QUESTION. (Hansard, 14 June 1867)

§ MR. GATHORNE HARDY

said, no doubt great difficulty had arisen in consequence of the vote of the House on this matter, but we must take exception to the manner in which the hon. Member for Leicester stated the case to the House. It did not represent the circumstances of the case. The hon. Member brought forward a Motion which involved the character and position of a particular person—namely, Mr. Churchward. When the hon. Member brought forward that Motion—not a rider was added—but an Amendment was moved, taking away the name of that particular person, and involving all persons who had been reported upon by Commissions and by Committees of the House. Immediately upon that Motion being agreed to it was referred to the Lord Chancellor, it being his duty to look into this question. But the Lord Chancellor was placed in the greatest difficulty, and the House would see that it was absolutely impossible for an officer of State to act in accordance with the views of the House when these views were not definitely expressed. The Lord Chancellor, in the first instance, directed his Secretary to investigate the records of all the Committees which had 1908 sat since the period that it was thought probable the House might have in view—namely, since Commissions under the present system were first instituted. Beginning with the General Election of the year 1852, that period would include the case of Mr. Churchward in 1853, to which the hon. Member had alluded. Having gone carefully through the proceedings of Committees, he next proceeded to those of the Royal Commissions. Here he was placed in this difficulty. The Commissions had not confined themselves to elections which took place since 1852, but had investigated others as far back as 1842; therefore the Lord Chancellor, in dealing with two sets of investigations which had taken place nominally within the same period, would have affected persons implicated in transactions earlier by ten years in one case than in the other. The House, in fact, had not laid down any rule by which its officers could be guided in dealing with the subject; and he must frankly say that by this omission it had created a difficulty almost incapable of solution. There was this further difficulty. The Lord Chancellor, if he acted in accordance with the vote of the House, might be bound to go back not only to the year 1852—there was no reason why he should stop there—but to the period of living memory, so as to include any person now living and in the Commission of the Peace who at any time had been reported upon by Committees or Commissions for corrupt practices. One of the points taken by the hon. Member for Leicester was not without considerable force. Anybody who looked over the Reports of Committees must see that these varied very materially as to the weight of evidence existing against the particular persons who were reported upon. In one case, a person might be directly implicated, in another case, only through the acts of his agents. In some instances names of persons were simply reported as having been guilty of corrupt practices without saying whether this was personally or through the agency of others, or with or without their own cognizance. Though Members were, of course, liable for the acts of their agents, they might not in many cases have been parties to the guilt of the transaction. The hon. Member for Leicester had suggested that different degrees of guilt in bribery might be dealt differently with; but this would be difficult to carry out. This further consideration must be borne in mind. No doubt, as 1909 far as an election and the House were concerned, the Report of the Committee was a complete piece of evidence, which could be acted upon as far as the seat was concerned; but where penal consequences were in contemplation, it had never yet been held that persons unconvicted of bribery by a jury were in the same position as persons who had been convicted. Over and over again, where cases had been referred to the Law Officers of the Crown, it was held that there was not sufficient evidence to justify a prosecution for bribery. There might be grounds sufficient to unseat the Member, and yet not enough to warrant the infliction of additional pains and penalties. There were cases again where prosecutions had been ordered and had yet failed to procure a conviction. Again, the House itself had not always treated this question of bribery with the same amount of severity. In his own short recollection of Parliamentary proceedings he could recall a case in which an hon. Member stood up and said boldly, when a question arose as to a number of men—not 20, but 250—being paid, and he was told that they would not vote without being paid, "Well, pay them." That statement was received at the time with loud laughter; he heard it with some surprise, he confessed; but the hon. Member who made it was never treated in any different manner by the House or his friends — he was never removed from the House, nor were any proceedings taken in consequence. By the Amendment which was carried to the Motion of the hon. Member for Leicester, Mr. Churchward had been put on exactly the same footing as the other persons alluded to by that Motion. Mr. Churchyard's name, in fact, was struck out of the question altogether. The Lord Chancellor had done his best to comply with the terms of that Motion; and unless the House gave him further instructions he did not see how he was to proceed further. It was impossible to discriminate between those who were to be retained and those who were to be dismissed from the Commission of the Peace. The hon. Member for Leicester had alluded to what had taken place at Lancaster, where the Chancellor of the Duchy, having appointed three persons to the Commission of the Peace, had dismissed two from office, because in the present Session their names had been reported in connection with the notorious transactions in that borough. 1910 The hon. Member seemed to imagine that only the two Liberal ex-Members had been displaced; but, according to the statements in the papers, Mr. Wilson, the leading politician on the other side—Mr. Lawrence, the candidate, not being himself implicated in the bribery—had also been removed from the Commission of the Peace. Therefore, as far as the case of Lancaster was concerned, there had been no partiality and no party feeling in the matter. Dealing candidly with the question, he must say that the House had put the authorities into a position in which they were incapable of acting without committing injustice towards some parties. He also felt bound to suggest that as Parliament had sat subsequently to the Reports of these Commissions and Committees, it might be a point for the consideration of the present Parliament whether it ought to travel beyond its own existence into transactions not immediately within its own cognizance. Members were now sitting in Parliament and magistrates were now sitting on the Bench whose conduct of late years no one had impugned, but whose names had formerly been implicated—he would not say with what foundation of truth—in transactions of bribery. Under all the circumstances, the House would see that it was impossible for the Government or for the Lord Chancellor to proceed further until the House gave implicit directions as to the mode in which they were to act.