TOPICS OF THE DAY.
A REFORM OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS.
THE Lords have rejected the Ballot Bill without discussing it. So entirely and immovably is the temper of the House at variance with the policy of her Majesty's Govern- ment, of the House of Commons, and df the Electorate, that even the Liberal Peers failed to attend ; that the House refused by only 97 to 48 even to give the Bill a fair and respectful discussion ; and that many Peers condescended to an argument which, if it had been more than a sneer, would have justified the abolition, not of their House only, but of their Order also. They said they preferred their holidays to their duty. They are invested with precedence in society, are exempted in all serious eases from the jurisdiction of her Majesty's Courts, and are entrusted with the extravagant power of annulling all the work of the representatives of the country, in order that they may improve legislation, and they assert that they will not take the trouble, that out of lives which are one long holiday they will not devote one month to work which the Government, the Commons, and the electors demand should be performed. They must, having done nothing, now have their recreation. The only answer to that argument would be to dispense finally with the duty which is so irksome, to withdraw their payment in hon- ours for performing it, and to relegate them for good to the plea- sant woods they are so loth to quit. Of course the plea was not real—the Lords would work if they wished—and was only put
forward as the most lordly one they could think of, the true motive of the Peers' action being disgust with the whole course of modern legislation, with the policy of progress, and with the people who, according to Lord Shaftesbury, are unfit to be trusted with unwatched power. That disgust is sincere, is permanent, and is active ; it will always, as now, stop the course of legislation, and it cannot be cured by an infusion of new blood, which in a generation would be as torpid as the old. It remains therefore only to substitute a working Legisla- ture for the present two-headed monstrosity, and to that end the electors should, during this recess, think out a definite plan, so that at the next election no candidate may be carried not pledged first of all to a Reform of the House of Lords.
There are two grand difficulties in the way of this Reform, one of the most practical, the other of a more theoretical kind. The first is the amazing power over the Executive Govern- ment with which the Constitution invests the Peers. No politician is unaware of the Lords' power over legislation, but the bulk of the people scarcely notice that it is far less than their power over the Executive Government. Partly from their authority as born legislators, partly from their social supremacy, but mainly from prerogatives conferred by statute, thirty or forty gentlemen, described by Mr. Disraeli as "the Political Peers," men generally of ability and energy, but belonging in sympathies and opinions to another century, claim and exercise the right of appointing half the Committee or Cabinet to which the Executive Government of the country is entrusted. Three, if not more, of the seven great offices must be entrusted to them, that is, must be divided among such of the Political Peers as agree with the Government of the day,—a limitation on her Majesty's right of selection without a precedent in the world. This enormous privilege, which quadruples or quin- tuples their power as legislators, enables the Peers to break up any Cabinet with which they may differ on measures affecting the Order,—which has an immovable esprit de corps ,—and makes it therefore indispensable that the demand for Reform should come, in the first instance, not from Government, but from the electors, who, to make their demands effectual, must make them definite. Clearly the first of them should be the repeal of any statute limiting the Crown's right of sake- tion to any political office, or giving any preference to one order of men over another, or defining in any way the number of offices which shall be assigned to each House. No statute of that kind can be defensible in principle. The power of the Crown to choose the best rulers is already limited as re- gards half the Cabinet to six hundred gentlemen, but they are selected by the constituencies, and to limit it as re- gards the other half to forty more, who are selected only by birth, is a superfluity of naughtiness, a needless effort to make Government incapable. The next demand should be, if the electors decide that they desire two Houses, which we do not pretend to do, for the introduction of two hundred Life Peers, so that there may be a perpetual influx of men imbued with the ideas and wishes of the
time ; and the third should be the reduction of the theoretical power of the Upper House to a level with their real power, that is, its limitation to a right to send. a Bill or a clause back to the Commons for one more debate.
Bills should be passed through Committee of the Commons, then be sent up to the Lords, and then be sent back to the Commons for a debate on the Lords' amendments. The abso-
lute veto would, of course, be withdrawn, like the absolute veto of the Crown. This arrangement would be sufficient to prevent undue precipitancy in the action of the Commons, would allow the Lords to address the country even more freely than at present, for they would be less fettered by responsibility, and would permit of the businesslike revision, which the group of passed statesmen in the Peers bring to bear on Bills. It would secure, in fact, all the advantages which the believers in mixed constitutions, that is, in the use of drags for uphill work, hope to secure from the Upper House, while it would leave the ultimate power of government entirely to the Commons. It would, with- out any disturbance of ancient forms, bring the theory of the Constitution into accordance with its facts, would leave us still nominally under a legislature composed of Kings, Lords, and Commons--magic words still with so many worthy folk—but would place the substance of power in the hands to which it belongs, those of the Representatives of the people.
We say these are the demands for the electors to make, if they desire the House of Lords to continue ; but for ourselves, we should infinitely prefer, in the interest of conservatism, to see the House of Lords extinguished formally by an Act which prohibited fresh creations, annulled the now peerages. necessary to vote the passing of the Bill, and distinctly affirmed the right of the Peers to sit in the House of Commons. The resolution of the Lower House by which they are pro- hibited from interfering in elections is a relic of a passed- away time. Let them interfere as much as they please, like
anybody else. The great body of them would remain just what they are now, dignified landowners of considerable social, but no political use, whose ideas are out of keeping with modern requirements, but whose lives help, or may help, to keep up a standard of living which, whether better or not, is at least different from that of the rich bourgeoisie, and so lends colour to a world that tends to become all grey. The limited number, perhaps fifty, of political Peers who would endure the turmoil of elections would, on the other hand, indefinitely strengthen the Commons ; would bring into the House much independence,, a large amount of administrative ability, and, above all, that cosmopolitan knowledge in which the Representatives are so deficient that they are hardly equal to the conduct of a great debate upon foreign affairs, unless indeed those affairs are American. Such an arrangement would, moreover, be in- finitely more just to the Peers who work and think, whose utility has not been destroyed so much by their own fault as by an impossible position, and who, in the Commons, would rapidly renew their intellectual sympathy with the country, now lost through their isolation, their freedom from criticism, and their pride in imaginary or injurious prerogatives. They would, no doubt, be conservative ; but their conservatism would not be of the wealthy middle -class Liberal typo, but of another and higher one, consistent with the first great truth of politics, that the State is more sacred than all the individuals within it. Lord Salisbury in that gilded cage is a nuisance, a big bird screaming out unpleasant- flosses with no result but dissonance ; but in the Commons he would be a force, securing expression at the centre of power to ideas that want expression there—say, for example, that mobs shan't rule—and compelling Liberals as they advance to justify advance by larger and loftier exposition. Mr. Cardwell is well enough to convince Mr. Moneybag, but with the political Peers in the House, instead of its gilded succursale, Mr. Cardwell would have to make way for some one who would not be in- tellectually smashed. The present arrangement only guts. the House—pardon the Saxon—of its conservative fighting force, without compensating the country by unity and speed of legislation ; deprives the electors of aid of high value in counsel, yet leaves us, as Lord Salisbury said, "with the slowest Legislature and the weakest Executive in the world." If, however, the electors would prefer, as English electors always do prefer, a feeble course which retains forms to a bold course which sets them aside, their demands should be "Life Peers, a Commons Cabinet, and no Veto" for the Lords.
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