TOPICS OF THE DAY
THE "CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS."
MR. GLADSTONE has acted with splendid nerve, but in truth he had no option. He was compelled either to defeat the Lords, or to allow them to supersede the Commons as the ultimate pivot of power. The position, regarded from the political and not the service point of view, was exactly this. Her Majesty's Government—a Government of singular ability and decided aristocratic leaning, one-half its members being Peers had determined, after long and grave consideration, after consulting the most eminent mili- tary authorities, and after much hesitation caused by their well-known reluctance to spend money, that the system of Army promotion called Purchase must come to an immediate end. That system prevented any reorganiza- tion of Her Majesty's forces, and without such reorganization the country could not, in the new circumstances of Europe, be pronounced safe. They were aware that the needful changes could be accomplished of their own authority, but being willing at all times to ask the opinion of the country, and anxious to deal most liberally with officers who had broken the law, they embodied their proposals in a Bill. To that Bill the nation, through its representatives, gave a most emphatic assent. The Government was for many reasons partly tongue-tied, the Opposition were most zealous and de-
termined, and a section of the Press was white with hostility to the reform ; but the majority of the Commons, night after
night, during a struggle protracted for three months, sup- ported the Premier and his plan. During the whole of that time no resistance, not even a resistance of public meetings, was offered by the public, while Sir Henry Storks, acci- dentally the least popular candidate in the kingdom, was as an opponent of Purchase. sent up to Par-
liament avowedly to assist the Minister at War. The clear decision of an immense majority of the country was that Purchase should cease and the military career be thrown open to all men, and after every device of faction had been exhausted in vain, the Bill passed the House of Commons and went up to the Lords. There, after a debate in which every point made was either a point in favour of Purchase or against selection, the Lords passed by a majority of twenty-five an amendment recording their unwillingness to pass the Bill until they had further information. In other words, 155 gentlemen, of whom many are able and a few are statesmen, but of whom the majority are men seeking pleasure in lives of refined and luxurious idleness, without political standing of any kind, claimed the right to forbid the action • of the responsible Government, and to veto the resolution of the Representatives of the country. They assumed, in fact,. to be a power superior to the Commons. They were quite within their legal right, but then their right was one of those which, re- sulting solely from accidental history, can exist only so long as it is unused, for if used it, like the veto lodged in the Crown, nullifies every other right. Freedom is a farce if a com- mittee of gentlemen, not elected, however cultured or however wealthy, can of their own volition impose laws upon a free State ; and the Lords were in fact, though not in form, impos- ing the military system they approved upon the country, were in the plenitude of their own strength forbidding all poor persons within the United Kingdom to enter on the military
career. It was absolutely indispensable either to override them in this particular exercise of their obsolete but legal power, or to ask of the country whether it was content that the Upper House should continue to retain it. The Premier adopted the milder and the swifter course, and on Thursday announced, amidst the ringing cheers of the majority, that the Government would on this occasion override the Lords ; that he had advised the Crown to exercise its statutory powers, that the Crown had assented, that the Warrant had been signed, and that from November 1 next, Purchase—regulation and extra- regulation—would cease to be permitted. The Lords would be asked to pass the compensating clauses of the Bill, but the system in favour of which they had exerted their historical power of coercing the Commons had been legally abolished.
Mr. Gladstone's act requires no defence, for after the vote of Monday there was nothing left to be done. By one of the strange fictions of our constitutional history, the members of the Upper House are supposed to retain, and legally do retain, the power of overriding the Government and the nation, of forbidding anything to all time to be reformed, or abolished, or established, unless they approve,—of, in fact, governing England as completely as if they still nominated a majority in the Commons. Of course, no such power could be constantly used in our day, and amidst our modern ideas, without the Crown and the Commons combining to suppress it ; and if it is used occasionally inexpediently, the kindest and most conservative method of action is, as far as possible, to evade or supersede it, as Judges evade similar fictions, by appealing to some other fiction a little less obsolete or unreal. And this is
what Mr. Gladstone has done by evoking a nearly dormant right of the Crown to override a dormant power of the House of Lords. If the Lords, seeing the dilemma in which they have placed the State, that of either superseding their action, or abandoning re- presentative government, should reconsider their course, then the incident will pass away and be forgotten, until its memory is revived by some similar impediment in the way of the machine ; but if they should not reconsider it, but throw out the Bill, or re- fuse legislation until the project is withdrawn, there will be no- thingfor it but to go to the country with a Bill for the reform of the Upper Chamber. Mr. Disraeli, who at five o'clock was in- clined to yield, seemed at midnight disposed to believe that he could safely appeal to the country on this issue, that he could make the electorate prefer the dictatorship of a hereditary Cham- ber to the dictatorship of a representative one ; but Mr. Disraeli, with all his ability, has never been able to understand English- men, has never realized their full contempt for logic, has never comprehended that they are capable of turning fiercely upon a power in action to which, while it is quiescent, they are form- ally deferential. Our history might have taught him better. No power in England has ever been swept away except just after its highest manifestation. The whole of the aristocracy of the land welcomed the Papal Legate to London just before the Papal authority was abolished. The Crown was never scs powerful as in the fourteen years which preceded the as- sembling of the Long Parliament. Richard Cromwell suc- ceeded his father as easily as a King, to be swept in a few weeks into permanent oblivion. The House of Commons. sent a member of their own body to the Tower for dis- respect to James II., and yet they banished the dynasty. The Lords nominated a majority in the Commons in the very Parliament of 1832 which abolished their power, and the middle-class was never so confident or so strong as when in 1867 it was submerged in the people. Mr. Disraeli would risk in such a contest more than his own reputation, and we cannot believe that the average Peers, the men who would not come out of a contest the greater for defeat, will engage in a struggle with the Electorate while the statesmen are at its., head. For years we have warned them that this was their danger, that it was not from the opposition of the people, but from the weariness of the statesmen that the assault would proceed, and now after years of waiting the prediction is coming true. The Queen's Government must go on, come what may, and it cannot go on if a mere Order, whatever its wealth, or refine- ment, or historic position, whatever the capacity of its members, or whatever its hold upon " society" in the smaller acceptation of the word, exercises its legal right of vetoing the decision of the elected Executive Committee of the people. If the Lords, deceived by their own pride—pride which, even when justifi- able, may mislead—or by Mr. Disraeli's habitual misconcep- tion of the temper of average Englishmen, force on an appeal to the people, they will learn the full truth of the question by which Lord Shaftesbury, in the most far-sighted speech he ever made, warned them against the Bill establishing house- hold suffrage,—" The masses, you say, are Conservative. Grant it, but conservative of what ? Will it be of the privi- leges, the honours, and the authority of this House ?"
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