THE HOUSE OF LORDS.
(TO TOR EDITOR 01 TDB .8PROFATOR.1
Snc,—The cable reports to us here in Canada the startling language of the Attorney-General on the question of the House of Lords. He anticipates a revolution, and seems to exult in the prospect. From other quarters comes language hardly less ominous. This surely is insanity. The hereditary House of Lords is not a usurpation, but is survival, as the union in it, otherwise incongruous, of a Judiciary with a Legislative Assembly curiously shows. It is now out of date, is loaded with a record of blind obstruction, has lost its indispensable support in the Commons, and has become incapable of performing the part of a national organ of revision assigned it in the Constitution. It calls for replace. ment by something to which the sound part of the nation will heartily adhere, not for mere patching, which would be a postponement of the problem, with risk of a still more dangerous agitation hereafter. But of revolutionary violence there ought surely to be no thought, and it is surprising to hear men in responsible positions talking in that strain. Calm, large-minded wisdom, and thoroughly patriotic statesmanship, disregarding the party rivalries of the hour, and thinking only of the salvation of the country, salon° can solve an organic problem as perilous as it is momentous. The course of the franchise question was largely determined by Lord Russell, a man of first-rate aspirations and second-rate ability, ;who, having been pushed in his youth to the front of Parliamentary reform, whenever his popularity flagged was always, notwith- standing his declaration of finality, wanting to revive it with a Reform Bill. He was weak enough to believe, at least he was always saying it, that the sense of responsibility would go with the possession of power. Conservatism was in the hands of Disraeli. Votes were given to ignorant masses without a thought of redressing the balance of the Constitution. The masses at first did not know what to do with their votes, but gave them to established leaders, and at the last Election to opponents of a tax on bread. They think now that they do know what to do with their votes, and their tendencies were seen in the last Session. They are the tendencies of a class, of a class large and immeasurably important in its way, but still of a class, and one which almost avowedly looks to its own interest apart from that of the community at large. If you wish to escape the domination of a proletariat House of Commons, as without renunciation of Liberal principles or of progress you may, a revision of the Constitution there apparently must be. It is to be hoped that you have some- where the man or men to do it.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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