Yesterday week at the evening sitting, Sir Wilfrid Lawson proposed
that the Queen in conferring a title of honour should always state, as she does in conferring the Victoria Cross, the special merit on account of which that honour is conferred. This was a motion, said Sir Wilfrid Lawson, which had nothing to do with official duties, it concerned only "peerages, baronetcies, knighthoods, stars, garters, and thistles." These honours at present were of no value. Take a baronetcy. A baronet is a man who is not a nobleman and who had ceased to be a gentleman. Nevertheless, "all snobs wanted to be nobs, and all Radicals wanted to be Peers." When a title was conferred on a soldier the patent should record how many people he had killed ; on a politician, how many constituents he had corrupted ; on a brewer, how many quarts of beer he had brewed in a year. Sir William Har- court replied that he could not agree to the proposal. The old patents used to enumerate the grounds on which the honour was conferred, but they were like epitaphs, they enumerated merits which no one ever suspected the person decorated of possessing. If Sir Wilfrid Lawson, for instance, were to be described, he would probably be spoken of as possessing every virtue under the sun, except that which the Victoria Cross had been praised for sometimes recording, namely, that he had saved somebody from water. And to give a reason for a decoration would probably destroy the estimate in which it was held ; at least Lord Melbourne said that what makes the Garter the first Order in Europe, is just the fact that there is no merit ever attached to it at all. As romances with a moral are the dullest and poorest, so titles would lose instead of gain in appreciation for having a moral attached. It would destroy all the mystery of the title, all the speculation about i‘ to ass;gn a reason for it. "We know the thing is neither rich nor rare; the wonder is how in the name of fortune it gct there." The resolution was negatived by 52 votes against 34,—majority, 18. After all, titles are needed, if only to set off democratic ruggedness.
