MOTION FOR A SELECT COMMITTEE. (Hansard, 28 March 1865)

§ MR. DARBY GRIFFITH,

in bringing before the House the subject of which he had given notice, said, that it was one, if not of pressing emergency, at all events of considerable constitutional interest. The office to which his Motion related appeared to stand in a peculiar position. Every other office connected with the Government was understood to be capable of being filled by Members of that House; the office of Postmaster General alone must, it would seem to be contended, be filled by a Peer. So late as last Session, the noble viscount opposite (Viscount Palmerston) when questioned as to whether a fair number of the Offices in his Government were filled by Members in that House, stated that, as a matter of course, the Postmaster General was a Member of the other House. In a popular account of the Post Office published the year before last, he found it stated that the Postmaster General must be a Member of the House of Lords; but no reason for that statement was given. This was certainly a remarkable anomaly; was it founded on any reason? His object was to ascertain whether any such reason existed; and he asked for a Committee of Inquiry for the purpose. The history of the office was connected with the civilization of the country. It was first mentioned in the reign of Henry VIII., who 379 was a very accomplished literary prince. He wrote a tract against Luther on the seven sacraments, and received from the Pope the title of Defender of the Faith for his defence of Roman Catholic doctrine, which is the origin of that title as now assumed by the Sovereign of Great Britain In consequence of his correspondence with Borne and other parts of the continent he instituted a post and appointed one of his Secretaries master of it. The Office went on increasing under Charles 1. and the Commonwealth. During the Commonwealth the first Postmaster was appointed under the Great Seal of that time. After the restoration in the 12th of the reign of Charles II. an Act was passed consolidating the previous Acts, and the Act provided that one Postmaster General should be appointed for His Majesty's dominions, but said nothing about his being a Peer, or any other restriction. Charles II. conferred the Office on the Duke of York, who performed the duty by deputy till his right merged on his accession to the Crown. The Office was made the engine of Royal patronage, and large pensions were granted to various parties. A pension of £4,700 was given out of the Post Office revenues to the Duchess of Cleveland. A pension of £4,000 was given to the Earl of Rochester. The same practice of granting pensions out of the Post Office revenues was continued in the reign of William and Mary, when the total amount of pensions reached £22,000 a year. The Post Office Acts were consolidated again in the 9th of the reign of Queen Anne, and further pensions were granted, amongst them one of £5,000 to the Duke of Marlborough—which then amounted on the whole to £65,000. The Act of the 9th of Queen Anne, which settled the whole arrangement of the Post Office, contained no restriction as to the rank of the person who should be Postmaster General. In 1720 the first great improvement in the Post Office took place, when it was farmed by Mr. Allen, postmaster of Bath, the original of Squire Alworthy in Fielding's novel Tom Jones, and whom Pope had immortalized in the couplet— Let humble Allen with an awkward shame Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame. He made about £10,000 a year out of the Post Office, and held the appointment for forty-four years. In 1784 Mr. John Palmer was the next great Post Office reformer, who accelerated the mails by means of 380 coaches. He received a pension of £3,000 per annum, and a donation of £50,000 from Parliament. He was supported by Mr. Pitt in carrying out his improvements. He did not find, upon referring to the Acts passed in the reigns of Charles II., Anne, or Victoria, with reference to the regulations of the Post Office, that there were any clauses affirming in the slightest degree the appointment of Peers to the office of Postmaster General. Formerly there were two Postmasters appointed, and in 1822 Lord Norman by brought forward two Motions, one within six weeks of the other, for the purpose of abolishing the practice of appointing two persons. Great malversations had taken place in the office, yet Lord Normanby was opposed by the Gentlemen then on the Treasury Bench, who said it would be impossible to abolish one of the offices without diminishing the influence of the Crown, and his first Motion was lost by a majority of twenty-five. The second Motion, which was different from the first in some respects, being in the form of an Address to the Crown instead of a Resolution, was carried by a majority of fifteen, and immediately afterwards the office of the second Postmaster General was abolished. The Postmasters General had not all shown themselves favourable to Post Office reformation. The penny post system was adopted by the Melbourne Ministry in 1840, because, on its return to office, after the failure of Sir Robert Peel to form a Ministry, on account of the "Bedchamber Question," in 1839, it felt bound to adopt the popular suggestions which had been made. Lord Lichfield on the Liberal side, and Lord Lowther on the Conservative, both spoke against this Post Office reform. Lord Lichfield in 1837 said "of all the wild visionary schemes which he had ever heard of this (the penny post) was the most extravagant," and he subsequently said the whole area of the Post Office building would not be able to hold the clerks and the letters if such a change took place. Noblemen had been called up to the House of Lords for the purpose of enjoying the office of Postmaster General, and he could not see that this added to the efficiency of the Public Service. The confining the appointment to a Peer was a limitation of the Royal prerogative, and whatever indirect authority there was for confining it to Peers, he could find no direct authority for the practice. It was a curious 381 fact that Mr. Rowland Hill got a grant of £20,000 for carrying out that system which had been spoken of as he had described by two aristocratic Postmasters General. He saw no reason whatever for the Office being held by a Peer, any more than there was occasion for a double Postmaster General. The hon. Member quoted from a series of enactments which had passed in the reign of Queen Anne, and at other times, to prove what he had affirmed. The only restriction of those statutes was against offices which conferred a profit, or which were new offices since the 6th of Anne, He maintained that the appointment was neither one of profit, nor the Office new. The Post Office was virtually the same since its first institution. The hon. Member then cited several Acts of Parliament bearing upon public offices, the holders of which were disqualified from holding their seats in the House of Commons. In none of those Acts was this Office mentioned. ["Divide!"] If he were to speak candidly, he might say he believed that historical matters of this kind were as worthy of the consideration of the House as was the headstrong party conflict in which his hon. Friend the Member for Swansea (Mr. Dillwyn) proposed to engage the House present. He believed that the appointment of a Peer to this Office had always been regarded as chiefly ornamental, and as a convenient mode of providing Office for Members of the other House. He maintained that this Office was a highly commercial and mechanical one, and therefore the better adapted for management by a Commoner, though he did not deny that a Peer might be qualified to fill it. Since the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer—whose personal courtesy towards himself he was always willing to acknowledge—had included banking and life insurance operations within the duties which appertained to the Post Office, the commercial character of the post had been greatly increased. He should, therefore, be glad to know why Members of the House of Commons were excluded from the Office? and he moved for the Committee of Inquiry of which he had given notice.

