MR. GLADSTONE AND TrIE HOUSE OF LORDS.
IT is difficult, it is almost impossible, for anyone who reads his first speech at Edinburgh to believe that the Tory theory of Mr. Gladstone's personality can be quite honestly held. According to that theory, the Premier is a passionate and arbitrary man, careless of Constitutional restrictions, and either at heart inclined to revolutionary courses, or ready to embark on them rather than be defeated. In the height of a true crisis, amid circumstances of the most exciting kind, with all England hanging on his lips, with the majority of his fol- lowers, and, as we believe, a majority of the whole people, hungering for a word bidding them to be done with the House which has so thwarted his efforts at legislation, Mr. Gladstone rises to give the Peers another opportunity of honourable retreat. He deprecates a revision of the Constitu- tion. He refuses to denounce the hereditary principle. He relies wholly upon the merits of his cause. He will not look beyond the necessity of the hour, will not "widen out the issue "; but contents himself by proving, through a chain of reasoning absolutely unanswerable, that the Lords are in the wrong and ought to retreat with all dignity and honour from their unconstitutional position. The temptation on him to take a different line must have been almost terrible. Mr. Gladstone, like Sir Robert Peel, disbe- lieves in the House of Lords. He has sat in Parliament for half a century ; he has throughout half that time understood the inmost policy of successive Governments ; he has been compelled to study with painful attention the action of the Houses ; and the result has been to force upon his mind the conviction that "the legislative action of the House of Lords for the last fifty years has not been a benefit Or a blessing to the country." He has himself been thwarted by the House, as in a splendid passage of his speech he reminded his audience, in his financial policy, in his policy for Ireland, in his policy for securing true representation to the people, as few Liberal Ministers and no Tory Minister have been thwarted yet, and still he reasons calmly with the Lords. Those who best understand the temper of the majority, and the extent to which dislike to the legislative power of the Upper House has silently grown up among the people, know best how easily Mr. Gladstone could have "fired the prairie," and have given the signal for an agitation which would have ended in a radical Constitutional change. The very audience to which he spoke—and Mr. Gladstone is sensitive to his audiences—was eager to provoke him to do it ; and at the first appearance of menace to the Lords rose to its feet in an enthusiasm of applause. Yet Mr. Gladstone, the passionate Premier, only once in the whole speech let intellectual passion have its swing, and that was in defence of the existing Con- stitution. The single thing that he denounced with more than argumentative fervour was an innovation. The right of the responsible Ministry, with the assent of the Sovereign, to choose the time and the occasion for a Dissolution is of the very essence of English polity— is so vital that the late Mr. W. Bagehot, in his great book upon the Constitution which was accepted all over Europe as a final authority, maintained that without it the Legislative machine would at once become unworkable. The Lords in the most revolutionary manner have clutched at this great power, and have insisted, not only by acts, but in words, that hence- forward their House, itself exempt from dissolution, shall have the right, without danger of any consequences to itself, of passing -whenever it chooses a capital sentence on any House of Com- mons which displeases it. In treating this monstrous pre- tension, the Premier, no doubt, rose to passion. "To tamper with that doctrine," he said, "to give it the smallest counten- ance, to admit one jot or tittle of it, would, in my opinion, be treason to British liberty ; and I tell you fairly, I would far rather abandon my share in the Franchise Bill, and that which would go with it, my share in political life, than for one moment cease to raise the loudest protest in my power against the introduction of this greatest innovation which, neither in a reformed Parliament nor in an unreformed Parliament, was ever heard of, by a majority of the House of Lords." This is not argument, this is passion ; but this passion is from the Conservative, not the aggressive, side,—in defence of the old, and the usual, and the well established, and not of the unac- customed. Throughout, Mr. Gladstone spoke as the calm and experienced statesman, resolute to carry out the reform he deemed essential to the country, but most reluctant not only to propose, but even to consider, any issues involving radical change. He did not deny—even his opponents would scarcely deny—that such issues might be opened, if the Lords con- tinue obstinate ; but his own• desire was that they should not be, and that the Lords, convinced by reason, and by the informal plebiscite which the English 'people know how to take, should retire from a dangerous struggle in which victory for them is impossible, "with dignity and honour."
