1HE POLITICAL CRISIS.
IT is disagreeable to have to turn from the Coro- nation and from national and non-party thoughts to the political crisis. That, however, is what the nation will have to do next Monday, and, therefore, the duty of dealing to-day with the crisis cannot be avoided, much as we should like to avoid it. The House of Lords will have to begin the discussion of the Parliament Bill in Committee and to consider what amendments they should make thereto. That question is difficult enough, but beyond and behind it is the problem of whether the Lords should or should not in the highest interest of the country main- tain amendments to the Bill which the Government and the House of Commons refuse to accept. Here is the bed- rock of the situation.
In approaching the question as a, whole, the essential point, as we have said so often in these columns, is to face the facts, the true facts, and all the facts. What people must not do is to delude themselves into fancying that the facts are what they would like them to be and not what they are. The first fact to be faced is that if a dead- lock takes place between the House of Lords and the House of Commons, owing to the Lords insisting on amendments which the ilouse of Commons will not accept, then as- suredly there will be a creation of such a number of peers as will be required to secure a majority in the Lords and allow the will of the Commons to prevail. In other words, a creation of some four hundred or five hundred peers, or whatever may prove to be the exact number, must be the result of the Peers standing firm. It has been argued that the King should not consent to the making of the peers. In regard to this view we can only say that it is a pure and a mischievous delusion. The King, under our Constitution, must accept the advice of his Ministers so long as they remain his Ministers. If he dislikes their advice his alternative is to find Ministers who will tender him what he considers better advice. But no such alter- native is offered to the King in the present case. There is no body of men except the present Ministry who could or would consent to carry on a Government based on the present House of Commons. But it will be urged, " How about a dissolution ? Why should not a new set of Ministers take office, even though they have not got a majority in the Commons ? Let them solve the difficulty of carrying on the King's Government by dissolving in the hope of obtain- ing a majority." To be specific this means : " Why should not Mr. Balfour, if the present Ministry resigns because their advice is not accepted, go in and dissolve?" The answer is: " Because the Unionist Party, of which Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne are the leaders, does not want to commit political suicide." No one who knows anything about the temper of the country can doubt that a dissolution just now would, at the best, leave matters where they are, and at the worst give our opponents a strong and homogeneous instead of a weak and disunited majority. A dissolution, even if we could obtain it, is the very worst of all the possible courses of action before the Unionist Party, and may be written off. The suggestion that the King should run all risks and refuse to create the peers, whether he can get another Cabinet to carry on the Government for him or not, is too mad to be even argued about. The King has duties of the most momentous kind to perform in the Constitution, but we shall never allow any lovers of political paradox to persuade us that it can ever be part of these duties for the King to enter the party arena, even for the protection of the Constitution. The only occasion on which we can con- ceive that it could be the duty of the King to disregard the advice of his Ministers or to act outside the limits of the Constitution would be the case of a war in which the nation seemed at its last gasp and a set of timid Ministers had counselled peace and surrender when in truth it was the duty of the nation to make all sacrifices and run all risks rather than submit. Then, indeed, but only then, a, King might be justified in appealing directly to his people over the heads of Ministers and Parliament, and of any and every other Power and interest in the country. We have got, then, to face the fact that if there is a real deadlock between the two Houses over the amendments, and the Liberal Government advises that sufficient peers should be made to pass the Bill, the peers will be made. That is the prime fact.
