TOPICS OF TI-1E DAY.
THE PRIME. MINISTER'S CRUSADE.
THE Prime Minister's speech at Edinburgh last Satur- day seems to have delighted a large audience of Scottish Liberals. That larger audience of thinking men of both parties throughout the British Isles read it, we imagine, with very different feelings. Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman intends to rouse the country with the old cry of "Down with the Lords ! " He does not wish to end that body altogether ; he certainly does not mean to mend it ; he only proposes to make it a shadow and an absurdity. And he has nothing to put in its place. His appeal, therefore, is for a single Chamber, and no amount of sophistry will disguise the fact. The June Resolu- tion will be put again to the House of Commons, and, of course, carried. Certain Bills, like the Scottish Small Landholders and Valuation Bills, will be brought in again, and probably rejected by the Lords. Then will come the climax. The Resolution will be put into the form of a Bill, and after its inevitable rejection by the Lords the country will be appealed to on the sole issue,—the limitation of the Lords' veto to a single Parliament. But the average man does not understand a Constitutional question, so the rejection of one or two Bills—notably the Scottish Land Bill—will be made the gravamen of the charge against the Peers.
Let us admit at once that the House of Lords is far from perfect. There is no necessary connexion between it and the House of Commons. It is apt to pass a Con- servative Government's measures automatically, and there is the danger—though the history of the past two years has not revealed it—that it may automatically reject Liberal measures. One party has a vast preponderance in it, and this makes it a suspected, if not unfair, revising body. The real complaint, let us observe, is not that it is too stringent a revising body, but too lax, since it is believed to veto the measures of one party and pass those of the other. What is the way out of the difficulty ? Obviously the proper course is a thorough reformation of the Second Chamber which would get rid of its pre- ponderatingly Conservative character, and, while containing a certain number of Peers, would admit distinguished men of all professions to its ranks, and so bring it into touch with the people. Such a Second Chamber would be a far more efficient and authoritative revising body than we have at present. Short of a revolution, it is clear that reform of the Lords can only come through their own goodwill, and the Committee which is sitting under Lord Rosebery's chairmanship is an earnest of that goodwill. Another plan is to have au elected Upper House,—a bad plan, we think, as Colonial experience has shown, for such a Chamber either impoverishes the Lower House, or is made up of the odd men and failures of politics. But it is at least a plan which recognises the tremendous import- ance of a Second Chamber. The worst remedy is to abolish the Second Chamber altogether. We would remind our readers that no democracy in the world has ever found a single Chamber successful. And in Britain there is even more need for one than elsewhere, for we have nothing to correspond to what Continental publicists call " constituent law." In France and America, for instance, before a change in the Constitution can be carried there are the most intricate formalities to be observed ; but in Britain Constitutional changes are effected by the same machinery as the regulation of motor- cars or the control of pleuro-pneumonia. We assume, then, that a Second Chamber is necessary, and we believe that the people of the country in an overwhelming majority take the same view. So apparently does the Prime Minister, but, like the Roman statesman, he is suarum legum auctor ac subversor. In one breath he declares that he wants a Second Chamber as a check on the Commons, and in the next he proposes a scheme which strips that Chamber of any vestige of authority. If the.Lords reject a measure of the Commons, it will be sent back to them the next Session after a con- ference between the Houses. If they still reject it, it will be sent back again, and, in spite of the Lords' refusal, will automatically become law in the last year of the Parliament. This means, as we have pointed out before, that a fag- end of a Parliament, when the representatives are furthest removed from the popular approval which gave them their seats, Will have an absolute power to legislate. " No doubt the Prime Minister is right in claiming that a Bill may be modified by conferences and debates with the Lords. But can we expect the Lords to show much interest in a measure when they have no ultimate control over it ? Remember, too, that it is an unreformed House of Lords, no whit more efficient than it is at present. Indeed, it is likely to be a great deal worse, for no active statesman will care to take part in debates when the conclusion is already foregone. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman claims that he is a Second Chamber man ; but what kind of Second Chamber does he propose ? A body a great deal less authoritative than the leader-writers on Radical papers, a body on about the level of an unimportant Royal Com- mission. It is idle to talk of powers of revision or veto or check in connexion with such a body. The only merit is a party merit, for under such a system Radical measures would pass with greater ease than Conservative measures in the 1900 Parliament. Sir Henry shows the shallowness of his statesmanship in endeavouring to right one accidental abuse by the creation of another anomaly far more glaring, and made permanent by statute. It is an attempt to upset the fundamental idea of our democracy,—that we are governed in the last resort, not by the representatives of the people, but by the people themselves. It is also treason to the principles of Liberalism and • progress, for, while doing lip-service to the need of a Second. Chamber, it would keep it for party purposes unreformed and incompetent.
The rest of the speech was on a level with this proposal. One of the chief weapons against the Lords is to be the Scottish Small Landholders Bill,—a Bill which, according to the Prime Minister, is most earnestly desired by the people of Scotland. On the contrary, almost every well-informed Liberal in Scotland who has the cause of laud. settlement at heart is opposed to it. And the few meetings engineered. by wirepullers in its support were filled with town voters, who know as much about farming as about metaphysics. On the aim of the Bill we are all agreed ; but its methods are so crude and ill-considered. as to endanger the chances not only of settlement under it, but of all future schemes of settlement. The arguments of Mr. Munro Ferguson and others have never been answered.. The one appeal of the Bill is to Scotch particularism,—in the Prime Minister's words, its rejection " meant a denial of Scotland's title to separate legislation," on " the assumption that my Lord Lansdowne had abolished or dried up the Tweed." A more foolish appeal was never made, and many Scotsmen must have squirmed at the attribution to a great people of the cheapest form of parochial sentiment. Economically, of course, the Tweed. is abolished. Scotch Lowland farming is English farming, only more scientific ; and is poles apart from the conditions that obtain in the crofting districts of the North. We are not concerned, however, with Sir Henry's bad arguments, but with the badness of his central policy. If we may trust the speeches of the Scottish Whips—who do not speak without their cue—he is antago- nistic to any rash Socialist experiments. He is also antagonistic to Protection. The last House of Commons would have passed the second. of these, and a future House of Commons may carry the first. No doubt the Lords would have offered. no objection to Protec- tion, but this is a reason for reforming them, not for abolishing them. As to Socialism, engineered. by a chance majority in the Lower House, the only safeguard is a competent and authoritative Second Chamber. Remember that a Constitutional change is hard to retrieve, and it is grave Constitutional changes which.we have to face in the absence of proper Constitu- tional cheeks. Probably Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman intends his crusade as a counter-stroke against Labour propaganda. If so, he is most deeply deceived. The people of Britain will tolerate the one as little as the other. His party agents may have told. him that the abolition of the Lords' veto would be a popular cry, but wirepullers are notoriously bad. judges of the temper of the country. He will get no support from the Socialists or from the Opposition, and he will have against him that vast central Liberal opinion which is not inclined to a policy which sins alike against common-sense and true progress. If he should be so rash as to appeal to the country, he will lose both majority and reputation.
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