On Monday, Lord Rosebery moved for a Committee to inquire
into the constitution of the House of Lords. He referred to Franklin's remark (with which, however, he did not appear to agree) that there would be more propriety, because less hazard of mischief, in hereditary professors of mathematics than in hereditary legislators ; he complained that, as the hereditary principle is now embodied in the House of Lords, it makes legis- ]ators of men who do not wish to be legislators, and Peers of men who do not wish to be Peers ; he maintained that the Peer who is a black sheep discredits the hereditary principle, while the Member of the House of Commons who is a black sheep discredits only the constituency that selects him ; he said the veto of the House of Lords is nothing but an individual veto, freed from all the Ministerial responsibility which hedged about the exercise of the Royal veto when formerly it was exercised, since it is a veto exercised by the Tory leader, and by him alone. He charged Lord Salisbury with brandishing this veto and threatening with it, as the King of Hungary at his coronation used to brandish his sword to the four corners of the globe ; and he especially cited Lord Salisbury's Oxford speech, in which the Prime Minister expressed his hope that the House of Lords would reject all the bad measures sent up to it. Lord Rose- bery enumerated the changes which would, he thought, tend to keep the Upper House in sympathy with the Commons, the most important of which we have noticed in another column ; and he suggested that the position of a Peer should not entitle any man to be a Member of the House of Lords, but only to be chosen a Member if popular bodies should care to elect him ; and that any Peer who had either refused or had not received the offer to sit in the Upper House, should be entitled to stand for the Lower Honse,—a suggestion which might tend, as Lord Salisbury subsequently remarked, to empty the House of Peers of all the able men, and to fill it with nobodies.
Previous page
