THE NEW POSITION OF THE LORDS.
IT is feeble policy to try to answer Mr. Labouchere's speech on the House of Lords, which brought him one hundred and sixty votes, by calling it a poor speech, or a speech which was only amusing. It was a very good speech, perhaps the most sensible one, from its point of view, that Mr. Labouchere has ever delivered, though it was marked here and there by outbursts of aristocratic spite against the great industrials. Mr. Labouchere, who might be a Peer himself as far as his birth is concerned, to judge by the evidence of his speeches holds a big industrial to be only a fattened cad, and if he can detect him in inventing, or even in accepting a pedigree, makes him, with gleeful malice, as ridiculous as he can. This impulse, which is obviously quite instinctive, it not being prudent in a Radical leader to stick pins into the captains of labour, detracts from the seriousness of his argument ; but it was serious all the same, and much of it true besides. The House of Lords has not been during this generation a good Second Chamber. It has never really resisted, still less modified for good, the impulses of the Lower House ; it has never turned back the stream of opinion, but only dammed it up, till when it burst it was too rapid for safety ; and it has been far too little solicitous about that permanent repute for dignity, firmness, and efficiency in leadership, which is the moral claim of aristocrats to the first places in the State. In a country which is a reservoir full to choking of men who will attempt and succeed in anything, it has no doubt contained men of ability, as have Convocation and the Stock Exchange, and especially oratorical ability ; but then, it has also secluded them, shutting them out of the very place, the House of Commons, where their influence was most required. The Peers are said to do business well, and we dare say they do ; but they have never shown the slightest desire so to utilise their capacity as to protect the Commons ae-ainst error, or to make the body of English laws consistent, intelligible, and independent of Judges' interpretations. Our legislation is just as awkward and cumbersome as if the Lords knew nothing. Above all, the Lords do not use their grand privilege, upon which Mr. Curzon dilated so much, of being independent of constituents, and therefore able to speak their real minds. They do not speak their real minds, being, we think, even more afraid of outside opinion than the Commons are, certainly more afraid to run counter to any stream of thought which may for the moment be in flood. We agree, we confess, with Mr. Labouchere that the House of Lords is a poor Second Chamber, which neither revises nor resists adequately, and which loses instead of gaining favour with long-sighted politicians.
It is when we come to the practical suggestions for reform, that, greatly to our mental relief—for it is dis- quieting to find oneself even for five minutes in accord with Mr. Labouchere, who seems to us not a new Jack Cade, as Mr. Curzon called him, but an English Rochefort, utterly out of place in any English assembly—we part company with the orator. Like him, we have an intellectual fancy for a single Chamber, though if we had one, we should have to control it either by reviving the Royal veto as a personal power, or by adopting the Referendum ; and like him, we perceive that the people are entirely opposed to that plan ; but his alternative suggestion creates in us no respect. It would not work. He wants a Second House with a suspensive veto only, to be elected by the County Councils. The result of that scheme would either be that the Senate or Imperial Council, or whatever it was called, would be elected by the electors as the Commons are—the scheme of double election breaking down, as it always does—or the Senate would be a nuisance, always causing worrying delays. It would be immensely strong, from its representative character ; it would be utterly contemptuous of threats, having nothing what- ever to lose ; and it would be morbidly anxious to assert its separateness and wisdom as a House. It would con- sequently suspend everything of importance, and compel all Governments to legislate for five years hence, a posi- tion which would not, even in this land of patient men, 'where the mob never hangs a Member for obstruction, be borne for a single decade. It would be better, if the country adopted that idea, to divide the House of Commons itself into two, and trust to the instinct of separate life which belongs to every living entity, to produce the difference of opinions which, on the hypothesis of two Chambers, is absolutely required. If we are to have repre- sentation at all in the Upper House, it must be direct representation, and Mr. Labouchere will find when he draws up a scheme with that object, that he has made a Second House a great deal stronger than he likes ; that, as in America, one House will undo the other's work ; that legislation will be nearly suspended ; and that all practical power will pass to the Executive Government. That result might not work any mischief if the smaller legislation, commercial legislation and the like, could be provided for by compromise ; but if that is what democrats want, they do not understand much of their own business. It would be the most conservative plan ever tried, probably so conservative that the country would shortly be crying for the despised Lords back again. If Mr. Labouchere really wants to break down the resistance of the Lords, and increase the power of the Commons, he should leave the hereditary principle alone—it is, after all, nonsense to attack it while the Monarchy is supported by the people— and demand that whenever the Houses differ, any two hundred Members of Parliament, whether they belong to one House or the other, should have a right to demand the Referendum,—that is, the direct " Yes " or " No " of the electors upon the specific measure. He will not like the result at all, but that is the plan which, if his principles are sincere, will realise his ideas.