MR. PEEL

said, the hon. Gentleman proposed to have a Committee to inquire whether the practice of appointing a Peer to the office of Postmaster General was founded on any law or constitutional practice, and he (Mr. Peel) hoped in a few words to be able to satisfy him that it was quite unnecessary to trouble any Committee with such an inquiry. With respect to the law of the question he must refer to an Act passed at the commencement of the reign of Queen Anne, which provided that any person appointed to any new office of profit under the Crown, created after 1705, should be disqualified for election and for sitting and voting in the House of Commons. At the time that Act was passed there was in existence an office of Postmaster of England, which office was created in the reign of Charles II., but a few years after, in 1711, the office of Postmaster of England was abolished, and a Postmaster of Great Britain was created, which office was itself abolished in the first year of the reign of of William IV., when a Postmaster for the United Kingdom was appointed. His answer to the first part of the speech of the hon. Gentleman was, that the offices of Postmaster of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom had always been considered to be new offices of profit under the Crown to which the statute of Anne applied. He understood the hon. Gentleman to dispute the application of the statute of Anne to the office of Postmaster General, but he would find that the practice of that House furnished an uniform exposition of the law which was quite decisive upon the point. The office of Postmaster was in the beginning held jointly by two persons, and in 1708 it was held by Sir Thomas Frankland and Sir John Evelyn, who continued to hold it until 1715. Sir Thomas Erankland sat in the House of Commons as Member for Thirsk, and continued to sit until 1711, when the office of Postmaster of England was abolished, and the new office of Postmaster of Great Britain was created, to which the holders of the former office were jointly appointed. Upon reference to the Journals of the House it would be found that on the 7th of June, 1711, Sir Thomas Frankland vacated his seat, and a new writ was issued for Thirsk, for which he sat, and Sir Thomas Worsley was ap- 383 pointed in his stead. Since that time there had been several instances of Members of the House of Commons being appointed joint Postmasters of Great Britain, but in every case they had resigned their seats, and other persons had been elected in their places. There were instances in 1708, 1711, 1721, 1726, 1749, 1770, 1799, 1801, and 1807. The law, therefore, was quite clear upon the point. It was not that Commoners could not hold the office of Postmaster General, but that no Postmaster General could sit in that House. Indeed, there had been a recent instance of a commoner holding that office in Mr. Canning's Government, when Lord Frederick Montagu was Postmaster General. The hon. Gentleman proposed that the Committee should further inquire whether that practice or law might be altered with advantage to the public service. That was hardly a proper question to refer to a Select Committee. It was a subject upon which the Government and the House could form its own opinion. That question did not turn upon such information as a Committee would be likely to obtain, and it could be much better discussed upon a Bill introduced in that House, which was the course taken in 1836, when the Government of the day introduced a Bill to assimilate the management of the Post Office to that of other branches of the public revenue. As to any advantage to the public service which was likely to accrue from an alteration of the law, that question must be considered not only in reference to that House and the public, but also as to the Government. The hon. Member must remember that the Government had to carry on the administration of affairs in the other House as well as in the House of Commons, and therefore it was necessary to have some offices filled by Peers. It would be admitted that the office of Postmaster General was one that could be filled by a Peer with less inconvenience to the House of Commons than almost any other. He could not perceive that any great advantage would accrue to the public service from providing that the office of Postmaster General might be held by a Member of the House of Commons. The chief advantage would be that the House would be placed in direct communication with the Post Office, instead of all questions relating to that Department being answered through the Treasury. But there were other Departments of the public 384 service which were not directly represented in that House, which the Treasury had to answer for, and it would be difficult to have both of those Departments represented in that House. The chief questions that arose in that House connected with the Post Office were mere matters of detail, and upon any question of greater importance the Treasury was equally responsible with the Post Office Department. Upon the whole he thought there was no occasion for an alteration of the existing practice, and if any discussion was required it could be better obtained in that House upon the introduction of a Bill than by any reference to a Select Committee.