REFORM OF PARLIAMENTARY PROCEDURE.
The Session of 1882, if credence is to be given to the most authoritative announcements, is destined to attempt, as its most important achievement, a Radical reform of our Parliamentary procedure. Nobody who has been familiar with the "scenes" of which the House of Commons has been the theatre during the last four years can fail to recognise the expediency of such changes as may restore to that Institution the character of a deliberative and legislative assembly. That the ancient forms devised "by gentlemen for gentlemen" have come to be employed in a very different spirit, and for objects altogether extra-, or, indeed, anti-Parliamentary, is now unhappily notorious. To arrest particular legislation so long as any good purpose could be served by further discussion, or even to secure the postponement to another Session of novel proposals on which public opinion was imperfectly or not at all matured—these have always been recognised among the legitimate objects of a patriotic Opposition. The use of the machinery designed for these purposes as a means of preventing all legislation whatever, or of crippling and almost disabling the Queen's Government in the discharge of those administrative functions which can only be fulfilled by the co-operation of Parliament—this is certainly such an abuse of Parliamentary privilege as to call for signal chastisement and unsparing repression. An evil which had paralysed the efforts of the sober and conscientious House of Commons which was dissolved in 1880 has become, if not more detrimental to the State, at least more offensively prominent in the more excitable and less experienced Chamber now led by Mr. Gladstone, and cannot be dealt with too soon or too trenchantly. Let us only be on our guard, lest in rooting up these political tares, occasion may not be found for destroying at the same time much of the Parliamentary wheat on which the future of our Constitutional breadstuffs must depend.
"The lessons read, and to be read, to the country on the subject of Obstruction ought not to have for their main text the conduct of the Irish members. At worst they are but accessories. The Executive Government is the principal offender." Thus wrote Mr. Gladstone in August, 1879, after twenty-one days consumed in the discussion of the Army Regulation Bill, which, in its older and more exceptionable form as the Mutiny Bill, had been passed times out of mind by Governments of which he was a member in about as many minutes in the face of a Tory Opposition. Circumstances, as we know, alter cases; and the Irish members who may have flattered them-