We are often told that it is folly to write about sub- stitutes for the House of Lords, for the Lords are really in no manner of danger. The cry for their abolition, it is said, has been raised at intervals ever since 1832, two whole generations, and they are not abolished yet. They may continue, it is said, for another century if only they will adopt an attitude of passive resistance. We disagree. Those Conservatives who employ this argument forget that two great changes, one of them visible, one of them silent, have recently passed over politics. The visible one is, of course, the alteration in the suffrage ; but the invisible one is this. The House of Lords cannot be bullied any more. During the fifty-seven years since the Reform Bill, the regular practice has been, whenever the Lords rejected a popular Bill, to threaten them with extinction, usually in the bargee tone adopted by Mr. Rowlands on Friday week. He said :—" The time was coming rapidly when they should come to conclusions with the hereditary legislators. The House of Lords was an insult to the manhood of the nation. The people had not forgotten the history of the House of Lords. They neither forgot nor forgave. What were they threatened with now ? The Prime Minister declared that if a Liberal Parliament was returned and it passed a certain great measure, the House of Lords would throw it out. Let them try it. It would be so much the worse for the House of Lords. This was a question they would fight to the death." Or, in briefer English, the Upper House is to yield or die. That, though expressed sometimes with greater eloquence and less brutal directness, has been the regular formula ; and upon every question except the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, it has been found, on the whole, to be efficacious. The House has trembled, pro- tested, sighed, and yielded. The efficacy of that rough medicine is, however, at an end. A revolver is a formidable weapon to everybody except one, the man who would much rather die than not. The mighty change of feeling, rather than thought, produced by the events of the last twenty-one years, has affected the Peers more than any other class of politicians, and if they could reply as a whole to Mr. Rowlands with his own rough distinctness, they would say,—` Abolish us, and be damned to you ; the quicker the better.' A few Peers conscious of inaptitude, and a few rural magnates conscious of their seclusion, are afraid for the House of Lords ; but the Peers who are at once the brains and the body of the House rather dislike than like it, know that they would have five times the power outside it, have learned by Continental example that titles cannot be swept away—the Terrorists tried that and failed, though they had the guillotine for an instrument—and are only reconciled to continued seclusion by the chance it affords them of occasionally teaching the House of Commons that it is not alone in the land. We can remember the time when Lord Salis- bury would no more have threatened to throw out a Bill not before his House, than he would have sworn at a lady. An instinct fostered by his whole training would have pre- vented him ; but it prevents him no longer. If the Commons are irritated with the Peers, what does that matter ? The majestic "People " itself in its highest wrath can only sentence the House of Lords to extinction, and the House will receive the sentence with a sigh of relief from pain. There is no future life for legislating Houses to dread, and to live for the performance of duties which cannot be performed, is no such exhilarating position that this one should buy with incessant humiliations a continued right to exist. It is because the Peers are careless whether they continue or not, unless they can continue with honour, that we expect to hear in no long time that the hour of collision has arrived, and that the nature of the new Chamber to be created has become a very " living " topic indeed.
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