THE. CREATION OF PEERS. T HE passage from Mr. Asquith's speech
dealing with the creation of Peers shows that the Government are as usual living in a fool's paradise. They clearly think that the Lords may be frightened into acquiescing in the establishment of what will in effect be single-Chamber government by the menace that worse things may befall them,—that is, by the threat that the " aristocracy " will be swamped by a huge influx of new Members. We venture to say that the hope that the House of Lords will yield to such threats is entirely out of date. It is based upon a misconception, the misconception that the existing Members of the House of Lords are Peers first and citizens afterwards, and would rather maintain what are somewhat grandiloquently called "the privileges and rights of their Order" than help in the work of maintain- ing a check upon the legislative vagaries of the House of Commons. The great majority of the Peers are much more concerned with the risks involved in there being no restriction upon the arbitrary will of the Lower House than with possible augmentations of the personnel of the Peerage. To begin with, the more important and leading Peers are well aware that the position and standing which they possess in the country, and no doubt value very highly, come from their being the holders of historic names and titles, the possessors of great houses and estates, and the maintainers of picturesque and attractive family traditions, far more than from membership of the House of Lords. Such membership is a privilege which they enjoy in common and on a footing of equality with a considerable number of persons who, though eminently respectable in birth and status and in worldly endowments, cannot in any true sense be called aristocrats. Men are immensely proud of being the Marquis of some historic stronghold or the Earl of some great county, but not of the mere receipt of a writ to sit in the House of Lords. In addition to this, the Peers, as was clear from the debate over, and the acceptance of, Lord Rosebery's Resolutions, fully realise that it is now almost certain that the House of Lords cannot continue to be in the future what it has been in the past, and that in some form or other a smaller body will be distilled from the larger. Whether by internal election, or by status, or, again, by external selection, a body of not more than three hundred Peers will be taken out of the existing House in order to constitute a Second Chamber. In other words, if any change is made in the House of Lords, the mere possession of a peerage will in the future only confer the right to be in some form or another a constituent of the Upper House.
The moment this idea is grasped and accepted a complete change comes over the prospect of the creation of, say, four hundred new Peers by the Liberals. It merely menus that the constituency will be widened. But the Peers are good enough politicians to see that the result of such widen- ing will be very greatly to strengthen the element in the Constitution which they represent. The four hundred new Peers when chosen would no doubt as in duty bound vote for the proposals of the Government which had created them ; but we venture to say that in a very large number of cases there would be a rapid change of opinion, and that they would very soon, either as Members or constituents of a. Second Chamber, begin to view with disfavour the encroachments of the Lower House. They would, whenever the reform of the House of Lords was taken in hand, be prepared to restore the powers and functions of the Second Chamber. Remember that if the Liberals were to make four hundred Peers, the port of the case against the House of Lords which appeals most strongly to the country—namely, that the Liberal Party is not properly represented. in the Upper House—would vanish. Clearly, then, the Peers are not going to be thrown into a paroxysm of terror by the threat that their body will be very greatly strengthened, as it would un- doubtedly be by a large creation of Peers. No doubt a certain number of Peers and. a still larger number of Peeresses might dislike the intrusion into their sanctuary of so many newcomers, but the more far-seeing would, as we have said, find good grounds for acquiescing in the result. We should very quickly witness the process of absorption which is so characteristic of our national life,— a process which is constantly seen, for example, when a large creation of new Magistrates takes place on a county Bench. Till the new men are actually made the old Magistrates express the most gloomy views as to their fitness. After a very few meetings, however, the assimila- tion is complete, and the newcomers begin to show themselves more than willing to share all the feelings and prejudices of the body they have entered. The result is that in a very little time those who were inclined to regard the new men as intruders are the first to admit that they have very greatly strengthened the position of the Bench.
