TOPICS OF THE DAY.
AGITATION AND " MODERA.TION."
NO one who listened to the Attorney-General's most elo- quent and earnest exhortation, addressed to the Eighty Club on Tuesday, to agitate for the Franchise Bill without violence, and without threatening the Lords with consequences in case they reject the Franchise Bill again, could have doubted for a moment that he was in earnest. He believed what he said, that by distracting the mind of the country from the one object—the strenuous purpose to pass the Franchise Bill—to the second object—the Reform of the Lords—we should seriously endanger that which we could otherwise secure, the success of the Franchise Bill. But admirable as the Attorney- General's earnestness and eloquence were, we must with great deference express our profound conviction that he is mistaken in supposing that the two objects can be safely dissevered. What we have to consider is this, —first, what we are aiming at ; and next, what are our means of obtaining what we are aiming at. Now what are we aiming at ? Not simply to get the Franchise Bill in the end,—the Lords themselves have promised us that, and would, moreover, grant it cheerfully to a Conservative Government,— but to get the Franchise Bill, with a Redistribution Bill, if possible, if not, without it, before the Dissolution. As Mr. Bryce very justly said, if the Government had acquiesced in the claim of the Lords to dictate an appeal to the country, the whole cause would have been lost ; we should never again have been safe from the pretensions of the Lords to declare that some great question had not been fairly submitted to the constituencies, and that without a Dissolution on that point, and that point exclusively, they must decline to regard the House of Commons as representing truly the mind of the constituencies. What we must have, then, is not merely the County Franchise Bill, but the County Franchise Bill carried before a Dissolution, and in the face of Lord Salisbury's pretension to postpone surrender -till after a Dissolution. But now, in the second place, what means have we of forcing this surrender on the Lords ? We know that Lord Salisbury means to reject the Franchise Bill as often as it is offered without a Redistribution Bill, until the constituencies shall have formally declared that Mr. Gladstone is right in insisting that the Franchise Bill shall be carried as a preliminary to Redistribution. This being so, what is to prevent the Peers from following Lord Salisbury's advice, and rejecting the Franchise Bill, if offered alone, as often as it shall be offered, until this Parliament shall have expired by virtue of the Septennial Act ? So far as we see, there is but one consideration which can prevent the Peers from following Lord Salisbury's advice, and that is the growth of the salutary conviction that if they act in this way, the Disso- lution, when it comes, will bring with it a House of Commons pledged to care for one thing above all others, and that is,— war to the knife with the present House of Peers. That is the consideration, and the only consideration, as it seems to us, which will cause the group of fifty Peers who formed the majority against Lord Wemyss's motion last week to melt and dwindle away, till in the crisis of the autumn campaign that group will probably cease to exist altogether. But for that fear, why should a single one of the fifty change his vote ? Why should he not say,— ' Whether we surrender now or surrender after the Dissolution will make all the difference in the world to us. If we sur- render after the Dissolution, we shall have established the pre- cedent that the House of Peers have the right to dispute the authority of the Commons to speak the mind of the country. That is a very substantial right, and our constitutional position cannot be more conspicuously strengthened than by asserting it. In the meantime, nothing can hurt us. We are only ex- ercising our constitutional right to reject a Bill submitted to us ; and when we have rejected it often enough, a Dissolution must follow, whether our opponents like it or not.' We can see no forcible answer to that argument., except one, namely, that if the Peers do act in that way, the question of the abolition of the House of Peers will become the question before the country, and will quite swallow up the questions affecting the Franchise. Now, the Peers would certainly not enjoy the election of a House of Commons with a majority of a hundred and fifty, pledged explicitly to the abolition of the existing House of Peers and the substitution of some very different arrangement. That would frighten them. There is
nothing which a hereditary caste fears more than to find itself in the presence of a hostile and resolute people. And we do not in the least doubt that if there were any visible. probability of this, not merely twenty-six Peers, but pro- bably a hundred at least, would go over to the Liberal side for the nonce, in order to postpone the crisis and soften down the temper of the country. Well, if this be so,—and we see no loophole of escape from the conviction' that this is so,—the very essence of the agitation, even for the Franchise Bill, is the diffusion throughout the country of the conviction that a reform of the Peers is absolutely essential, and that the conduct of Lord Salisbury's majority in the last fortnight has brought the question well to the front. For our own parts, we confess frankly that we care at least as much for a removal