MR. HALDANE'S SEDATIVE FOR NERVOUS GLADSTON TANS. M R. HALDANE, the
Member for Haddington, wto was designated by a good many of the Glad- stonians for the post of Solicitor-General when Lord Russell of Killowen was made Lord Chief Justice of England, has put forward in the National Review an apology for the abolition of the veto of the Lords, which is as ingeniously modest and suited to weak nerves, as if it had been devised for the very purpose of reconciling constitutional alarmists to the policy of the Government. Mr. Haldane in effect deprecates the idea that anything very new to the Constitution is proposed. He makes use with great adroitness of " that comfortable word 'evolu- tion,'" as Lord Salisbury called it in his address to the British Association. He goes back to Anglo-Saxon times to show that the pious constitutional fraud of pretending that new political proposals were nothing but old practices made a little more systematic, has been the very secret of enlarging popular rights from time immemorial. The House of Commons gained its right to forbid any interference of the Lords with money Bills in that way, by assuming that the old words meant a good deal more than they had ever up to that time been interpreted as meaning, and both Houses got rid of the King's veto on popular legislation in the same fashion. All that is now proposed is to take a step in advance, and "evolve" a right of the House of Commons to get rid altogether of the veto of the House of Lords, which, if slightly startling at first sight, is really in complete accordance with the method in which the Sovereign's veto has been actually abolished. The proper way, says Mr. Haldane, of dealing with such a political forward movement is to pass a resolu- tion in the Commons asserting the need for this forward step ; and if, after such a resolution has been passed there by however narrow a majority, the nation endorses the policy by again giving the Ministry which proposed it a majority however narrdw, it may be safely assumed that the step in advance will have been achieved in perfect accordance with the precedents of a long and even cautious political tradition :—" It is not too much to hope that the acceptance of a resolu- tion declaring that the Commons are entitled to be the sole judges of the will of the Constituencies would settle the question at issue. At all events, it would put the Lords in a hopeless position if they were to violate the new principle, and an appeal to the country followed. And yet it would leave the Upper Chamber vested with complete theoretical control, and capable of acting in a constitutional emergency if the Commons had plainly and obviously put themselves in the wrong." In conclusion, Mr. Haldane throws in a soothing suggess tion which is still more likely to reconcile weak nerves to this very mild view of the revolution which he so astutely proposes to spell without its initial "r," and to treat as a mere development of the great traditions of our history. It is a suggestion that, when we have got rid of the Lords as they now are, by taking away all legislative effect from their hostile majority against any political encroachment of the Commons, the country will probably double back upon its course, and restore the House of Lords to power in some new and transfigured shape as a Federal Assembly that may be asked to overrule the decisions of local Legis- latures when they are not consonant with the welfare of the whole Empire. "In conclusion, it may be asked whether the country will remain content with an Upper Chamber so shorn of its original functions. The answer seems to be that it probably will not be content, but that the re-estab- lishment of the House of Lords belongs to a later stage, to be entered on after the question of the Veto has been dis- posed of, and as part of a further problem. The tendency of the time is towards devolution by the Imperial Parlia- ment of local business to local Legislatures. This has long since become the principle of our system of govern- ment in the Colonies. It may shortly become so not only in Ireland but in Scotland. It may be that in England and Wales the same principle will be applied. If so, transition is not impossible to a state of matters in which the Imperial Parliament will be yet more concerned than it is to-day with the ever-increasing business of the Empire as such, and in which a reformed and reconstituted House of Lords will have become the Chamber which contains the wise men of the Queen's dominions, distant as well as near." This last is a very soothing syrup for the disturbed political conscience of the Glaastonian who observes with horror that the party is about to abolish the only political brake that prevents sudden revolutions without even pre- tending to put anything in its place. Mr. Haldane adroitly suggests that such a policy is merely transitional,—a purely provisional resource against too tedious and em- barrassing a delay. The democracy, he suggests, is not at all likely to remove this political brake altogether. It will take it off only to repair and put it back again in a new and much more effective form. Wait till the principle of devolution is fully developed, and then you will see devolution and evolution in their full majesty and force without any trace of the dreaded revolution of which so much is now made.
Well, Mr. Haldane is certainly a very tranquillising political physician. But we hope that even Gladstonians will distrust his personal assurance,—for it is nothing more,—that the proposed removal of floodgates is only a temporary expedient for restoring new floodgates of even greater strength. Somehow, it does not seem to us that, temporary expedients of that kind are quite safe without providing at least temporary floodgates guaranteed to be strong enough for the intervening period. Nor is the last paragraph of his paper quite in harmony with the general drift of its argument. If it is perfectly in accordance with precedent for the House of Commons to enlarge its privileges by saying that the old words shall mean for the future something more than they ever meant in the past, is it perfectly in accordance with precedent to say that they shall mean something more than they ever meant before, only for the moment, and that so soon as the devolutionary and evolutionary process has been completed, they shall again mean something less for ever after P Mr. Haldane's soft and almost purring attempt to reconcile the party to which he belongs to this very feline method of disposing of a political difficulty, surely breaks down here completely, and stands confessed as a violent breach with the much belauded method of enlarging " make- believes " into rights, on which he has so astutely descanted. Where is the justification for evolving a new and much stronger political brake out of an intervening step in the process which got rid of any vestige of a brake ? Would it not be a very remarkable applica- tion of Mr. Darwin's evolutionary law if an ape with- out any elaborate system of prohibitory nerves at all were to be suggested as the intervening link between an ape with a rude but effective system of such nerves, and man who has very elaborate and powerful provisions for putting a bridle on all the impulses of his lower animal nature ? Mr. Haldane tries to reconcile Gladstonians to a total suppression of any cheek on abrupt and violent House of Commons impulses, by professing his personal opinion that this will lead to the restoration of a very powerful check in some mysterious and unexpected way, of which he only hints the possible course. That is very astute in him, but is it in any sense consistent with his previous attempt to show that the evolution of popular rights always moves in one line, and that line, the line of a gradual enlargement of popular pretensions ? Surely the gradual enlargement of the popular pretensions of the House of Commons ought not to lead to a sudden restora- tion of a Second Chamber which would block these popular pretensions in the most effective way ?
But the real criticism on Mr. Haldane's attempt to give a sedative explanation of Lord Rosebery's policy is this, that all powerful democracies in the modern world have shown themselves perfectly conscious that great waves of popular emotion are in the nature of things,—like the earth- quake-waves which so often appear to visit the Pacific,—and that they are exceedingly perilous to the continuity and stability of democratic institutions, so that it has always been the democratic tradition to take elaborate precautions against the destructive effect of such sudden waves of popular emotion, pan i passu with the development and elaboration of the democratic principle. What the :pre- sent Government deliberately proposes, is to sweep away all such precautions at the very moment of maximum peril, without even any shadow of stcurity that teich pre- cautions shall ever be restored. Whether that is in keep- ing, or not in keeping, with constitutional tradition, it is certainly not at all in keeping with the principle that the supreme aim of popular politics is to take security that nothing shall be done to bring detriment to the fortunes of the State.
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