THE IMPEDIMENTS TO A REFORM OF THE PEERS.
fR. GLADSTONE'S ten Peers have, at least, done thus .1!1 much,—and they would have done it better had they been fifty,—they have awakened the country, and probably the Peers themselves, to a sense of the necessity of doing something soon in the way of a Reform of the Peerage, and of the great difficulty of determining what would be efficient and what practicable. Nothing, it is clear, can be much worse than an Upper House which, though it has sagacity to yield on all momentous questions, compensates itself by snubbing all the minor reforms,—which year after year refuses to abolish University tests and such measures as that which gives married women an individual right in their own property, as some small set-off to its mortification in conceding sweeping reform bills, disestablishment bills, and the like. There is something ludicrous as well as vexatious in a constitution which is anxiously conservative of small abuses while it provides a safe and certain mode of removing those which are great ; which insists on the right to inflict petty sufferings while it generously abates those which are severe ; which holds firm by the power to maze, while it surrenders the power to torture ; which makes it a condition sine qua non of ceasing to be malignant, that full right to be vexatious shall be reserved. One would think that any sagacious House of legislature would at once see the wisdom of not wrangling about the little results of great principles already conceded, after the great results have been assented to. But the House of Peers, as at present constituted, is only too glad to find balm for the sad necessity of paying the pounds and shillings claimed by the people, in rejecting the claim for the pence with indig- nant scorn. Now, this does not strike us as either wise or permanently endurable. We must find some remedy for the small cruelties of which the Lords are habitually guilty, by way of indemnifying themselves for abstaining from the greater sins. What is this remedy to be ? It is clear that the appointment of one or two able Roman Catholics, a great banker, a great landed proprietor, an able Scotch peer, and a few others, even if they be of the highest calibre, will not be a remedy. It will be of use only if it draws public attention to the real difficulty at a time when public attention has very little to occupy and distract it.
The first and simplest plan for bringing the House of Peers into general sympathy with the Commons is, of course, the creation of a considerable number of Liberal Peers from time to time. But the objection to this, is that it is not only a very temporary remedy, but one which is exceedingly likely in the next generation to increase the particular evil of which we complain. The House of Lords has, at least, one great sign of vitality. It assimilates new material veryquickly, and transforms it by imposing on it its own modes of thought. The Liberal Peer is much more apt to have strong sub-Conservative leanings, especially on social subjects, than the Liberal Com- moner. So that even if most of the new Liberal Peers remain nominally Liberals, which will not always be the case, they will very soon become torpid Liberals, timid Liberals, Liberals with a certain satisfaction in resisting progress at all points where resistance seems to be not too dangerous. But these are exactly•the points on which we want to secure a Liberal ma- jority in the House of Lords,—for on the greater issues the pru- dence of the Conservatives themselves avoids a deadlock. Where, then, is the use of a remedy which, at best, can only supply the majority needed for a few years, and is pretty sure to restore, if not to augment, the difficulty ten years or so hence ? It is like the result of planting wild flowers in a garden :—they become double immediately, simply by virtue of being planted in the garden. You may plant a whole crop of Liberals in the House of Peers; in a very few years,—at least on all matters connected with the influence of property, and especially the influence of landed property in the country,—they will, most of them, be as stiff and impracticable as the members of the most ancient family among their colleagues. Here, then, is the great diffi- culty ;—the largest creation of hereditary peers by the advice of a Liberal Ministry is a mere expedient for the moment. It may help through a special measure, but once planted firmly in the aristocratic soil, the new species will change its manner of growth, and fail to bear the variety of fruit that was expected from it.
Then there is Mr. Hughes's suggestion, which has in it a good deal more of hopefulness, if only we could persuade the House of Lords to accept any bill which would render it feasible to apply it. He proposes that the power should be taken by Act to create Life Peers, and, as we understand, the power to create
new hereditary peerages abolished; and finally, that enough life peers should at once be created to secure general sympathy with the Commons. The bribe here to the old hereditary Peers would be that it would immensely enhance the social prestige of their position, if they were secure against any farther increase to their number. For such a perpetual social monopoly they might be willing to give up a good deal of political power, especially as they are probably sagacious enough to see that it can hardly be safely exercised for any great length of time. On the other hand, the life peers would be ranch less likely to succumb to the aristocratic influence of the House of Lords than hereditary peers. They would not be constantly thinking of securing the position of their descendants by their legislation. They would be proud chiefly of the intellectual distinction by which they had gained their position, and not be willing to be overruled by their hereditary compeers. But the difficulty here seems to us of another kind ; so long at least as the House of Lords should continue to be conceived as a House of titular dignity and social pre-eminence at all. If it is to become chiefly a senate of notables, containing all sorts of men who have earned the respect and deference of large sections of their fellow-countrymen, and yet at the same time to keep its character of a social aristocracy, there must almost im- mediately arise difficulties innumerable in considering the claims of men fully as well entitled as any others to the former position, but neither coveting nor indeed being willing to accept a distinction of the latter kind. How is the con- stitution of such an assembly to be long justified for including all the Bishops and wholly ignoring the ecclesiastical leaders
of the Roman Catholic and Dissenting Churches We have ourselves proposed as a very wise step the elevation of Archbishop Manning to the Peerage, since he would neces- sarily be a life peer, being forbidden by his vow from marrying. But how could an innovation of this sort be justified without a cry from the Dissenters that Roman Catholicism had no better title to representation in the Legislature than Dissent? And how impossible it would be even to propose to the Dissenters, with their almost uniformly radical views and their religious propagandism against caste, to elevate (say), Mr. Spurgeon to the House of Peers by the title of Lord Speak, or even Mr. Binney as Baron Binney of Weigh House To make such an offer would be a sort of insult to the Nonconformists. Hardly even would it be possible for their laymen to accept peerages,—so strongly has the whole current of popular feeling set against distinc- tions of rank in these communions. Yet in an assembly of notables, such as the Life-peerage method proposes, no men would be much better entitled to be heard on public questions than Mr. Binney, Mr. Newman Hall, or Mr. Miall. They would probably contribute more to the real revision of social measures by an assembly of sober notables than the majority of the Bishops now contribute. And no one would dream of any impropriety in appointing such men to an assembly of mere notables with which no aristocratic associations were necessarily connected. But all transformations of the present House of Lords in the direction of greater sympathy with the Commons really imply mingling with it elements incompati- ble with the assumption of social prestige and rank, that is, imply a practical contradiction which will be felt more and more as the problem of recasting the constitution of the Upper House is more fully discussed.
Mr. Lowe pointed out in his speech to his constituents last year that in granting household suffrage we had, in effect, granted the principle of equality, and that the whole tendency of our future changes must be to introduce this principle of equality more and more into all our political institutions. We believe this to be true, and we greatly fear that it amounts to admitting that the only final re- form of the House of Lords will consist in either reform- ing it away, or substituting something entirely different, and entirely free from the attribute of social aristocracy which is the most distinctive trait of the Peerage. Every attempt to harmonize the Peers with the Commons must bring out the radical assumption at the bottom of the House of Lords that family and rank are to count as power in our political system ; and that is an assumption which we have already so completely abandoned as regards the great changes made in the choice of our chief legislative assembly, that it cannot hold its ground very much longer, even for the second chamber. Yet whenever it goes, we do not see how any political assembly, of which either family descent or title is a condition, can possibly survive in its place.
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