THE LORDS AND THE EXECUTIVE.
T4ORD ROSEBERY, in his speech of Tuesday, gently chaffed Lord Kimberley for having opposed his motion for the reform of the House of Lords. How could the Peers, asked Lord Rosebery, imagine that the Government were menacing the Upper House when the mover of the Franchise Bill had, only a fortnight before, done his utmost to crush out a moderate little motion for reforming it? It was quite true ; both Lord Granville and Lord Kimberley directly op- posed any reform of the Lords, except in the direction of delegation ; and the fact indicates one of the hundred diffi- culties which impede the Government whenever the Peers use their whole strength to make advance impossible. The Premier is met with difficulties at the very threshold. The Upper House is armoured in privileges, some of them statutory, some of them traditional, and some of them arising out of con- stitutional etiquette, which would grievously hamper any Minis- try intent on Radical reform. To begin with, the Peers can never be without representatives in the Cabinet. It is part of the unwritten Constitution that the Secretaries of State must be in Parliament ; and in the latest statute on the subject, that of 1858, which increased the number of Principal Secretaries of State from four to five, Clause IV. runs thus :—" After the commencement of this Act, any four of her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State for the time being, and any four of the Under-Secretaries for the time being to her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State, may sit and vote as Members of the House of Commons ; but not more than four such Princi- pal Secretaries, and not more than four such Under-Secretaries, shall sit as Members of the House of Commons at the same time." One Member of the Cabinet must, therefore, he a Peer ; and by an etiquette which has, we believe, only once been broken, so must the Lord President in Council. The Lord Chancellor, or some member of the Commission holding the Great Seal when there is no Chancellor, is also invariably a Peer, and so also is the Lord Privy Seal, when that officer exists. Of course, both the Lord Chancellor and the Privy Seal could be left out of the Cabinet ; but in practice the difficulty of transacting business without responsible and fully empowered Ministers in both Houses is so great, that a large share of the seats in the Cabinet is invariably assigned to the Upper House. The present is supposed to be a Radical Ministry ; but at this moment the Lord President, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Foreign Secretary, the Secretary for the Colonies, the Secretary for India, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, seven in fact out of the fourteen great officers who now form the governing Committee of the kingdom, are all Peers, while the Secretary for War is the eldest son of a Duke. There are Peers—Lord Kimberley, for instance—who are decisively Liberal. and Peers—like Lord Rosebery—who in politics may be fairly classed as Radicals ; but all Peers have a feeling for their Order, and very few are without a deep inner prejudice in favour of abstaining from evoking the country against the Upper House. The Lords are within their right, they say, though they are misguided. It is, therefore, inevitable that a Cabinet so constituted should, when quarrels arise between the Houses, be deeply penetrated by conservative feeling, which is not diminished by the supplementary fact that of the remaining thirty-two " Ministers" three are Peers, and eight either Peers or representatives of ennobled families. No Premier, however confident of the support of the nation, can be insensible to the pressure of such a body of colleagues, backed as they are by the whole Conservative Party, by the number of Liberal Members who are in the sucecesion to Peerages, and by that large number of influential persons who, though Liberal, are in favour of the hierarchical order of society, and of retaining what they would describe as a reserve of preservative force within the Constitution. The dead- weight of resistance from the inside to any proposal for diminiAring the weight of the Peers in the kingdom is enormous, so great, that it is a wonder successive statesmen like Lord John Russ211. Sir. Robert Peel, and Mr. Gladstone, have been able
to pass measures detested by the Upper House, and that now that the Commons have become so nearly Democratic, the machine moves on at all. It could not move if many such
votes were passed as that of Tuesday night, or if .the control of the rank and file of the Peerage—the " country Peers," as
the Duke of Argyll called them—did not tend to be vested, as it has been for long periods together, in exceedingly cautious and, from the point of view of Peers,." safe " men.
We do not altogether wonder that Peers like Lord Salisbury, who would not care much if the House were abolished, who are thoroughly acquainted with the direct strength of the Order in the Executive and in the Commons, and who pro- bably overrate its strength in society—forgetting, as the clergy do, the rival strength of social jealousies—should think all menaces words, and believe that no responsible statesman will ever proceed to extremities against them. The Radical Ministers, they believe, will be sobered long before they have carefully considered their means of proceeding to action, and will see that unless the people have risen to the revolutionary temper there is nothing practical to be done, for the first step would shatter the Cabinet, the Ministry, and possibly the party, into fragments. They should, however, remember, that in this close hold of the Order upon the Executive, there is a danger as well as a defence. The. people are sensitive upon the subject of the limitation of office to a caste, as they have shown of late years in every debate on patronage ; and they may decide that the enormous favour shown to five hundred families—shown by themselves as well as by the Crown—is radically unfair and inconsistent with the justice which a democracy should promote. No man is so close to the inner thought of the average elector as Mr. Bright ; and Mr. Bright once thundered against that injustice in words which, although their brutal plainness raised a tempest of irri- tation, and though they went beyond the justice of the case—for the Peers no more seek money than the Com- mons do—have never been forgotten. If the public temper, exasperated by a suspicion that Cabinets are not free, when Lords fight Commons, to decide impartially, should grow electric, there is a word which good men hesitate to pronounce because of its inherent injustice, but which demagogues will pronounce loudly, and that is "ostracism." The electors, if they cannot overawe the Lords, can ostracise their families ; that is, can reject as candidates all who spring from the great houses and are inclined to defend their privileges. The measure would be brutally unjust, English liberty owing perhaps more to the "cadets " than to any single class whatever, and dozens of them being at this moment among the soundest Liberals ; but an irritated people—justly irritated, as they think, by the inter- position of a caste between themselves and their wishes for their own representation—may not be just. Their indignation took this form in 1831 ; and one of the heaviest blows dealt to the " boroughmongers," as they were called, was the circu- lation of the now-forgotten Black Beok, which revealed the extent to which the Peers filled every profitable or powerful office in the State. No such book could be published now, for the old abuses have been swept away, and all classes find careers fairly open, the only remaining injustice being the preferential claim of the well-born to every ap- pointment in which interest can help, a claim seldom set aside ; but the strength of the Lords in the Executive is still excessive ; and if it were once noticed by the people as a cause of the confidence shown by the Peers in their ability to resist popular measures, it would speedily be reduced. The statutes guaranteeing office to them would be neglected, a jealous supervision would be exercised over the higher patron- age, and the Lords would find that they had within a few years lost heavily in substantial power. Of all their privileges, the preference they enjoy in the distribution of offices, and in the selection of candidates for seats—a preference out of all proportion to their numbers—is unquestionably the most valuable, and the one which, if the country once became fairly irritated with their pretensions, and determined to put an „end to caste ascendency, they would be in most danger of losing. There is nothing the average elector would think he saw so clearly as that to give half the control of the ultimate Executive, half the power of administering the de- partments which govern the Empire, to persons who are not elected, is not in any complete sense representative govern- ment. Nor is it. It may be good government—and we who are strong Liberals are not insensible to the high advantage which the country derives from its possession of a political caste which is not tempted by cash—but still, the system is pro tanto inconsistent with government by the people.
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