THE PLEA FOR THE LORDS.
THE Lords undoubtedly still have their " favourers," as
Richardson's Clarissa used to call her elderly friend and confidant ; and we publish in another column the letter of one of these favourers, which, being more temperate in tone than Lord Carnarvon's strange eulogies on his order, deserves, if it does not command, a closer attention, and merits a more careful attempt to narrow the issue between the writer and ourselves. Let us then look at the writer's position as impartially as it is given us so to do.
In the first place, our correspondent is very angry with us for judging the House of Lords by what he calls hypothetical assumptions. We had said that the Lords have no necessary function at all as exponents of public opinion, which is, we suppose, simply undeniable; that they were as bitterly opposed to this -Government in the days when it was absolutely certain that the people were en- thusiastic for it, as they are now when they venture to hope, with a fearful hope, that the people are weary of it. That, surely, is not hypothesis, but fact. And it is a fact which bears most powerfully on the question whether the Lords are the right persons to form a cool and impartial judgment on the present drift of popular opinion. Our hypotheses were hypotheses in form, but not in fact, and they were made solely to illustrate the extraordinary perversity of those who hold that the House of Lords is a fit and impartial judge of the drift of opinion among the people. Our correspondent holds that the Lords showed their power to distinguish between their own prejudices and the drift of popular opinion by passing the Irish Land Bill in 1881. Well, they must have been insensate indeed if within a year of the General Election of 1880, they had managed to per- suade themselves that the people had come round to their own view. No one ever charged the Lords with absolute political idiocy. It is, of course, a perfectly tenable, though we believe a very mistaken view, that in the interval between 1881 and 1884 the popular confidence in Mr. Gladstone's Government has been largely alienated. But if we are to hold that the Lords are the right body to force an appeal to the people, we certainly ought to hold also that they are the body who, if no such alienation of feeling existed, would know that it did not exist, and who would have the means, if it did exist, of measuring its depth and its diffusion. What we maintain is that they have no more qualification for either task than the Medical Council or the Benchers of the Inns of Court, and that they have even less, so far as their much stronger prejudice against the bias of the House of Commons is a positive disquali- fication for impartial judgment. Our correspondent does not deny,—he glories in this personal and violent bias. It does great credit, he thinks, to the House of Lords that they disapproved Mr. Gladstone's Government as much in 1880 as they do now. Well, that is a matter of opinion, and his opinion differs from ours. But even if his opinion were right, he surely cannot deny that a violent desire to believe that the people are turning against the Government is not a good security for a lucid discrimina- tion of the evidence pro and con. If any other body besides the House of Commons is to have the power of compelling an appeal to the people, one would naturally suppose that that other body ought to be carefully chosen, and chosen, if not to represent, yet at least to study and test and understand the set of popular opinion as well as calm unprejudiced judgment will qualify them to test and understand it. Is the House of Lords such a body ? If not, what a monstrous pretension it is to entrust it for the first time with a very responsible duty for which it is thoroughly unfit. But, says the Guardian, the Lords are at least in close relations with the leaders of the Conservative Party. Those leaders hear the reports of the Members of the House of Commons, who are in close connection with the people, and by the help of this bond they can at least tell what local Conservativesa think of the sway of the tide. All that is true, of coarse, but it forms no qualification for judging at all comparable with the disqualifi- cation of a violent prejudice for one particular conclusion. The Whips on either side may be very shrewd judges—the late Mr. Adam was a very shrewd judge of the growth alike of Conservative and of Liberal opinion—but if so, it must be from their own infiinsic qualities, and not from their official position. We would rather take a shrewd doctor's judgment of the drift of opinion in the class he attends, or a shrewd barrister's opinion of the evidence with which small political in- cidents occurring from day to day supply him, than we would the opinion of any Whip, Liberal or Conservative, who had not cultivated very carefully the faculty of sifting all the evidence within his reach. It is so easy to be deceived by sanguine partisans ; and it is so much pleasanter to think your party is on the road to victory, than to think it is on the road to defeat, that we would give extremely little for the opinion of a mere Whip on either side, unless we knew that he had a character for encouraging people to tell him disagreeable facts as well as agreeable facts. A very little impartiality in a matter of this kind is worth an immense deal of sanguine belief on the part of an ordinary Whip.
But, says our correspondent, if you are so sure that the Lords are wrong, why not appeal to the country and show them that they are wrong ? For one very simple reason, amongst many others,—namely, that by the very act of making that appeal, we should alienate all the sympathy requisite to prove our case. What the people so indignantly repel is the right of the Lords to determine when a Dissolution is to take place. Concede that the Lords shall determine when a Dissolution is to take place, and the votes which would now prove that we are in the right, would never be recorded. The present writer, for in- stance, is a strong Liberal, and a Liberal with the utmost' confidence in the vast predominance of the Liberal Party. But if a struggle were precipitated by the craven concession of the Government that a Dissolution shall take place when the Lords choose to demand one, he would certainly not think it worth while to record his vote for the Liberal candidates. It is idle challenging us to test the strength of our party by virtue of a course which would send one long shiver of disgust through every genuine member of that party.
We expressly admitted last week that the absence of any change of feeling in the House of Commons is no infallible teat of the absence of change of feeling in the country. All that we contended for was this, that if the best accessible gauge of change of opinion in the country fails us, we shall not get a better, or nearly so good a one, by going to look at the dilapidated and useless weather-gauge furnished by the House of Lords. We hold that in 1873-4 the condition of the House of Commons afforded a'very clear and sure indi- cation of the drift of opinion to the Conservative side. This journal was loud in its proclamation of that change of opinion before the election of 1874 justified that impression, and deeply as we regretted the change which we discerned. There was no such clear indication within the walls of the House of Commons of the great change of opinion which had taken place in 1880. But we venture to think that the Conservative Party never feels or indicates so sensitively the loss of popular support as the Liberal Party feels and indicates it, and the failure of this premonitory symptom of the people's conversion in 1880 does not in the least prove that the Liberals would not discern such premonitory symptoms now, if there were any real failure of popular support. But whatever may be said of the inadequacy of the House of Commons as a sensitive weather-gauge, it is at all events a thousandfold as sensitive as the House of Lords.
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