The Mother of Parliaments Part 29

[453] Walpole's "Memoirs of the Reign of George III.," vol. i. p. 261.

The subject of reporting cannot be left without some mention of that official amateur reporter who sits upon the Treasury bench and prepares his nightly precis of the day's parliamentary proceedings.

Amateur reporters there have always been in the Commons from the days of Sir Symonds D'Ewes and Sir Henry Cavendish[454] to the present time; but there is only one upon the floor of the House whose duties have ever been officially recognised.

[454] In the heyday of parliamentary corruption, when a critical division was impending, Sir Hercules Langrishe was asked whether Sir Henry Cavendish had as usual been taking notes. "He has been taking either notes or money," he replied, "I don't know which."

In accordance with a custom of many years standing the Leader of the House of Commons writes a nightly letter to the sovereign, whenever the House is sitting, giving a brief _resume_ of the debates. This letter, often composed somewhat hastily during the course of an exciting debate, is at once sent off in an official dispatch box to His Majesty, and is subsequently filed in the library at Buckingham Palace.[455] The practice dates from the reign of George III., who required George Grenville, then Leader of the House of Commons, to provide him with daily reports of the debates relating to the contest between Parliament and John Wilkes.

[455] On one occasion, in the hurry of dispatching his nightly missive, Lord Randolph Churchill accidentally enclosed a quant.i.ty of tobacco in the box which he forwarded to Queen Victoria, much to Her Majesty's amus.e.m.e.nt.

The sovereign is not supposed to enter the Lower House--Charles I. was the only monarch who broke this rule--and thus, in days before debates were published at length in the papers, the Crown had no means of ascertaining the doings of the Commons save through the medium of this letter. The need for this one-sided nightly correspondence no longer exists, but the custom still prevails, and adds one more to the already multifarious duties of the Leader of the House, though nowadays it is occasionally delegated to some other Minister, or to one of the Whips.

To-day Press and Parliament are mutually dependent. A great newspaper proprietor who was recently asked which of the two he considered to be the most powerful, found some difficulty in replying. "The Press is the voice without which Parliament could not speak," he said. "On the other hand, Parliament is the law-making machine without which the Press could not act." The question of their relative power and importance must be left to the decision of individual judgment and taste. "Give me but the liberty of the Press," said Sheridan in 1810, in answer to the Premier, Spencer Perceval, "and I will give the Minister a venal House of Peers, I will give him a corrupt and servile House of Commons, I will give him the full swing of the patronage of office, I will give him the whole host of ministerial influences, I will give him all the power that place can confer upon him to purchase submission and overawe resistance; and yet, armed with the liberty of the Press, I will go forth to meet him undismayed; I will attack the mighty fabric he has reared with that mightier engine; I will shake down from its height corruption, and lay it beneath the ruins of the abuses it was meant to shelter!"[456]

[456] Hansard's "Debates," 1st series, vol. xv.

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