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They did give their reasons: viz., that it had no precedent; that the King ought not to be informed of anything passing in the Houses till it comes to a Bill; that it will wholly break off all correspondence between the two Houses, and in the issue wholly infringe the very use and being of Parliaments.
The same sovereigns have still the same audiences and interviews, hunts and banquets, and balls and uniforms; there are the same diplomats and the same deliberations on alliances and wars; there are still the same parliaments, with the same debates on the Eastern question and Africa, on treaties and violations of treaties, and Home Rule and the eight-hour day; and one set of ministers replacing another in the same way, and the same speeches and the same incidents.
Parliaments, clergymen, and employers have all been troubled for years about Labour, and they have been trying very hard on Sundays and through reports of speeches by members of Parliament in the daily press, and through laws, and through employers' associations, and through factory rules and fines, to get the attention of labouring men and lift their thoughts to higher things.
Find a man who, totally destitute of genius, possesses nevertheless considerable talents; who has official aptitude, a volubility of routine rhetoric, great perseverance, a love of affairs; who, embarrassed neither by the principles of the philosopher nor by the prejudices of the bigot, can assume, with a cautious facility, the prevalent tone, and disembarrass himself of it, with a dexterous ambiguity, the moment it ceases to be predominant; recommending himself to the innovator by his approbation of change 'in the abstract, and to the conservative by his prudential and practical respect for that which is established; such a man, though he be one of an essentially small mind, though his intellectual qualities be less than moderate, with feeble powers of thought, no imagination, contracted sympathies, and a most loose public morality; such a man is the individual whom kings and parliaments would select to govern the State or rule the Church.
But the Smoke Parliament wouldn't hear of the champion of the Household over the ridge and furrow risking the steadiness of his wrist and the keenness of his eye by any such additional tempting of Providence, and went off itself in various directions, with good-night iced drinks, yawning considerably like most other parliaments after a sitting.
A nation which does not expect good from a Parliament, cannot check or punish a Parliament. France expects, I fear, too little from her Parliaments ever to get what she ought.
It is absolutely incomprehensible to us that intelligent men and such are not wanting in the collectivist party can remain partisans of national or municipal parliaments after all the lessons history has given them in France, in England, in Germany, or in the United States.
A true patriot is no lavish promiser: he undertakes not to shorten parliaments; to repeal laws; or to change the mode of representation, transmitted by our ancestors; he knows that futurity is not in his power, and that all times are not alike favourable to change. Much less does he make a vague and indefinite promise of obeying the mandates of his constituents.
"The planters of New England were Englishmen, not exempt from English prejudices in favor of English institutions, laws and usages ... They had not been taught to question the wisdom or the humanity of English criminal law. They were as unconscious of its barbarism, as were the parliaments which had enacted or the courts which dispensed it."
And when America went forth to fight for democracy abroad, Arkansas, Michigan, Vermont, Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, began to lay the foundations of freedom at home, and New York in no faltering voice proclaimed full liberty for all its people. Lastly Great Britain has enfranchised its women, and surely the Congress of the United States will not lag behind the Mother of Parliaments!
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