SOME CONSIDERATIONS FOR TORY PEERS.
WE cannot yet believe that the Peers will throw out the Irish Church Bill. Lord Derby is rash enough for anything, and there are Peers in whom the old spirit of
ascendancy is still all-powerful ; but the majority are quiet, sensible men, heavily weighted with money, and position, and traditions of moderation, and they must during the past week
of reflection have perceived that the attitude urged upon them by the gentry of Ulster is hopelessly untenable, that Lord Derby is leading them into a dangerous impasse, a position in
which they can neither advance, nor fly, nor fight. In rejecting the Bill they will not, as some of them appear to think, be merely exerting a constitutional power to reject a measure accepted by the Commons, but will claim for themselves
the exclusive right to control the policy, and appoint the Ministers of the country, prerogatives which they would admit to be in excess of their rightful authority under any interpretation whatsoever. The excuse by which they cover this, that the country has changed its mind, is too clearly an excuse to be even worth discussion. The country has not changed its mind, and they only say it has as a matter of decorum. The new Electorate, created by a Conservative Government, decided at the autumn election two grand points,—that Mr. Gladstone should be Premier, and that a new policy, to be suggisted and arranged by him, should be adopted towards Ireland. The chosen leader of the Conservatives, then the head of Her Majesty's Government, admitted this, both in act and word ; they themselves do not in their calmer momenta deny it ; and their organs make of it an incessant charge against the Liberals, who, they say, are yielding to a dictatorship. Nevertheless, a .couple of hundred gentlemen not elected by anybody, and representing even indirectly only a minority of the people, are about to decide that the policy adopted by the nation shall not be carried out, and that the Premier elected by the nation shall be dismissed. If the rejection of the Bill means anything, it means those things. The Peers, of course, must be assumed to wish to succeed ; and if they succeed, the Bill must drop ; and if' the Bill drops, Mr. Gladstone would be base to retain power. As a matter of fact, we all know they won't succeed, and Mr. Gladstone will not go ; but this is the logical and, under many circumstances, would be the actual effect of their decision, an effect which is wholly beyond their constitutional power. The Lords cannot have, we are not aware they even .claim, a right to impose a Premier on the nation in the teeth of its representatives, yet this, and nothing less, would be their apparent claim, if they persisted in the course said to have been resolved on. They and not the country would be nominating the Government. Such a pretension is foolish, would be foolish even if the Lords possessed in reality the powers they claim in theory,--for it would amount to a perpetual disfranchisement of the whole Electorate on the greatest of all subjects, the choice of the executive Administration. The nation could not submit to it without surrendering its freedom, giving up rights it possessed long before the Reform Bill, and the result would be to make revolution inevitable. The Constitution could not work. On the other hand, if the Lords at heart do not wish this dead-lock, and know beforehand that they cannot succeed, then, in rejecting the Bill, they are playing a farce, endangering order in Ireland for the sake of a stately ceremonial. They will not conciliate the Ulster men, who will demand perpetual rejections, and will plant a bitter feeling against their House in the minds of all Irish Catholics. We cannot believe that sensible men who know the facts of politics will permit themselves such a 'choice of dilemmas, or in revolutionary haste throw away their own best defence, the esoteric rule which, since 1832, has preserved the two Houses, the porcelain jar and the iron pot, from collision in mid-stream. That rule has been to revise or reject all measures at discretion, save those which are clearly called for by the nation, or those which, if rejected, involve the fall of a Minister preferred by the House of Commons. There is nothing dishonourable in such a rule, its application in great crises, such, for example, as the abolition of the Corn Laws, has not degraded the House ; it is simply a statesmanlike precaution to meet an obvious and very extreme danger. Of course its adoption shows that the House of Lords is not the ultimate pivot of power ; but then, who affirms that it is ? Not even a typical aristocrat like Lord Salisbury ! It seems to us, we confess, that the intellectual argument against rejection is absolutely complete from the Peers' own point of view, but there is another which deserves their most earnest attention. Their House is drifting very fast out of the stream of opinion. Owing to many causes, one of them being the remarkable inaccessibility of the Peers to the influence of Mr. Disraeli's " philosophers," whose influence increases so much over the mass, the Peers have become more Conservative, while the Electorate has become more Democratic. There is scarcely a question now " up," or likely to be " up," —the Irish Church, the reform of the land laws, the change in the legal position of women, the opening of the Universities to all creeds, the abolition of the indelibility of Orders, and a hundred more,—on which the Lords are not at heart opposed to the nation, so opposed that if they give the rein to their own opinions, the current of political movement will be completely dammed. Hitherto this want of rapport between the Lords and the country, though suspected by the public, has not been clearly perceived, because the Lords have to an extraordinary extent effaced themselves, have avoided divisions, and even discussion. If, however, the Lords are waking up, are going to use their powers, and more especially if they are going to stretch them unconstitutionally, as they will do if they dismiss a Minister elected by the people, this divergence will be fatal to public order, which requires that legislation shall at all events be possible. The divergence between the two Houses must be corrected or government must cease, and it unquestionably will be corrected. Fifty plans might be suggested to that end, but in England, as all experience shows, the plan adopted is sure to be the one which attains the end with the smallest amount of evident revolution. In other words, the constitutional power of the Crown will be exerted to reform the House by a very great addition to its number, by granting peerages to men who are, from circumstances, training, and manner of life, necessarily in sympathy with their countrymen. The House still contains 200 less members than the House of Commons. We should say that such a creation, so far from injuring the House as a Legislative body, would enormously improve it, by introducing that element of variety of the want of which Lord Salisbury complains, and detaching it from its over-close relation to the soil ; but then, is that what the Conservative Peers want ? Such a reform, it must be remembered, while it would improve the House, would injure the social position of the Peers as a caste, which is derived in no small degree from the presumption of landed wealth which attaches to their titles. We suspect they value their caste at least as much as their legislative power, and it is this which in every act, like the one now said to be in contemplation, they are putting at stake. It is not the extinction of their House they are urging on—that they might not mind—but its transformation into an assembly of men who are not magnates. The superstition in favour of two-headed Parliaments is dying slowly, but it will live a long while yet, and till it dies the fate the Peers are risking is the intrusion among them of a totally different class. If they approve that, they will act wisely in showing conclusively that they are not only out of accord with the nation, but so far out of accord that they cannot even force themselves to accept the inevitable, but must resist even if resistance is nothing but a scream. If they disapprove, they will be wise to let the Bill pass. From this point of view it is not the people whom they are irritating, but the statesmen, who are certain in the end, whatever their prejudices or habits of mind, to see before all things that the " Queen's Government must be carried on."
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