kind, of the guarded way in which the most respectable publications were as yet accustomed to relate the transactions of Parliament, may be gathered from the account of the proceedings in the case of Wilkes, given in the "Annual Register" for 1770—drawn up, probably, by Burke himself—in which Lord Camden is only mentioned as "a great law lord;" Lord Chatham as "Lord C——m;" Lord Rockingham as "a noble Marquis who lately presided at the head of public affairs;" the King as "the K——;" Parliament as "P.;" and the House of Commons as the "H. of C."—Annual Register, 1770, pp. 59–67.]

[Footnote 15: On more than one occasion there had been disturbances in the City, and in the streets adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, which were little short of riot. One day the mob paraded effigies of the principal ministers, which, after hanging and beheading them, they committed to the flames with great uproar. On another day Mr. Charles Fox (as yet a vehement Tory) complained to the House that the mob in Palace Yard had insulted him, breaking the glasses of his chariot, and pelting him with oranges, stones, etc.—Parliamentary History, xvii., 163.]