Evening Post. FRIDAY, APEIL 21, 1911. AT WESTMINSTER.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 93, 21 April 1911, Page 6

Evening Post. FRIDAY, APEIL 21, 1911. AT WESTMINSTER.

A fourteen hours' sitting does not count for much in 'the New Zealand Parliament, which exceeds that limit night after nighb d"iiring the last two -or three weeks of a session. But the British House of Commons has been accustomed to a more leisurely pace during the thirty years .that have passed since the palmy days of Nationalist obstruction. A fourteen hours' sitting of the House of Commons is, therefore, a thing worthy of note, and one need not be surprised that it has been found necessary in order to pass the first clause of the Parliament Bill. Not fourteen hours, but fourteen days, might well have been, required if the British Government had had no more effective method of cutting off "the dreary drip of dilatory declamation" than is available in New Zealand. It is only the drastic power conferred by the closure ■ — an invention, it must always be remembered, of a Unionist Government — that has enabled Mt. Asquith to get the first clause of his Bill through so quickly and to speak with confidence of sending the- Bill to the- House of Lords next month. The clause which has now been adopted, and apparently without ■ amendment, by the House of Commons, is certainly on© of the most important ever submitted to a British Parliament. If it reaches the statute-book, it will become an abiding macrk of one of the most memorable stages in the development of the British Constitution. It will represent the formal and statutory affirmation of a principle which had long been regarded as a part of the unwritten law regulating constitutional practice. Nobody ever doubted the technical power of the House of Lords to reject a Money Bill, but it is probably ! safe to say that even so recently as two years ago nobody dreamt of the exercise of this technical power to the destruction of a Budget which, after an exceptionally full discussion, had passed the popular chamber by an overwhelming majority. In an ill-starred hour the Loids were, however, induced to revive this right, and after two-Gen-eral Elections the House of Commons has now passed the first instalment, of the democracy's retort courteous. The meagre reports which have been supplied us by cable of the debates on the Bill have failed to reveal the theory of the Unionists' attack upon the first clause. After the abject surrender offered by the Lords themselves on the eve of the battle in November last, tha possibility of any effective attack upon the main principle of the clause was out of the question." The Lords are prepared to forego their constitutional right to reject or amend Money Bilk which are purely financial in character." Such was the resolution at which the Lords arrived under the guidance of Lord Lansdownc, and this astonishing capitulation left nothing for debate except j the procedure for' determining the definition of a Money Bill and other less I important details. How much the Unionists in the House of Commons attempted in this direction does not appear from our cabled reports, and their principal attention seems to have been directed to an amendment by which they sought to exclude any measure providing for the payment of members from the definition of a Money Bill. This procedure on the part of Oppositionists strikes us as being not less ill-judged than the general run of their tactics during the last two years. As a measure involving a- great constitutional principle aud calculated to afteot ma-

terially the status of a popular representative, a Payment of Members Bill would surely be something more than a Money Bill. If the single sentence credited to Mr. Asquith in our report was intended to convey an opposite impression we have no hesitation in differing from him, nor can we believe that the Speaker, to whom the decision would be left, would support the contention. But, technicalities apart, what is the sense of providing as a last ditch for the Lords the right to meddle with a measure which would not touch, any of their privileges, being confined solely to the rights of the members of "another place" and of the constituencies which elect them? The amendment was, in our opinion, properly rejected, but we should be as sorry to see the Government attempting to use clause- 1 as a means of forcing a Payment of Members Bill through as we should to see the Lords commit the absurdity of rejecting such a. Bill..