THE PROGRESS WITH HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM.
THE debate in the House of Lords on Thursday, March 22nd, was a milestone in the controversy about reforming the Second Chamber. Progress is being made. We admit that it seems rather paradoxical to say this when the chief fact of the situation is that the scheme drawn up by Lord Bryce's Committee for reform- ing the Second Chamber has no friends left. It has been jettisoned and no new scheme has taken its place. But in spite of that we insist that progress is being made, because the debate of last week proved that most members of the House of Lords are now thinking along much simpler, le.ls ambitious and more practical lines. If this tendency lasts, we shall get an arrangement that will enable the House of Lords to perform functions of the greatest national value without being very drastically changed and, above all, without provoking another Constitutional crisis like that of 1911.
In considering the Reform of the House of Lords it is necessary to keep two main points in mind : (1) What is the true function of the House of Lords ? (2) What should be the qualifications for membership ?
The true function of the House of Lords is not to act in any way as a rival to the House of Commons, but to be harnessed to the service of Democracy in such a way that it may act as Remembrancer of the people. Talk about a veto belonging to the House of Lords is obsolete. The veto rests with the people as a whole, and everybody knows it. That there must be a veto lodged somewhere is one of the surest lessons of history. The King used to have it ; then it belonged to the Lords ; now it belongs to the people ; and within recent years the Lords have never claimed more than the duty of delaying doubtful measures till the opinion of the people could be expressed. If it should be arranged, as it easily can be, that the House of Lords in the case of disputed measures should have the right and the duty to demand the opinion of the people by means of a Poll of the People, or Refer- endum, there would be no need whatever to repeal the Parliament Act. That Act provided for three presenta- tions of a measure within two years, at the end of which, if the House of Commons persisted, the .assent of the House of Lords should no longer be deemed necessary. All that would be necessary would be to add a new clause declaring that a ,Bill should not become an Act until the people by means of the Referendum had been asked whether or not they approved of . it. The answer to the question, Do you want this tilt or do you not ? would be a simple " yes " or "no." In the past a strong and not unreasonable objection to the Referendum has been raised by Liberals on the ground that the Lords would pass Unionist measures as a matter of course, but would hold up Liberal measures. The remedy for this is to give to any number of members of the House of Commons greater than one-third of that body the right to demand a Referendum. Thus the Poll of the People would not be the weapon of any one party.
Now as regards the qualification for a reformed House of Lords. It is admitted by all candid observers that "a full dress debate " in the House of Lords on a matter of national importance is generally an impressive and very valuable thing. We want to keep this service at its full value instead of losing it. If the House of Lords were turned into a more representative Chamber than it is, it would infallibly lose strength in practice even while It gained it in form. This would happen for the simple reason that the House of Commons would very naturally be jealous. It may be said that a partly elected and partly nominated House of Lords—we do not care whether the election were direct or indirect—would be sufficiently different from the House of Commons and that there would be no real clash. We do not believe it, and the course of the debate in the House of Lords last week showed that most peers do not believe it either. If a new Second Chamber, drawing its authority much more than now from the people, saw the House of Commons behaving wildly or foolishly, it would almost certainly try to assert itself. It would regard an exhibition of folly in the other House as intolerable ; it would remember that the nation had created a Second Chamber to function, not to do nothing ; and it would try to pull things straight while there was yet time. The House of Com- mons would, of course, resent the interference and there would once more be a first-class Constitutional crisis— the very thing that we all want to avoid.
The path of safety, therefore, is to make the House of Lords as dissimilar from the House of Commons as it can possibly be. It is at present quite dissimilar and we maintain that it ought to remain so. For its particular purpose the House of Lords, with certain reservations that Wit shall come to in a moment, works very well. It was with real satisfaction that we noticed in the debate of last week a general instinct for getting away from the dangerous old game of Constitution-making. After all, the peers do not want the sort of thing that was satirized by Burke :— "Abbe Sieyes has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitu- tions ready-made, ticketed, sorted and numbered, suited to every season and every fancy ; some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top ; some plain, some flowered ; some distinguished for their simplicity, others for their complexity ; some with directories, others without a direction ; some with councils of elders and councils of youngsters, some without any council at all ; some where the electors choose the representatives, others where the representatives choose the electors ; some in long cloaks and some in short cloaks ; some with pantaloons, some ,without breeches ; some with live-shilling qualifications, some totally unqualified."
All that is required in the way of reform is that the number of peers should be cut down and that some test of fitness or public service should be imposed. At present the peers who have the right to sit number well over 700, and that is more than twice the number of any other civilized Second Chamber in the world.
Another disadvantage of the present system is that peers, generally described as "backwoodsmen," who lake no manner of interest in the ordinary debates and hardly ever trouble to attend the House rush to West- minster at a particular crisis and may be able to outvote the serious people who do all the work, and whose judg- ment is much more entitled to respect. The number of peers, then, to whom a:Writ of Summons would be issued would be reduced by providing that to be eligible a man must have sat as a member in the House of Commons, or have been elected as a representative peer of Scotland or Ireland, or have been a member of the Privy Council, or a Lord-Lieutenant, or a Chairman of Quarter Sessions, or a Chairman of a County Council, or a Mayor, or a Governor of a Dominion, or a member of the Diplomatic Service for a stated period, or an officer of one of the fighting Services for a stated period, and so on. More- over, in addition to the present spiritual peers, represen- tatives of Non-Conformist bodies and of the Roman Catholic Church should sit as spiritual life peers.
Such an assembly, preserving in the main the hereditary principle, would be directly connected with all our Constitutional traditions, and though it would not be a first-rate body for the exercise of sovereign or even semi- sovereign powers, it would be able to perform admirably, without friction or inconvenience, the office of referring doubtful legislation to the people. In the debate of last week speakers of various political views, for example, Lord Newton, Lord Phillinaore and Lord Buxton, all agreed that the numbers of the House should be cut down. Nobody cast even a lingering backward look at the schemes for a directly or indirectly elected Second Cham- ber. We accept the omen. We believe that we are nearer than ever before to a plan of reform which will distil the essence of the present House of Lords and combine it with that great safeguard against revolution and madness—the Poll of the People.
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