Lord Hartington then took up the threat to abolish the
House of Peers if it should insist on an appeal to the people concerning the Home-rule Bill carried,—if ever it came to be carried,—by the House of Commons. He pointed out the very great danger of making the momentary will of the people the only power in the Constitution, so that on all matters of Colonial and Foreign policy there would be no buffer between a popular impulse, perhaps excited by some purely domestic incident, and an abrupt revolution in our relations with our Colonies and the rest of the world. If a single Chamber which reflects every ripple of popular opinion is to be the only spring of popular government, "then all the pains which have been bestowed by the statesmen who have founded the European Republics in France and Switzerland, who have endeavoured to devise some check between the sudden and hasty and ill-considered expression of popular will, and its final execution, have been thrown away." The final and deliberate will of the people must, under a democracy, be accepted ; but the temporary and momentary impulse of the people ought not to be at once assumed to be their final and deliberate will; and yet the House of Lords was menaced for allowing an appeal from one to the other, such as all careful democratic constitutions, whether in Europe or America, would justify. A more statesmanlike speech than Lord Hartington's at Manchester has not been delivered in our generation.
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