TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ABOLITION OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS.
WITHER the Motion which the House of Commons is to debate on Monday is a perfectly futile piece of party rhetoric, or it means the abolition of the House of Lords. When we use the word " abolition " we use it deliberately and with no desire to exaggerate. We merely face the facts of the case. The Resolution lays it down that it is necessary that the power of the House of Lords to alter or reject Bills passed by the House of Commons should be so restricted by law as 'to secure that within the . limits of a single Parliament the final decision of the Commons shall prevail. The House of Commons, in other words, is to obtain a monopoly of power in the Constitution. To adapt the late Roman maxim, "The will of the King has the force of law,"—` The will of the House of Commons is to have the force of law and be the law and Constitution.' It is idle to contend that this is not so because the Resolution only says "within the limits of a single Parliament," and to argue that this may mean that the House of Lords will still have the right to reject or amend legislation at the beginning of a Parliament, and might, therefore, postpone the passage of a law for two or three years. To begin with, no man knows what the liinits of a single. Parliament are. Since the King must either act on their advice or dismiss them, the Ministry commanding a majority in the House of Commons can at any.moment set a limit to a Parliament and bring it to an end, and thus produce the conditions which forbid the Lords to amend or reject legislation. Even if such peremptory action were not taken, the last year of a Parliament would automatically become a period in which the right of the Lords to amend or reject would be non-existeut. This brings us face to.face with the absurdity that the less the House of Commons reflects the will of the people the more absolute become its powers over legislation. It is notorious that at the end of a Parliament Members get out of touch with the electors, and cease to represent their views. Owing to the working of what we may call the law of the pendulum, it is pretty certain that a majority of men holding perfectly different opinions will be sent to the next Parliament. Yet this is the very moment, under the so-called reform of the House of Lords, at which the powers of the House of Commons will be most tremendous, will, in fact, be absolutely unchecked and unlimited. A Lower House full of youth and vigour, and fresh from contact with the country, may be forced to hold its band for a short time. The dying Commons will be absolutely supreme.
We have said enough to show that the Government's proposal is in reality to abolish the right of the Lords to amend or reject, and that with the abolition of this right the House of Lords itself is in effect abolished. To deprive a political institution of its functions is to abolish it, just as surely as to take the engine out of a motor-car and merely leave the empty carriage is to abolish the motor-car. We must now ask whether this is a reform which is likely to commend itself to the will of the people,—that is, whether the people of the United Kingdom really desire to have the Constitution and their lives and liberties placed at the mercy of a vote of the House of Commons. We believe they do not. We are quite aware that there is a good deal of dissatisfaction with the House of Lords from many points of view, but this dissatisfaction comes very largely from the conviction, not that the House of Lords exercises too strong a check upon the House of Commons, but that it wields one which is too weak and partial. The more thinking part of the population admit it is an evil that when the Unionist Party are in power there is practically no check on the House of Commons. It is true that this evil is largely mitigated by the fact that the Unionist Party is also the party of conservation, and is not likely to inaugurate great Constitutional changes. At the same time, the Unionist Party, like its opponent, is now a democratic party, and there is a genuine need for a limitation of the powers of the House of Commons when under Unionist control. But though the British people would like to see an amendment of their political system in this respect, they are not so mad as to i ine that cannot get over the evil that the House of Lords is no check on the Unionist Party by enacting that it shall' no longer be a check on the Liberal Party. As long as half-a-loaf is better than no bread, and an imperfect brake better than no brake at all, men will rather endure the imperfect check they have than fly to the evils of dispensing with a check altogether.
That being so, we are confident that nothing will come of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Resolution. To quote Colonel John Hay's poem, "You may resolute till the cows come home " on such a proposition without moving the British people an inch. The Resolution will, of course, be carried by a large majority, but six weeks afterwards the electors will have forgotten all about it, and when the moment comes for giving it legislative form and substance the whole matter will have to' be discussed again on its merits. No doubt if the Government can a year hence persuade their followers to agree to postpone this or that piece of practical legislation . to their amendment of the Constitution, they will be - able to get such an amending Bill through the House of Commons. That the House of Lords will, however, refuse to accept the Bill without an ad hoc appeal to the country is absolutely certain. Therefore the Bill, when- ever it is introduced, must mean a Dissolution. But does any sane man believe that a Dissolution on this question, even if it is connected with the last Education Bill, or one like it, will be accepted by the country ? When the electors realise, as they can easily be made to realise, that the House of Commons is proposing to establish itself as an absolutely supreme power—indeed, as the only power in the State—they will refuse their consent. Even the most Radical portion of the population may be expected to shrink back from such a proposition. Remember that though the House of Commons pro- fesses to believe that the will of a majority of its Members is the same thing as the will of the country, there is a very large section of Radical opinion which dissents from any such proposition.
