TOPICS OF THE DAY.
HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM.
TAST week we had the hardihood to venture on political J prophecy. We predicted that Mr. Asquith would next February introduce a measure of House of Lords reform on the lines of the Preamble, and that this would be the soft place on which the Government would fall, and thus avoid the appalling evil of shedding the blood of the Ulstermen in order to force them under a Dublin Parliament, without having first ascertained whether it is the will of the majority of the electors of the United Kingdom that their blood should be shed. One portion of our prediction has been made good far quicker than we ever dreamt it would be. In the House of Commons on Tuesday the Prime Minister stated that the Government intend to lay before the House of Commons next session their proposals for the reform of the House of Lords. So much for the first half of our statement. It remains to be seen whether the second half will also be made good. The first paragraph in the " Political Notes" in the Times of Wednesday certainly seems to support our view that the Bill for reforming the House of Lords, based on the promise in the Preamble (which it is an open secret was introduced at Sir Edward Grey's wish), will be the soft place. The very able and impartial Parliamentary observer of the Times stated that already the Liberal Party is showing " mingled feelings " in regard to the Prime Minister's announce- ment. Some Liberals, we are told, who have recently discussed the subject, are very decidedly opposed to an elective Second Chamber. Others do not object to an elective chamber if its powers are rigidly limited; while there is a Radical section which is content that matters should go on as they are. The writer of the " Political Notes next reminds us that Mr. Asquith on May 6th, 1911, " stated four points of the Government's policy " (1) that the Second Chamber must be small in number ; (2) that it must not rest upon an hereditary basis ; (3) that it must not claim anything in the nature of co-ordinate or competing authority with the Commons ; and (4) that it must not be predominantly one-sided or partisan.
We have little doubt that it is on these lines that the new proposals will be based. If we read them with Sir Edward Grey's utterances on the subject during the session that ended in the Parliament Act, we shall find that what is likely to be proposed is a small Second Chamber on a wholly democratic basis, i.e., one elected by the votes of those who vote at elections for the House of Commons. The constituencies will no doubt be very much larger, and in all probability some system of proportional representation will be proposed. We shall have con- stituencies with a maximum of ten or twelve members each and a minimum of five or six. As regards the essential question of what is to be done when the two Houses differ, no doubt the proposal will be that the two bodies in that case shall sit and vote together. In this way, since the Second Chamber will probably be a body of three hundred members at the most, the complete subjection of the Second Chamber to the Commons will be preserved, and yet an answer will be provided to those who insist that as the Second Chamber is formed on a purely democratic basis, its powers ought to be co-ordinate with those of the Commons. No doubt the validity of the answer is more apparent than real. Still, it would probably serve its purpose. But though this device might get rid of some of the difficulties with which the party will be faced, it will by no means get rid of all of them. The truth is that the Liberal Party is hopelessly divided on the Second Chamber question, or, rather, to use a phrase which we have used again elsewhere, the Liberal politicians want things both to bbe and not to be. The Liberal majority in the Commons have tasted the delights of single-chamber government and want to maintain them. At the same time they are conscious that the country as a whole desires a check on the House of Commons, and demands some form of Second Chamber. The difficulty is to reconcile these two views, the views of those who want single-chamber government and the views of those who want to have a check, even though it is a democratic check, on the unbridled authority of the Commons. The men who say that a bridle is necessary, and the men who declare that they will not forge a bridle for their own mouths, have got some- how to be brought together. We do not envy the Constitu- tion-mongers of the Cabinet the task of combining these two sections for common action. We doubt even if the Abbe Sieges in his laboratory of constitutional dodges, so eloquently described by Burke, could have accomplished the work.
We will leave the Government and the Liberals to their task. The question for us is to consider how Unionists should approach and solve the problem of the Second Chamber when they are in power, as we are convinced they will be before very long. In a matter so serious we do not intend to play for safety, or to say merely what we think will be liked by the leaders of our party or by our readers. For what it is worth we shall state specifically our own view. We shall set forth without any attempt to hedge or to conciliate others what in all the circumstances we believe the Unionist Party ought to propose. In the first place, we hold that there must be a check, and in the last resort a potent check, upon the House of Commons. We would provide this check by the veto of the people, that is, by the Referendum. But no one wishes the Referendum to be applied in any and every case. We want it applied, first, to matters about which there is reasonable doubt as to what is the will of the electors, and, secondly, to matters of particular importance. Even if there were a doubt as to the will of the country, we should not advocate a Referendum on a matter of small moment. The lesser evil would be to let the legislation in question go through. Therefore we are, on the whole, against certain subjects being scheduled so that legislation touch- ing them must always be referred to the electors. We want a body capable of acting elastically and of taking a reasonable view of legislation, a body to act as the People's Remembrancer, and to say whether a Bill should be submitted to the popular veto or not, a body to decide, in fact, whether the master should be put to the trouble of giving a personal decision. In our opinion an here- ditary House of Lords is an admirable body to which to entrust the duty of People's Remembrancer—the duty of saying, " This Bill, whether good or bad, is so important that the electors ought to have an opportunity if they like of exercising their sovereign right of veto thereon." That is the sole power we would claim for the House of Lords. We believe that the fact of their independence from caucus dictation—the fact that they are what they are not because they got a party nomination, but because, to use Topsy's phrase, they " growed "- makes them a suitable body to exercise this power. Frankly, we do not want to repeat the House of Commons in the House of Lords—the mistake made in so many of our colonial Constitutions. We want a Second Chamber that will look at things not from the same, but from a different angle. We are no enemies of the elective principle, but we have got plenty of what Walt Whitman called the " insolence of elected persons " already, and we see no object in doubling it and setting up two democrati- cally elected chambers like two Kilkenny cats to eat each other—especially if we are to have it provided by law that one cat shall have a very much larger mouth and stomach than the other.
