19 MAY 1894, Page 5

THE COMING CONFERENCE AT LEEDS. T HE Edinburgh reviewer who suggested

the other day to Lord Rosebery that he could hardly do better than keep his party amused and out of mischief by setting them to work, or rather to play, with the reform of the House of Lords, seems to have hit the right nail on the bead. A conference is summoned at Leeds for the 20th of June, to discuss that very unprofitable question : and meantime Lord Rosebery will find himself at liberty to weigh maturely the various approaches by which he may best attain a Dissolution, without being driven into new enterprises of a doubtful and perhaps dangerous nature. There is nothing like a great constitutional ques- tion, which cannot be solved without the assent of the existing Legislature, and which certainly cannot be solved with its assent unless one of the two great parties secures an immense predominance over its rival,—to keep the people amused at such a time as the present, when the best chance that appears at all hopeful for the Gladstonians is to excite a great popular enthusiasm by which the balance of parties might be profoundly affected. Without a very high tide of popular feeling, it would be impossible to carry a revo- lutionary measure, especially one by which not only the aristocracy but the Throne would be most seriously shaken. But though a high tide of popular feeling is not at all likely to be attained by a kind of agitation in which for every impatient emotion which you excite, you excite also that deep Conservative dislike to a breach with history which it takes a very severe and urgent sense of injury and suffering to overcome, still the people will be interested and amused by the endeavour to stimulate them, and that endeavour can do no harm. However, it is quite certain that there is no such severe and urgent sense of injury and suffering due to any obstinacy on the part of the House of Lords at the present moment. The House of Lords has been for some years, and is still, squeezable enough. It has passed two Local Government Acts which, as even the Radical party have had to admit, are large enough to lead to great experiments, experiments which may prove to be almost revolutionary if they are not put in force with very great caution. As for the great Irish experiment which the House of Lords has vetoed, not even the Gladstonians pretend that that has taken a strong hold of the popular mind. On the contrary, the House of Lords has never been so popular as since it threw out by a majority of ten to one the measure for letting Ireland do as she liked with herself, and almost do as she liked with England too. On the other great subjects brought forward by the present Government, such as the abolition of the plural vote, the payment of Members, and the Disestablishment of two Churches, the great majority of the people have ty no means made up their minds. Some of them like the idea of rash experiments on the suffrage and the representative system, some of them do not, and would much prefer to leave thriving families a greater share of influence in the State than families which do not thrive at present, and are not at all likely to thrive the wore for obtaining permission to play ducks and drakes with the property of their more fortunate brothers as well as with their own. The great question for demo- cracies is whether the majority of any great demc- cratic people is more moved by envy of those who are better off than themselves, or by the hope that they may soon stand in the position of their more fortunate and prosperous brethren. For the present at least, we may safely say that the people of Great Britain are more moved by hope than by envy. They have no real wish to pull down those who stand above them. They only wish to make it easier for themselves to keep what privileges they have, and to gain more without depriving others of any harmless advan- tages which they have gained. This being so, there is no strong feeling against a House of Lords which concedes a great deal, though it does not concede everything, to popu- lar demands. The English people are in no hurry to do anything that the House of Lords is quite certain not to do. They certainly like, instead of disliking, titles. They are not nearly fond enough of equality to be willing to pay a great price for it, such as taking upon themselves all those political expenses which the richer classes are quite willing to spare them. Half the measures which the Radical party advocate most strenuously are measures which would either abolish the prizes that some of them hope to win, or throw much heavier burdens on the rates than they are at all willing to bear. And therefore they listen with comparative indifference, not to say frigidity, to the enumeration of the advantages which they are promised as the immediate consequence of pulling down the House of Lords. The discussion at Leeds will do nicely to amuse the delegates, but it will not fire the heather. They will leave off very much where they began.

Indeed, nothing can show this better than the cue which is being given by the wirepullers. They say, Don't ask for the abolition of the House of Lords, ask for what looks moderate, that the House of Lords should be allowed to reject a measure once, but not more than once.' No cue could indicate more clearly how half-hearted the agitation is. That demand might mean almost all that the Lords themselves desire, if it meant that a General Election should intervene between the veto of the House of Lords and the second sending of the Bill by the Commons up to the Lords. No doubt it does not mean that in the mouth of the Radical wirepullers who wish that if a measure is rejected in one Session, it should pass in the next Session, without any intervening Dissolution, if the Commons send it up again. But are the people at all likely to approve of such an inane decision as that ? Either there is serious doubt as to whether the Commons have truly interpreted the popular will, or there is not. If there is no doubt, the House of Lords would not resist. They did not resist either the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, or the Irish Land Bills, though their own judgment was diametri- cally opposed to that of the Commons. But if there is real doubt whether the Commons are supported by the people or not, why in the world should the people abolish the appeal to them which would give them the right of determining the doubt ? Depend upon it that, let the Leeds Conference decide what it will, the people of this country will never condemn a second appeal to the democracy to determine how far their wishes have been rightly interpreted. The wirepullers may carry it their own way at Leeds, but the Leeds Conference will not represent the country if it takes pains to abolish an appeal to the people where there is a real doubt about the people's wishes. If the wirepullers had had any con- fidence in the popular character of the attack on the House of Lords, they would have taken up Mr. Morley's cry for " ending " rather than "mending." Nothing can indicate more clearly how uncertain they find the ground, than this half-and-half proceeding of theirs which promises no definite result. For what can the Lords desire better than the opportunity of rejecting a plan for curtailing their own constitutional right which not only curtails their own right, but also deprives the electors at large of their right to arbitrate between the two Houses of the Legis- lature ? The Lords will be on the side of the people, not against them, if they insist that they shall take the order to give way, not from the House of Commons, but from the masters of the House of Commons.

This interlude at Leeds is but a mere expedient for gaining time. The Government want to see the fate of the Budget, and how the Budget will be received in the country. And accordingly the wirepullers of the party, Dr. Spence Watson and Mr. Schnadhorst, are set to work to amuse the people with the House of Lords' puzzle. If the leaders had intended to commence a serious agitation against the Lords, they would have waited till the Lords had given serious cause of popular offence, which at present they have not given, and then the persons who moved in this matter would not have been Dr. Spence Watson and Mr. Schnadhorst, but Lord Rosebery and Sir William Harcourt. Nor would the cue given have been so dubious as it appears to have been. Nothing could be proposed which it would be more easy for the Lords to reject, not only without giving fresh offence, but with every advantage to be gained by taking up a strictly democratic, as well as a strictly constitutional position, than this feeble proposal to let the House of Lords reject a measure once which they would not be allowed to reject a second time. Indeed, it is open to all the ambiguities of what a second rejection means. If the measure had undergone a real reconsideration and modification, would that be a rejection of the same measure, or not? The modified measure would be sure to be open to quite new criticism, and yet nothing could be more absurd than to insist that not a line should be changed in the measure as it was first sent up to the House of Lords, in order that the Lords might not be able to plead that they had never rejected the new measure before. No proposal could be fuller of ambiguities and political absurdities than this. It is a mere political plaything, and not on the whole a very interesting one.