l'tte, LORDS ON IlibMSELVES.
THE Opposition have tried to make capital out of the large number of Peers in the new Cabinet. Of the nineteen Ministers of whom it is composed, nine will be Peers when Sir Henry James has taken his peerage, and only ten Commoners, while several of the Commoners will have hereditary titles. Moreover, of the members of the Government who are not in the Cabinet, an unusually large proportion are Peers. The Westminster Gazelle described the Administration as " a little dull and peery," and the Gladstonian party generally seem to think there is a good omen in the very large number of the order their leaders had denounced, and had asked the demo- cracy to denounce, in the new Administration. As the first great issue between the two parties is the issue on Home-rule, we too rather welcome the predominance of the hereditary element in the new Government. As Lord Rosebery made a grand attack on the House of Lords the second, and tried to make it the leading, issue on which the people were asked to give judgment, it is just as well that Lord Salisbury should not shrink from bluntly putting it to the electors whether or not they condemn the Peers for having peremptorily vetoed the Home-rule Bill. If they reply with a decided negative, that negative will be all the stronger for the large proportion of Peers in the new Government. The people will then be understood to have said quite plainly, We fully approve of the action of the Peers, and to show that we emphatically approve it, we give our confidence all the more willingly to the new Government, that it will contain so large a proportion of the class who have rid us of the Home-rule Bill.' That will be a very distinct answer to a very plain question ; and as our main object is to get such an answer to the question which has been ten years before the people of the United Kingdom, nothing which makes that answer more emphatic is a subject for regret.
At the same time, it would be a great mistake to assume that the answer for which the Unionists ask, if given de- cisively, and all the more decisively that it has been weighted with the subordinate question as to the conduct of the House of Peers in overruling the action of the House of Commons, should be interpreted by the Government as giving a popular endorsement to the perfect satisfaction of the nation with the House of Lords as it is at present con- stituted. On the contrary, they ought to bear in mind that that is not in any sense the issue placed before the electors. The great issue is whether the Home-rule move- ment is to go on, and even to ripen, as Mr. Asquith and others of the late Administration openly avowed that they wished it to ripen, into " Home-rule all round," and, secondly, whether the House of Lords did right or wrong in giving a peremptory negative to both questions. To say in the most emphatic way they can that the Home-rule movement is not to go on, and that the Peers entitled them- selves to the gratitude of the nation by declaring positively and peremptorily that they would not hear of such a dis- -ntegration of the United Kingdom, is one thing, and to Jay that the people are quite contented with the con- stitution of the House of Peers as it is, is quite another thing. What we hope to hear is that the people are quite contented with their recent action, and that that recent action has increased the people's respect for the House of Peers, instead of diminishing it. But that does not at all involve the further reply that they see nothing unsatisfactory in the present constitution of the House of Peers, and are quite willing to keep it precisely as it is. We observe with regret that Mr. Balfour, in one of his Wednesday speeches, dropped the obiter dictum that, whether the House of Peers should be recast or not, he could hardly imagine any change that would make it a better revising body, and one less likely to resist the pro- nounced will of the people. With the latter clause of his opinion we heartily agree ; but it would surely be the greatest of errors to suppose that the only essential of a satisfactory revising Assembly is that it should not be likely to attempt resistance to the pronounced will of the people. What we really want in a first-rate revising Assembly is one that will not permit the springing of new and sudden revolu- tions on the people without insisting on the mature con- sideration of the subject by the people's representatives, and on the people's approval of the revolutionary change by the constituencies ; and farther, on the hearty acquiescence of the revising Assembly in the principles once fairly accepted by the people, and its perfect willingness to graft all such principles on the future legislative changes brought before the Upper House. But it is in their failure to accept this last condition that the present House of Lords fails. It bows obediently enough to a distinctly enunciated democratie■ decree, but it shows no readiness to accept the logic of such a decree, and to adapt the legislative temper of ther Upper House to that logic. There can be no doubt, for instance, that when it yielded to the House of Commons on the great issue of the Irish Land Bill of 1881, it very much embittered the struggle and delayed the full acceptance of that decree by the amendments which it carried on minor clauses, and that the result has been a very much more angry and prolonged dispute in Ireland than any which the House of Commons ex- pected or intended. By our present House of Peers, great popular changes are often agreed to, but they are made by halves, and with an irritating reluctance which deprives them of a considerable proportion of their grace and good effect. And that seems to us to be the conspicuous flaw in the actual working of our existing House of Lords.
In the final debate of the Peers on Saturday last before the Prorogation, it was obvious that while Lord Salisbury and the Duke of Argyll obtained an easy victory over Lord Rosebery in relation to the question whether or not the Lords were willing to bow to the clearly expressed will of the people, Lord Rosebery obtained an easy victory over them as to the inadvisability of having a vast majority of irremovable Peers in a Revising Assembly whose duty it is to accept cordially the popular principles of the Commons, and to apply them, as a matter of course, to the Bills sent up by the Lower Home. It is not only certain a priori, but it is the unquestionable teaching of experience, that a revising Assembly, whose duty it is to forbid only immature decisions on undiscussed or half-discussed questions, should not contain an immense preponderance of members who, willing as they may be to bow to the popular will, when it is plainly and decisively declared, are only too happy to thwart the popular wishes on small matters, into the true effect of which it is almost impossible that the people should have any clear insight at all. Lord Rosebery is quite right that a fixed body of five hundred Tories, willing to yield when their leader tells them they must yield, but only too happy to back him up in not yielding when there is any doubt on the necessities of the case, ought not to constitute the most characteristic feature of the Revising Assembly which undertakes to review and modifiy the judgments of the popular House. The Duke of Argyll appears to maintain that the House of Lords has been Liberal enough whenever the House of Commons has been reasonable enough. We do not think so. And we are sure that it cannot give that impression to the English people, when there are five hundred followers of the Conservative chief to between thirty and forty followers of the democratic chief. Of course, the result is that when it yields to the Lower House, it yields with a bad grace, and takes back, in small amendments and grudging conditions, a good deal that it had appeared to concede in larger matters. We are not sure, so badly was Mr. Balfour's Wednesday speech reported, what qualifications he did put to his eulogy on the House of Lords as a Revising Assembly. Very likely he may have so qualified it as to remove our objections. But of this we are certain, that the Liberal Unionist party in general wish to see the Upper House so constituted as to be quite as firm in resisting any- thing like Conservative reaction when Conservatives are in power, as they would be in resisting anything like revo- lutionary surprises when Radicals are in power.
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