  On Procedure in Parliament (A Letter to The Times, March, 1914.) I am moved to speak out what, I am sure, many are feeling. We are a so-called civilized country; we have a so-called Christian religion; we profess humanity. We have an elected Parliament, to each member of which we pay £400 a year; so that we have at least some right to say: “Please do our business, and that quickly!” And yet we sit and suffer such barbarities and mean cruelties to go on amongst us as must dry the heart of God. I cite at random a few only of the abhorrent things done daily, daily left undone—done and left undone, without a shadow of a doubt, against the conscience and general will of the community:— (1) Sweating of women workers. (2) Insufficient feeding of children. (3) Employment of boys on work that to all intents ruins their chances in after-life. (4) Foul housing of those who have as much right as you and I to the first decencies of life. (5) Consignment of paupers (that is, those without money or friends) to lunatic asylums on the certificate of one doctor—the certificate of two doctors being essential in the case of a person who has money or friends. (6) Export of horses worn out in work. Export that, for a few pieces of blood-money, delivers up old and faithful servants to wretchedness. (7) Mutilation of horses by docking, so that they suffer, offend the eye, and are defenceless against the attacks of flies. (8) Caging of wild things, especially wild song-birds, by those who themselves think liberty the breath of life. (9) Slaughter for food of millions of creatures every year by methods that can easily be improved. (10) Importation of the plumes of ruthlessly slain wild birds, mothers with young in the nest, to decorate our women. Such as these—shameful barbarities done to helpless creatures—we suffer amongst us year after year. They are admitted to be anathema; in favour of their abolition there would be found at any moment a round majority of unfettered parliamentary and general opinion. One and all they are removable, and many of them by small expenditure of parliamentary time, public money, and expert care. It is pitiable that, for mere want of parliamentary time, we cannot get manifest sores such as these treated and banished once for all from the nation’s body; pitiable that due machinery cannot be devised to deal with these and other barbarities to man and beast, concerning which, in the main, no real controversy exists; scandalous that their removal should be left to the mercy of the ballot, to private members’ Bills—for ever liable to be obstructed; or to the hampered and inadequate efforts of societies unsupported by legislation. Rome, I know, was not built in a day. Parliament works hard, has worked harder during these last years than ever perhaps before; all honour to it for that! It is an august assembly of which I wish to speak with all respect. But it works without sense of proportion, or sense of humour. Over and over again it turns things already talked into their graves; over and over again listens to the same partizan bickerings, to arguments which everybody knows by heart. And all the time the fires of live misery that could, most of them, so easily be put out are raging, and the reek thereof is going up. It is I, of course, who will be mocked at for lack of the senses of proportion and humour. But if the tale of hours spent on certain party measures be set against the tale of hours not yet spent on measures of health and humanity, the mockers will yet be mocked. I am not one of those who believe we can do without party; but I do see and I do say that party business absorbs far too much of the time that our common sense and common humanity demands for the redress of crying shames. And if laymen see this with grief and anger, how much more poignant must be the feeling of members of Parliament themselves, to whom alone remedy has been entrusted! |
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