It is easy enough to show the folly and unreality of the Government's Motion, and the absurd position into which they will get themselves by laying down so contentious a proposition, and then proposing to sleep on it for a year or two., Motions like that to be debated on Monday are certain to become ridiculous if they are not followed by stern and immediate action.—Does anybody suppose that the Revolution of 1688 would have been carried out if Parliament had contented itself with an, abstract Resolution, and with telling the King that it would not tolerate his claims to supremacy, and that it meant to deal severely with him in a year or two ?—What is far more important to consider is. how the weak, and therefore ineffective, control over the House of Commons now exercised by the Lords can be enforced and made more real, no matter which political party is. in power. There is the root of the Lords question. As our readers know, we are in favour of supplying this control, not by the creation of a new and more powerful Second Chamber, but by calling in the will of the people to redress the balance between the two Houses. What we desire is the Referendum solution, and we are delighted to see that Lord Robert Cecil has placed on the paper an amendment' raising that point. We shall not be at all surprised if the claim that when the Houses differ the country shall decide between them finds, not only on the Conservative but on the Liberal benches, far more support than many people now suppose likely. We have advocated the use of the Referendum in these columns for many years past, and have therefore watched the development of the idea in the public mind with no little interest. For a long time the country seemed indifferent; but, in our opinion, there has been within the last few months, or even weeks, a very marked change. The Referendum solution now numbers among its supporters many men who a short while ago were either indifferent or actively hostile.
Let us give once more in outline the method by which we propose that the Referendum should be carried into action. We suggest that it should become the custom of the Constitution for the House of Lords, when they find it impossible to agree with the House of Commons in regard to the amendments to a Bill, to add to the Bill in the form finally insisted on by the House of Commons
"Aye" or "No," shall be taken before the Bill can come into operation, and then pass the Bill in the ordinary way. Further, and in order to prevent the Referendum being a dead letter when the Unionist Party is in power, we would pass a general law requiring an Act to be submitted to a poll of the people before it came into operation, provided that a sufficient number of electors in a majority of the constituencies in .the kingdom petition the Crown for such a poll of the people. It must not be supposed that there is any difficulty in putting the machinery for a Referendum into operation. The thing is done constantly in the States of the American Union as well as in Switzerland. People sometimes ask, How can you put a great and complicated measure before the country ? Our answer is that the discussions in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords will have familiarised the nation with the issue, and that all you have to ask is whether the Bill in the form in which it passed Parliament shall or shall not come into operation. In order to show how simple is the form of ballot-paper required for a Referendum, we may reproduce that sub- mitted, to the people of the State of California in the year 1892 in regard to an amendment of the Constitution affecting the State Senate :— Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 101 Yu.
(Increasing legislative session to one hundred days) ... No.
In the case of a British Bill, say the Education Bill, the ballotpaper would read as follows :—
It would, of course, be understood that if the majority of voters said " No," the Act would not be placed on the statute-book, but would be treated as dead. The holding of .the poll would be perfectly easy. The Crown would issue a writ to the returning officer in each constituency exactly as it does in the case of a General Election, requiring him to hold a ballot under the Ballot Act and Corrupt Practices Acts on such-and-such a day, at which all, persons on the Parliamentary register would be qualified to vote, and instructing him to submit to each elector on the register who presented himself at the polling-booth a ballot-paper expressed as above. The votes would be counted under exactly the same rules and conditions as at present, and the writ would be returned to the Speaker, endorsed by the returning officer, with the numbers of those voting "Yes " and "No " respectively. The expenses of the election would, of course, be borne by the Treasury. There is no. reason why this sum should be a large one, though no doubt there would be many pleas for doing the thing in a dear instead of a cheap way, for are not we the most extravagant people on the face of the earth ? If, however, extravagance prevailed over economy, as would probably be the case, that would be the fault, not of the Referendum, but of the British people.
We note that a Canadian correspondent, who writes to us against the Referendum, says that the difficulty found in Canada was that a great number of people would not take the trouble to vote. We do not think this would be so likely to happen here, because only highly controversial measures would be referred to the people, and because our political organisations are much stronger and more highly de- veloped than in Canada. But even if a very large percentage of people deliberately preferred not to let their voices prevail in the matter of legislation, we do not see that the Referendum thereby stands condemned. Why should the State trouble itself in regard to the man who deliberately disfranchises himself P If, however, the 'nation thinks otherwise, it might follow the Austrian example, and compel every man under penalties to record his vote. Is it your wish that the Education Aot which received the assent of the Crown on the — day of — 190-, shall come into operation on January let,
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