Mr. Gladstone, in fact, throughout his speech was reasoning with the Lords as well as with his party and the country at large. Those Peers who profess to reason, and are not simply obeying their own dislike to every step in the progress towards democracy, plead three reasons for their action ; and Mr. Gladstone takes them up one by one, examines them, and shows that they afford no justification for resistance to the passing of the Franchise Bill. The majority in the Lords say the new proposal amounts to a revision of the Constitution ; but Mr. Gladstone shows them that it is not .even an in- novation. The Bill does not "alter the relations, or powers, or rights of the different orders of the State, or of the bodies by which the self-governing energy of the nation takes effect in_law and in acts of government." The suffrage adopted for the counties is the suffrage adopted by the Tories themselves for the towns, without change, except in directions, such as the service-franchise, which Conservatives approve. They might as well declare that a Ballot Bill, or a Bill extending the hours of polling, or a new Registration Act, was a revision of the Constitution, and, therefore, required a special assent of the legal nation. That the Bill is large nobody doubts, because it covers so wide an area, and enfranchises so many millions ; but there is no new principle in it, no franchise, except the service-franchise, which was not in Lord Beaconsfield's Bill. Household suffrage is applied in one district as well as another, and that is all. But, say the Peers, granting that, the Bill ought to be different, and we who, of the two Houses, are the more permanent representa- tive body, have a right to ask the people, who are the masters of both, whether they approve this imperfect Bill. "Well," says Mr. Gladstone, "I deny utterly that the Upper House is representative ;" and proves his position, not by decrying the hereditary principle, or by pointing to the absence of a mandate received from any class, but by a totally different method. If the Lords were representative, they would be usually, at least, in accord with the elected House ; but they are not. Twelve Parliaments have been elected since the passing of the Reform Act of 1832, and of them all ten have been Liberal Parliaments,—one, that of 1841, was both Tory and Liberal, having altered its opinions midway ; and one, that of 1874, was from the beginning to the end Tory. During all this period the House of Lords remained Tory. How, then, can it be said to represent the permanent, as opposed to the fleeting, opinion of the country ? The country, for nearly two generations, has been steadily Liberal, while the Peers have remained more steadily Tory. We cannot even conceive an answer to that argument; and the Peers are driven back upon their last defence,—that Redistribution should have accompanied extension of the franchise. No, says Mr. Gladstone, it should not. Her Majesty's Government honestly believe extension a good. thing in itself, though it will be better when Redistribution has been accom- plished, and they could not allow this good thing to be refused, because unaccompanied by another good thing which would have rendered the concession of the first one impossible. The Government knew, and the Tories knew, that if the two improvements were linked together, neither could have passed. The Government, allowing for the necessary business of supply, had but thirty-one nights at its disposal ; and, although the Franchise Bill had been drawn up after endless concessions to Conservative feeling, the minority occupied twenty-five nights in passing that one Bill. Suppose a Redistribution Bill had been added, with all the endless questions which adhere to it—questions of boundary, questions of the relative position of the Three Kingdoms, questions of the rightful position of the great centres of population—does any- one believe that the measure could have passed ? No one believes it ; the proposal is hardly honest and scarcely decent, and had the Ministry accepted it, they would, said Mr. Gladstone, have been " traitors " to the cause. They would have been regarded as men who played with the great subject, and were making capital out of proposals which at heart they knew were proposals in the air. Where is the answer to these propositions ? And yet, if there
is none, where is the excuse for the Lords, except in the theory that they have a right when they choose to call for a Dissolution ; that, as Lord Lytton put it in his wild harangue of Saturday, when the Houses differ, the people must decide, though in the process one House dies and the other remains alive ? And that theory is not only unconstitu- tional, but is absolutely new. The entire argument, as a great Constitutional argument, is made by the Premier as lucid as a proposition in figures ; and the man who, after reading his speech, does not see that to yield to the Lords is to hand over to them the Government of the country, and to reduce the Representative House to a position theoretically, as well as practically, secondary in the State, is unable to comprehend politics. Of course, he may accept that result as pleasing or inevitable ; but then he will, we think, find himself at direct variance, possibly violent variance, with the people of England.
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