It will perhaps be urged that what we are saying would be true if the new creations were to be on the old lines, but that they will not be. If, we shall be told, the Prime Minister is driven to the creation of Peers, he will choose men, not with any view of strengthening the Peerage, but with a deliberate intention of discrediting it and making it a laughing-stock. The suggestion is one of which the Peers need not be in the least afraid. That is not the way things are done in England. English statesmen, however violently they talk when party feeling runs high, know instinctively that the British people do not tolerate cynical action of this Jacobinical temper. No doubt a Liberal Prime Minister would try to choose none but "earnest Liberals" for his list of Peers ; but we may depend on it that he will not do what James II. is said to have threatened to do,—call up a troop of the Life Guards to the Upper House. The men chosen would be men of means and local position,—the kind of men who are searched for so diligently to take the chair at big Liberal meetings. That for the most part they will belong to the middle class by birth, and to the various Noncon- formist bodies by creed, is more than likely ; but he must be very foolish who imagines that this prospect is going to frighten the Peers. They are, as we have suggested above, quite wide enough awake politically to see that such an infusion of the upper middle class will strengthen, not weaken, their position. The presence of more Liberals and more Nonconformists in the body which, as we have said, must after its doubling in size become merely a constituent body, would prove a welcome accession. It has sometimes been suggested, no doubt, that after the new Peers had performed their function of abolishing the legislative rights of the House of Lords, an Act might be passed to unfrock them, or perhaps we should say disrobe them, and to return them to the position of comparative obscurity from which they had been called. That, of course, is a possible proposal. It is one, however, which we predict will not be adopted. The new Peers could hardly be asked to pledge themselves beforehand to such a scheme, and once Peers they can certainly be counted upon as ardent defenders of their Order. We remember, besides, the story of the innkeeper who is said to have been knighted by George IV. after too good a dinner. Next morning the King's entourage tried to explain to the new Knight that the accolade was not to be taken seriously, and that he must not consider himself a "Sir." "That's all right as far as I'm concerned," was the reply, "but you can't unlacly my wife." The Asquithian Peeresses will have something to say to the disrobing Act. While dealing with the subject of the possibility of the creation of Peers it is not -cmamusing to consider the way, should it ever come to the making of Peers, in which a Liberal Cabinet would probably act, and the method by which the list of the gallant four hundred would be drawn up. To begin with, no doubt all the eldest sons of existing Liberal Peers would be called to the Upper House. In this way some twenty or thirty Peers might be secured. Again, a considerable number of younger sons of Liberal Peers who had made wealthy marriages or who were bachelors might be expected to receive peerages, while a certain number of brothers of existing Liberal Peers would also be found eligible. We should imagine that in this way at least fifty new Peers might be obtained. Next, we may feel sure that recourse would be had to the authentic roll of Baronets which is just coming into existence. It would probably be found that there arc at least a hundred and fifty Liberal Baronets available. Some hundred Baronets have been created by Liberal Prime Ministers during the last twenty years. Next, the eldest sons of the said Liberal Baronets might, when of age, be summoned to the Lords. From these two sources, then, a Prime Minister might, we think, obtain two hundred and fifty Peers who would very well pass muster. Next, we might expect that all Liberal Privy Councillors who are commoners but not in the Lower House would receive peerages. Finally, there would be very little difficulty in finding a hundred Liberal commoners willing to take peerages in England and Scotland, while no doubt Ireland would also yield her quota. England and Wales have fifty-two counties and Scotland thirty- three, and there are in addition the great county boroughs. Undoubtedly each county and great town could on an average very easily produce one Liberal whose name could properly be included in the roll of "the Asquithian Peerage." The difficulty, indeed, would be one of choice. The Lord Chancellor told us the other day in his evidence before the Royal Commission on the appoint- ment of Justices of the Peace of the vast list of would-be Magistrates that was sent in to him. No doubt we might expect an equal flow of names of persons considered eligible for the new peerages.
The subject is a curious and interesting one, but we cannot pursue it any further. We think we have said enough, however, to show that Mr. Asquith will be very unwise if he thinks he can rely upon the mere threat of the creation of Peers to beat down the opposition of the Lords and to force them to acquiesce in single-Chamber government. It is only fair to warn him that threats will be of no avail. If on an appeal to the country he is armed with a mandate to insist on the creation of Peers, he will have to carry out his menaces and actually to make the said Peers. In doing this he will find that in the long run he will not be securing, as be probably hopes, the permanency of the single-Chamber system, but the very reverse. As coon as the Unionists return to power the new Peers will be willing to assist in restoring the functions of the Upper House, even if they may show a certain dislike of reform, and be inclined to stand with embarrassing rigidity for the maintenance of the rights of their Order. The Asquithian Peers will, we venture to say, prove the most intractable of "backwoodsmen." Nourished in the traditions of ' passive resistance," we can even imagine them standing a physical siege in "the Gilded Chamber."
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