The next fact to be remembered is that if the peers are made the Parliament Bill will be passed. People some- times talk as if the creation of the peers would somehow get rid of the Parliament Bill, and that, therefore, it was the duty of the Peers to sacrifice themselves rather than let the Bill through. There is no such alternative. If the peers are created we shall get the Parliament Bill plus the 500 peers. But it is quite clear that this is worse than the Parliament Bill minus the peers. How much worse it is may be judged from the fact that if the peers are made we shall not, in the case of a Home Rule Bill—and this, to our mind, is a dominant consideration—get the two years' delay which will give time enough to defeat any Bill for the dissolution of the Union. People seem to suppose that the 400 or 500 peers will only be pledged to pass the Parliament Bill and will not be Home Rulers. There is no ground whatever for such a belief. The men who will consent to take peerages under the existing con- ditions will, either by private pledge or by conviction, be Home Rulers to a man, and will be certain to past what they call " a Bill for the pacification of Ireland' quite as readily as they would pass the Parliament Bill. But this is not a11. Besides facing this fact we must also face the fait that the creation of 500 peers must destroy the peerage as it exists to-day. It could not possibly survive the creation. At the risk of being thought fools or snobs we have no hesitation in saying that the peerage is a very valuable national asset. The Peers take the lead in that unpaid service which is rendered so generously and so widely in England by the leisured and richer classes. The House of Lords represents the tradi- tion that a man who happens to have either birth, or riches, or high station, or a combination of all three, is under bond to devote himself to public work. Create five hun- dred new peers at one blow and the Peers must, if not at once, very soon become nothing but, as it were, glorified baronets—men with titles and possibly estates, but not men from whom anything in the way of public service can be expected or exacted. Another very serious fact which must be faced is one very difficult to deal with without seeming to use the language of exaggeration. To speak quite frankly, we are getting very near revolutionary conditions in this country. But it is not, in our opinion, the duty of the Peers, still less of Unionist peers, to set an example of, or in anyway to contribute to, revolutionary action. The creation of the peers will be an act of revolution. But all history shows that one act of revolution tends to produce another. Those who have tasted blood and have got their way by violent methods at once clamour for more violence. The appetite grows while they eat. This at any rate is what happened in the case of the French Revolution. Those who imagine that what is true of the French is not true of the British people are not, in our opinion, reading the lessons of history aright. In our own revolution things went very quickly indeed the moment the first revolutionary step had been taken. The abolition of the House of Lords at once succeeded the abolition of the Monarchy, and the moment the House of Lords was abolished and the Long Parliament made itself omnipotent it did what all unchecked deliberative assemblies hanker after and do—rendered itself permanent and also a final court of appeal in civil and criminal matters. No doubt we shall be told that the passage of the Parliament Bill will facilitate such a course as this, and we shall be asked why, that being so, we are doing our best to prevent it being thrown out. Our answer is plain. If we thought the creation of the peers would stop the Parliament Bill we should, of course, be willing to have the peers made. What we are not willing to do is to throw the peerage after the Parliament Bill and to have two evils instead of one. And here we may remind our readers that the Parliament Bill can and, we believe, will be repealed by the establishment of the Referendum as the means of settling deadlocks between the two Houses. What cannot be repealed if once made are five hundred peerages. Therefore we will endure the Parliament Bill for a season rather than the five hundred peers plus the Parliament Bill for ever.
Before we conclude we desire to address one or two plain words to the Lords and their leaders. We sincerely hope that whatever line they take they will take on their own responsibility and not out of any mistaken sense of loyalty to the party to which the majority of them belong. It is not their business to think of the Unionist party, but solely of the interests of the country and the interests of the House of Lords as an institution. When they threw out the Budget they threw it out, not because they believed it specially unfair to their House, but out of a kind of mis- taken loyalty to the opposition in the country and the Commons. Believing, as they did, the Budget to be utterly indefensible, they conceived that it involved a kind of desertion of principle, and also a desertion of those who had been fighting it elsewhere, to let it pass. But this, though plucky and loyal, was not wise, and it is greatly to be hoped that a similar mistake will not now be made. What is wanted from the Peers is patience and caution and, above all, a cool view of the whole situation. If such a cool view be taken, and if the rhetoric of the platform and the Press be dismissed, the Peers will see that, though the situation is bad, it is not absolutely desperate, and that the way to make it better and to save the situation for themselves, for the Consti- tution, and for the Unionist Party is to go slowly, to bend their heads to the storm, and to wait for that inevitable reaction which will come in time, but which will only be postponed by rash courses. We venture to prophesy that if the Parliament Bill is passed after a dignified protest by the Lords a very large number of people who are now crying out for the Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill will begin to wonder whether, after all, they have been wise in placing our lives and liberties at the disposal of a snap vote of the House of Commons. They will soon realize that the talk about bringing the "proud Peers" and the " haughty aristocrats " to their knees, and teaching them the power and majesty of the people, when translated into action means nothing, or, rather, means something very different from what the people intend—means in fact the enthronement of a caucus-created oligarchy. As soon as the people realize that our Government consists of nothing but a single, supreme, and autocratic Chamber, i.e., a representative oligarchy, they will discover that the only corrective possible is the Referendum. The people must be called in to redress the balance of the Constitution, and called in throsgh the democratic institution of the poll of the people or popular veto over legislative acts. When once the Referendum becomes part of the Constitution, we shall have got the corrective to the injurious develop- ment of representation which we need, and the Peers will automatically be restored to that position of independence which they ought to occupy in the Constitution. No one wants to give the Peers an absolute veto over the Com- mons or to give them even co-ordinate powers, and least of all to endow them with powers of taxing. All we want to make sure of is that if the Upper House differs fundamen- tally from the Lower House, it shall be the people them- selves who shall decide which view is to prevail, and not the House of Commons. To put the thing in a nutshell, we do not propose that the House of Commons, any more than any individual or institution in this country, shall be judge in its own cause.
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