TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE LORDS AND THE RADICALS.
WE are by no means devoted to the House of Lords: It needs reform greatly, so as to prevent rushes of country squires from overwhelming the political Peers ; and even when reformed, we are by no means sure that it will be strong enough for its new work, or that the Referendum, to be demanded whenever the question is groat and the majority in the Commons less than fifty, would not be a better check on the aberrations of the representa- tive body. If the House of Commons is not forced to reflect, it will some day ruin the country ; and the Lords very often fail to force it to reflect. But for all that, the present attack on the House of Lords for doing its duty and voting according to its convictions strikes us as almost silly. What is the use of denouncing hereditary legislators because they are hereditary, when the Crown is here- ditary too, and nobody is asking for a Republic P A man is not necessarily wise because he is his father's son, though there must be some truth in heredity too ; but neither is he necessarily wise because a crowd of ignorant electors have given him their votes. Of the five or six persons in Parliament whom both parties would admit to be competent to govern the. Empire, three (Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Devonshire, and Lord Rosebery) are Peers, and numbers for numbers, the pro- portion of able men in the Houses is about equal. There are just as many fools in the one House as in the other, popu- Jar favour no more preventing folly than hereditary right does. Nor is there much sense in talking of the Peers as having given their vote because they are rich men. Home- rule would not interfere with their wealth. A few of them own Irish estates, but the immense majority would be lust as well off without Ireland as with it; better, because Ireland is always pushing the Land question to the front, and always offers as a substitute for landlordism, peasant proprietorship. How many shillings would Lord Salisbury lose if Ireland were " emancipated " to- morrow P That charge is nonsensical, and so is the one that the Bill was rejected because all Peers are Tories by right of caste and dislike of the people. The Lords aro not fools, and had they been Tories before everything, they would have • accepted the Bill, have amended the Ninth Clause in favour of Mr. Gladstone's original plan, and so have seated a Conservative Government in power in Britain for thirty years. It is the Irish vote, if any, which will disestablish the Church, redistribute the land, and establish a progressive Income-tax; and the Peers, if purely selfish, would have made their bargain, and have saved all they are supposed to hold really dear, only at the cost of sacrificing Irish prosperity and English honour. Mr. Gladstone would have been delighted by that proof of his prevision in 1886 ; the Irish Members do not really care for anything except a grasp of the Executive Government, with its places and its dignities ; and the Radicals, though they sincerely want the Irish Members, because without them they are beaten men, hopelessly outnumbered, must have given way. In rejecting the Bill, the Peers rejected the best chance they will ever have of seeing their own poli- tical wishes prevail for a generation. The simple truth is that, like the rest of the cultivated class, they thought Home-rule a bad scheme, sure to injure Great Britain and ruin Ireland, and they voted against it, as so think- ing they were bound in honour and conscience to do. Though they are not representatives, they are trustees, and to ask them on so grand a question to vote in defiance of their own opinions, though, as we have shown, in furtherance of their own interests, was to ask them to betray their trust. In refusing, they earned a new claim upon the country, and would have earned one if every elector in the land had been in favour of a base surrender. The people may not want to be governed by Peers, but still less do they want to be governed by self- seeking cowards such as the Peers, if they had skulked from their duty in fear of, popular wrath, would have shown themselves to be.
are not the people to govern ? Certainly they are, and it is the Gladstonians who prevent their doing it. It is they, not we, who shrink from the Dissolution by which alone the people as a whole can be consulted. There never was a party so insincere as they have shown themselves on this point. They carried the last Election. by promising a dozen great changes amidst which Home- rule was forgotten, and now, when the opponents of Home- rule ask them to consult the people on that specific question, they reply by a refusal. If that refusal came from distrust of the people or disbelief in them, or denial of their authority, that would be reasonable enough ; but they repudiate all' notions of the kind. The people, they say, are good and wise, their rights are absolute, the Lords in thwarting them are merely insolent ; and therefore the people must not be consulted. The Cabinet acts like the Ministers of the Czar, who every day acknowledge their Sovereign's auto- cracy, who describe him as the wisest of mankind, who, think his will ought to be above all law, but who are afraid of their lives ever to go near him ; and whenever they can, avoid the danger by deciding for themselves. If the Queen to-morrow insisted that, as England and the Lords were- both in an immense majority against the Bill, she should be glad of a clear guiding word from her whole people, the Ministry would resent that interference as unconstitu- tional ; yet her Majesty would be only giving effect to that idea of the right divine of democracy, which they are flinging at the head of the Lords. If the People has right divine, and the People is on your side, why shake at the idea of appealing to the People ? The truth is, the Ministry having, by a scratch vote, given on a dozen different grounds, secured the control of the Empire, want to keep it, without again asking anybody's permission.. They are not anxious about Home-rule ; for if they were, they would be anxious to pass their Bill, and they know the quickest and the easiest way. They have only to dissolve on that issue alone ; and if they win, the Home-rule Bill within six weeks of the reassembling of Parlia- ment will be the law of the land. The Unionists would suggest amendments, instead of resisting the whole Bill;. recalcitrant Peers would stay away under their trees ; and Ireland would at once begin her career of self-government, probably by an attempt to put down Ulster. Nobody, not the wildest Tory, has ever suggested that after a Dis- solution, ad hoc, the contest should be continued ; or has doubted that once honestly consulted, the will of the, people, unless directly opposed to the moral law, ought Lo- be, and must be, obeyed. The Ministry have only to ask for its utterance, and, if it is on their side, the Peers and the statesmen and the cultivated classes will all be over- whelmed at once. Never was a road so easy to poli- ticians ; and never was there one which these politicians declare to be so completely of divine engineering ; and never was there one at which they craned with such a display of fear.
There is reason, of course, for the fear, or it would not be felt. Mr. Gladstone himself acknowledged that the bulk of the intelligent were against him, and he and his followers have therefore relied upon the masses of the ignorant. Unhappily, however, the ignorant are upon Home-rule ceasing from their ignorance. The long debate taught them much, and especially that Home-rule for Ire- land was a question of the first importance,—a notion they had previously rejected. They thought of Ireland only as. a place where Irishmen lived, not as a province of the, United Kingdom ; and they thought of Home-rule as a, County Council sort of arrangement, which in a place like Ireland could not affect themselves either for good or ill. The debate disabused them, and the Ninth Clause completed their disillusionment. " Two wotes for an Irishman," said a labouring man, " and only one for- me ? that will never do ; " and in that sentence was em- bodied a complete disenchantment. No possible talking- can alter the meaning of the Ninth Clause or hide it from the people ; and the Gladstonians, who see that the people will not have it, are trembling in their shoes lest they should be forced to ask their opinion of the Bill. It is natural enough, and not altogether discreditable, for their leader did not share their blunder; but then they must not go about talking of the Lords' fear of the people, and their own confidence in them. It is the Lords for once who trust the people, and the Radicals who are afraid even to ask for their opinion, because at the next Election they will know too much. It is the strangest upset of all previously existing theories as to the relations of parties to the people. Imagine the Tories insisting on an appeal to the democracy, and the Radicals defending an oligarchy, their own majority in the Commons, against being forced to take a popular vote ! " Vox populi vox Dei," cries the aristocrat. " Vox populi vox diaboli," retorts the dema- gogue, and, having the power, he without blushing acts upon his new theory.
Previous page