of this permanent and vexatious hindrance to all beneficial legislation, as we do for the success of the Franchise Bill itself. It is all very well to talk, as our respected correspondent, Sir Edward Strachey, talks, in his letter of to- day, of the harmlessness of the Peers when once they learn their true place. But his own letter confutes him. They never have learnt their true place yet, and they never will learn it, if we leave it in the power of a permanent Tory majority always to resist any decision of the House of Commons which has not as yet roused a storm in the country. Why, he himself refers to the frightful mischief done by the rejection of the Com- pensation for Disturbance Bill. Yet that Bill, as Mr. Fawcett has often pointed out, was carried, on its third reading in the Commons, by a majority quite insufficient to convince the hos- tile Peers that the country really cared about it. Are we for ever to be at the mercy of a majority of squires—some of them very selfish, many of them completely ignorant of politics, most of them deeply prejudiced—when it is a question whether the right thing shall be done at the right time, or not done till all the appropriateness of doing it has passed away ? We maintain that there is no Legislature in the world hampered as a Liberal House of Commons is hampered, by the steady, pertinacious resistance of the House of Lords. Even the German Council of Princes is reason itself compared with our House of Lords, for the German Council of Princes is governed in reality by the Monarchs and the Chief Ministers themselves, who know the grave responsibility of the steps they take, and have the fullest possible information of the effect those steps will have on the German Empire. But the bulk of our Second Chamber is a slow and privileged squirearchy, which follows the sway of one or two leading minds without any real apprecia- tion of the motives to which these leading minds themselves respond.
However, this is a digression. What we are driving at is this, that even for the sake of carrying the Franchise Bill itself before a Dissolution,—and that is, as the Attorney-General admits, our great object,—it is absolutely essential to bring forward, with some pressure," the urgency of a reform of the Lords. Unless we do that, we give the Lords no excuse for surrender. By persevering in the line they have already taken, they can certainly ensure a Dissolution on the present Franchise ; and if they do that, they will have won the stakes for which Lord Salisbury is playing. We say that whether they surrender or not, the question of the reform of the Lords ought to be taken up most gravely by the country. But we do not and cannot deny that a surrender of the Peers in the autumn would take a good deal of the wind out of the sails of the agitation which we desire to see successful for the reform of the Lords ; and that would be the only consideration which would powerfully influence the Lords to surrender their pre- posterous claim. We, for our own parts, sincerely hope that such a surrender would not take so much wind out of our sails as to destroy the chance of a Dissolution in which the main question would still be the reform of the Lords. But we are well aware that a surrender of the Lords in the autumn would play into the hands of that dilatory party who are always eager to let fundamental questions alone. However, our present point is simply this, that if what the Attorney- General calls "moderation" is to go too far, we shall not even give the Lords any excuse for surrender. It is all very well, as Mr. Bryce said at the Eighty Club, not to talk Billingsgate. It is all very well to eschew such language even as Professor Rogers's, as to the morality of the House of Lords,—language which, so far as we know, it would be very difficult to justify by proofs. It is always well to say only what you mean, and not more than you mean. It is always well to avoid extravagance and vague threats. If this is moderation, we are all for moderation. But if moderation is to mean, as the Attorney-General seemed to think, confining ourselves to a mere manifestation of public opinion in favour of the Franchise, we must say that we might as well give up the agitation altogether. The Lords profess themselves entirely with us about the franchise. They profess that all their desire is either to get an immediate Dissolution, or a complete proposal for Reform—of which it would be simply impossible to carry any part in the present Parliament. Therefore, for anything we can see, the Lords would themselves join in the expression of public opinion favourable to the franchise, and would only add, in a careless aside, that if it is to be carried without a Redistribution Bill, the country ought to take upon itself the great responsibility of so anomalous a subdivision of a great whole. If, then, we are to get the Franchise Bill without a Dis- solution, demonstrations such as that of Monday,—grand and useful as they are,—are not the way to get it. We must make the Lords feel,—what is, we believe, true,—that almost every Liberal in the country is beginning to think the present House of Lords quite too intolerable an obstruction to wholesome legislation for a civilised State to endure. And we must make them understand, also, that not only is this the conviction of almost every Liberal in the country, but that the number of Liberals in the country,—in this sense of the term,—is increasing very rapidly indeed.
Previous page
