THE LORDS AND THE IRISH LAND BILL.
THIRE is the usual amount of rumour concerning the. ru rish Land Bill and the dealings of the Upper House with it as it has passed the House of Commons. It is said that all which has been done in the Commons on the third reading is only a preparation for an amend- ment in the Peers, which will be of a nature to see " justice " done to the Irish landlords, on pain of the defeat of the Bill if the House of C0111210118 should refuse to accept the amendment. We earnestly trust that there is no danger of such a policy as this. No reasonable Unionist is satisfied with the present House of Lords as a final Court of political Appeal between landlords and tenants. It is in the main a tribunal of landlords. Nay, it is not only a tribunal of landlords but a tribunal of rich landlords with hardly even an infusion of any class that can enter into the difficulties, and sympathise with the complaints, of the tenants. The Irish Land Bill has received the approval of the most Conservative representative Assembly which the United Kingdom has sent up for two generations. We are not prepared to say that it has never gone too far in any direction in the way of clipping the claims or even the rights of the Irish landlords. It would require a far more minute know- ledge of all the details of the case than the present writer can pretend to possess to make that assertion. But we do say that if it has erred here and there on the side of the tenants, it has in all probability erred here and there also on the side of the landlords, for not only the Government which drew the Bill, but the great majority in the Commons which passed it, was from the first prepossessed against the attitude of the Irish party, and determined not to yield to its extravagant and dictatorial demands. Wherever it has yielded what it at first resisted, it has been from a sense of the impossibility of so adjusting rival claims as not to hazard occasional injustice on one side or the other, or else in deference to the habitual decisions of the Irish Land Courts, which have had so much experience of the difficulty of steering fairly between the two opposite kinds of allegation. If the Govern- ment and the Conservative majority have yielded too much to the tenants on one side, they have certainly yielded too much to the landlords on another side, and the last Court of Appeal to which the country would trust as perfectly impartial would be a House constituted almost altogether of the landlord class. Whatever risk of injustice there may be in accepting the Irish Land Bill as it goes up from the Commons, there will be certainly a great deal more in allowing a purely class Assembly to alter it in the interest of its own members. What reasonable Unionists have admitted for many years is that the House of Lords is not a happy Court of Appeal in the case of vehement controversies between class and class, but that where there is real doubt as to the opinion of the country at large, it may fairly be trusted to delay judgment till the country has made up its mind. Can any reasonable person say that if in the present case it thus delayed judgment, and threw out the Irish Land Bill, there would be any chance of a more Conservative decision in future than that which the most Conservative House of Commons since the great Reform Bill has already given ? Everybody knows, and we believe that the Irish landlords themselves know, that the defeat of the Irish Land Bill as it has passed the Commons, would mean an eventual decision by the country far more unfavourable to the Irish landlords than that which has been now reached. It would be held,—and held without any careful re-examina- tion of the case,—that the Irish landlords had been intent on eliciting the judgment of a thoroughly prejudiced Assembly, and that if the Lords rejected the decision of so sympathetic a House of Commons as the present one, they might well be required to submit to the judgment of a new House of Commons of a much more hostile character. We do not believe that the House of Lords will be so foolish as to invite a popular reconsideration of a case decided by so very Conservative a tribunal as the House elected in 1895.
We do not know whether the House of Lords desires to challenge a great constitutional reconsideration of their own position or not. But if they do, they will hardly be wise in seizing the present opportunity for challenging it. At present they are decidedly more popular in the country than they have been for at least sixty years. They have extinguished the Irish Home-rule Bill, and they have shown very hearty sympathy with the people in reference to the conditions of labour and employers' liabilities. But if they reject the decision of such a House of Commons as this on the Irish Land-laws, they will certainly raise the question of their own reform at a most unfavourable crisis. They must remember that no one,—not even Lord Salisbury,—is prepared to defend the constitution of the Upper House as it now is. And if the question of a great change arises at all, no one will be able to predict how fax it may go. It must go a good way. As at present constituted, it is not an Assembly whose judgment can weigh for much against the judgment of the House of Commons. It is tolerated now not because it is strong, but because it is so weak that no one believes it would assert its own view against the view of the House of Commons unless there were ample reason to believe that it had a large popular party behind it. In other words, it is popular as a weak House leaning on the people, but not as a strong House leaning on its own intrinsic judgment. If it desires to retain its present position, it must not take the bit between its teeth and act as though it knew better than the Conservative majority in the House- of Commons on a matter in which it is itself conspicuously far from impartial. If it does, it will challenge the opinion of the nation on its relative merits as a House of Legislature when placed in comparison with a Conserva- tive House of Commons, and who can doubt what that opinion will be ? With the nation behind it, it may last a long time yet. With only its own class behind it,—indeed hardly as much as that,—it will soon go down before the voice of the people. Lord Salisbury himself only claims for it that it should be allowed to secure a new appeal to the people when the people are nearly equally divided. But who will say that the people are nearly equally divided between those who are as Conservative as the present House of Commons and those who are more Conservative still ? The Gladstonians at least claim that the present Session has shown that the pendulum is already swinging back towards the Radical view. We do not believe that it is. But we do believe that whatever indications have been given,—whether in the by-elections or in the public Press,—certainly prove that the country is not more- Conservative than the present House of Commons, either on the Irish Land question or on any other. If an appeal to the constituencies could be anyhow forced at the present time, we have no doubt that though the next House of Commons would still be Con- servative, it would not be so emphatically Conservative as this is. There would be a feeling that the Government would be none the worse for having to face a stronger Opposition. And that feeling would be very much strengthened by such an event as the passing of an amendment in the House of Lords which would result in the loss of the Irish Land Bill. It would be held that the House of Lords was taking too much upon itself ; that it was showing a proud stomach and setting itself up- above the representatives of the people. We believe that before the Government could go with any confidence to the constituencies, it would have to show its displeasure at what the House of Lords had done, and to declare for some moderate clipping of its wings. Is that the situa- tion which the House of Lords wishes to provoke ? We think not. If the Peers are wise, they will disown any wish to show themselves more Tory than the chosen. Conservative representatives in the Lower House. The last thing which they should desire is to impose on a Conservative Government,—with an eager Opposition to egg it on,—the duty of reforming and popularising their somewhat anomalous Assembly.
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