THE LORDS ON THE BALLOT.
THE Lords as a body do not come very well out of the Ballot debate. The speeches, no doubt, were very good, very much better than those of the Commons on the same
subject, many of the Peers raising the discussion to its true level,—that of a grand moral and constitutional dispute. But the policy suggested by the leader of the Conservatives, and accepted by the majority of his party, strikes us as quite exceptionally feeble and ill-judged. It is quite open to the Peers to declare that they cannot and will not pass the Bill, that in a matter of such magnitude they are bound by their consciences, and that they will risk all the consequences of a grave collision with the representative House. It is also open to them to admit that, as the nation clearly desires this method of representation, and as they do not affect ever to resist a national desire, the subject has passed out of their jurisdiction, and they allow the Bill, as modelled by those who approve it, to pass without a division. But to pass the second reading with the avowed intention of spoiling the Bill in Committee is neither fair nor politic, and this is the course recommended by the Duke of Richmond, and accepted by the
majority of Peers. The Duke, with the odd frankness, or rather naivete, which is so marked a feature in his political char- acter, declared that the rejection of secret voting would give risei to "a great and dangerous agitation," and that he should there- i fore accept it, and change the Bill in Committee into one for open voting by a new machinery! This is the clear meaning of his phrases about permissive secrecy, or rather his meaning is a little worse than this. He intends to destroy the special justification of the Bill, which is the protection it may afford to voters who cannot protect themselves, as well as its special object, which is the release of all voters from any pressure except that of their own consciences. The independent do not need the Bill, and the dependent who do will be punished for secrecy as they are now punished for independence. The great landowner, the great employer of labour, the Trades' , Union, or the mob who wish to coerce voters will coerce them as much as ever, treating secrecy of itself as a proof either of treachery or hostility ; while the briber will have this new I advantage, that while he will know how his voters have voted, their honest comrades, whose opinion might have restrained them, will not. Every evil of secret voting and every evil of open voting will be happily united in an amendment which I will neither express the opinion of the Lords nor realise the , expressed desire of the Lower House. It will be impossible ' for the Government to accept such a change, the Commons will flatly reject the clauses in which it is to be embodied, and the Peers will be reduced to one of two alternatives. They must either accept the rebuff, and pass the Bill as it stood after needless humiliation, or they must throtv it out after an undignified effort to evade so "dangerous" a deci- sion; must either yield at discretion, or fight after having tried to run away. Dodging is never dignified, but dodging into defeat is about as humiliating a policy as the leader of a majority could by possibility contrive to suggest, and the defeat is on the face of things inevitable. We like the Ballot quite as little as the Duke of Richmond does, though pro- , bably for reasons which are not his ; but we feel quite as strongly as its most fanatical advocate that we mast have one arrangement or the other, that bad as compulsory secrecy may be, it is not half BO bad as a secrecy which will not include the only electors whose consciences that secrecy might pos- sibly enfranchise, and which will give to the plutocracy new weapons. We do trust, when the time arrives, the Duke of Richmond will have the manliness to confess an error, and either throw out the Bill on the third reading, and so force an appeal to the country on a distinct issue, or suffer the measure to pass in the silence becoming to a statesman who submits to Awe majeure.
We have said the debating was very good. It is scarcely sibility for his vote to anybody but himself, that he owes nothing to his fellow-citizens whom his vote may defeat, nothing to the six millions of women above whom he is setting a Legislature and a Government in which they have no voice, nothing to the fifth of the human race whom his nominees will hold in subjection, nothing to that universal mankind whose fate the voice of his candidate may so directly affect ; and that is why Radicals who believe in a State, so persistently and as it appears so uselessly resist a change which reduces the "citizen of no mean State" into a mere elector.
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