Mr. Lowe also was very sharp on Lord Salisbury for
his wish that the House of Lords should control the House of Commons in interpreting the wishes of the people. Lord Salisbury had admitted, he said, that the House of Commons and Lords are both servants of the public, and obviously in that case the House of Commons must be the upper servant, for it is always the upper servant who takes his instructions directly from the master, which the House of Lords does not. The House of Commons, then, is the butler and the housekeeper,—the House of Lords being, we suppose, though Mr. Lowe was too delicate to say so, the page and the flunkey. If either were to control the other, then it should be the House of Commons that should control the House of Lords ; but this Mr. Lowe disclaimed, only advising the House of Lords not to take Lord Salisbury's advice in this matter, as it so often does, as it might prove a more difficult job than Lord Salisbury expects to control the House of Commons. He also quizzed Mr. Disraeli's Sanitas sanitatum cry, calling it the promise to give us all good constitutions, and denouncing as wrong and " wicked " the attempt to make people believe that crime, drunkenness, improvidence, and over-population can be put down by Act of Parliament. We suppose Mr. Lowe was thinking of Mr. Scott Russell and his Committee of Conservative Peers, but that was but a flash in the pan after all. It is unjust to accuse either Conservatives or Liberals of either promising or per- forming much in relation to the greatest of all the miseries which men suffer. Where much has been done in that direction, it has been done by men like Lord Shaftesbury, without much party encouragement on either side.