If we are not to use the elective principle in order to choose the men of the Second Chamber, there is little doubt that the hereditary principle is the best alternative. The elective principle plus party always ends in the caucus—not always, of course, in a bad caucus, but in some kind of caucus. A man can never get elected to a .representative House unless he can get his name put down on a party list. The veto of the party wirepuller is the strongest thing in a land ruled by the representative principle. Take, for example, a case like that of Mr. Harold Cox. No power on earth could now get Mr. Cox into the House of Commons, for the sufficient reason that no party would ever put him down on its list. But though we hold that the best method of constituting the chamber whose main function it shall be to decide whether Bills ought or ought not to be referred to the people is the use of the hereditary principle, we hold that it should be tem- pered. We would let no peer exercise power as a lord of Parliament unless his claim to do so were made good by proof of some form of personal and public service. To put the thing specifically, when a peer's father died and the son succeeded to the peerage, he should not, as now, merely claim his writ of summons by the production of his mother's marriage certificate and the proof that he was the eldest son. He should also be obliged to show.that he had been the chairman of a county council, mayor of a city or borough, chairman of a territorial associa- tion, lord-lieutenant, ambassador or minister, general or admiral, or had been in the House of Commons, or sworn to the Privy Council, and so forth and so on. We have already in these columns given a complete list of such qualifying public service, and need not repeat it here. The fact that a man bad been created a peer would, of course, be a proof of public service. His writ of summons comes to him in that case without his having to produce any certificates.
The only reform, then, that we would apply to the House of Lords would be this proof of public service. We would not even repeal the Parliament Act. We would simply enact that if, after negotiations between the Lords and Commons no agreement could be reached, the House of Lords should add a Referendum clause to a Bill, and that the poll of the people should be taken on the Bill as it finally left the Commons. In other words, we would make it the privilege of the Commons to choose, as now, the final form of a Bill, subject only to the veto of the electors. The Bill would indeed be passed by the Lords, but it could not come into operation till a successful poll had been taken thereon. So much for cases in which the two Houses were disagreed. In cases where they were agreed about a Bill, but where nevertheless there 'might be ground for thinking that the country was against both Houses (as, for example, in the case when the Unionists had a majority in the Commons as well as in the Lords), we would give a right to any number of members of the House of Commons greater than one-third of that body to petition the King in Council to submit an Act passed by both Houses to the veto of the people. Such petition should forthwith be acted on by the King in Council. That is in our opinion all that the Unionist Party should do in the matter of House of Lords reform. We believe that by the perfectly simple process of requiring proof of some form of public service and instituting the Referendum, we should, with a minimum of change and in the true spirit of the British Constitution, obtain security — security through the most democratic of instru- ments—against the hideous tyranny of tale-chamber government. The more we look at attempts to make patent Second Chambers based on all sorts of fancy conditions the less we like them. Such bodies have not power, dignity, or tradition, and are pre-doomed to failure. We believe that we have in the House of Lords and in our so-called aristocracy — for it is, of course, in no true sense an aristocracy—an asset of incomparable value, and one which, if we are reasonable and prudent, can be perfectly well assimilated to a Constitution which is wholeheartedly democratic. The function of People's Remembrancer, the function of insisting that the sovereign people shall be allowed the opportunity to veto, if they will, the acts of their servants in the House of Commons, is just the function to which an aristocracy is suited, and this function, if the democracy are wise, they will insist on the Peerage performing. The democracy should harness the Peers to their service. To change our metaphor, instead of pulling down the old castle, let us use it for modern needs. We have no thought of so foolish or, as we are perfectly willing to put it, so wrong a thing as an attempt to rob the democracy of sovereign power. All that we have the right to do is to make sure what is the will of the people. When that is made known we must needs bow to it. What we ought to do, and what we will do, is to insist that our authority shall be the genuine, the authentic will of the people, and not the will of a usurping oligarchy, the caucus, masquerading in the garments of the sovereign people.
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