PEERS IN THE COMMONS. T HE House of Commons has beaten
Lord Wolmer. It was certain that they would do so if they were willing to make not the law of the land, but what they thought ought to be the law of the land, the test of the matter. And they were willing to do so. The matter was decided on the report of the Vacating Seats Committee, but in reality that Committee merely reflected the unreasoning determination of the House not to listen to any legal subtleties, but to drive out from among them the successors to peerages. They were determined to " larn " Lord Wolmer to be an Earl, and no considerations of law or usage were to be allowed to stand in the way. No doubt the Commons had a right to do what they would with their own, but it would have been more to their credit if they had taken the trouble to understand Lord Selborne's point. When he asked them to say how a seat could be vacated by mere succession to a position which did not confer membership of the -Upper House, they merely yelled at him, "What business have you to come bothering here ?" The little debate on Tues- day night illustrated that quite as much as the previous discussions. There was no law and no argument, only a confused babble about "the unprecedented conduct of Lord Selborne,"—conduct, however, not half so unpre- cedented as that of the Commons in issuing a writ for a new Member "in place of Lord Wolmer, now Earl of Selborne." Sir Richard Webster must have been very hard up for arguments when he said that "he believed that if the records were searched, cases might be found" of writs issued to Peers who had not applied for them. If so, let them be produced. At present, all we know is that men have lived and died without having their writs issued to them, though every one knew that they were Peers. The man whom the House of Lords inferentially declared to be Earl of Berkeley, never had the writ of summons, because he vowed he would never apply for it.
The best way to show the want of consideration for law and usage, displayed by the House of Commons in regard to the point raised by Lord Selborne, is to draw attention to the words of the Report of the Committee on the Vacating of Seats, and then to the anomalous and unprecedented action which the House was obliged to take in order to give effect to the Report. The Committee first declares that the fact of succession to a peerage disables the person so succeeding from sitting or voting in the House of Commons. It might have been imagined that this would have been enough by itself to serve the purpose of the Committee. They seem, however, to have shared the feeling of the Welsh villagers, who added eleven other reasons for not ringing their bells to the first reason,—" There are no bells to ring." For those who want to clear up the legal point, it is, however, fortunate that the Committee showed itself so Celtic in the matter of logic. The first part of the next clause in their Report is a very curious and significant one. It runs as follows :—" That it has been the general practice of the House of Commons to abstain from declaring the seat of a Member vacant, and ordering a fresh election in his room, on the ground of succession to a peerage entitling the holder to sit in the House of Lords until the Member has been 'called up to the House of Lords' by receiving a writ of summons from the Crown to sit in that House." In other words the House has never declared a seat vacant merely because of a succession, but solely on the issue of a writ to their Member to sit elsewhere. Now plain men might assume from this, that the reason the House had refused all through its history to make succes- sion a cause of vacancy, was because succession did not cause a vacancy. Not a bit of it, say the Committee. The House, they argue, really held that it was the succes- sion which caused the vacancy, though they never acted on this secret doctrine, but instead, made the issue of the Peer's writ the cause of the vacancy. They, however, only seemed to be doing this. As a matter of fact, they were merely regarding the issue of the Peer's writ as a piece of necessary evidence. "The rule, in other words, is a rule not of law, but of evidence." We confess that these distinctions are altogether too fine for us, but we would point out one thing. The Committee allege no proof whatever for this proposition. They merely state it as a fact. Perhaps some day another Committee will tell us that the rule, that an election for a Member of Parlia- ment is not held till the writ has been issued, is not a rule of law, but of evidence, and that the constituency, if it is satisfied that a writ ought to have issued, will go ahead and hold an election on its own initiative. They will have a capital precedent for doing so in the action of the House of Commons. The Committee having thus established to their own satisfaction, (1) that the mere succession to a peerage prevents sitting in the Commons, (2) that the House of Commons have always acted as if it did not, and (3) having reconciled these contradictions by their delightfully easy, but none the less wholly inapplicable, dis- tinction between a rule of law and a rule of evidence, go on to make the following remarkable assertions :— " That when a Member has succeeded to a peerage entitling him to a seat in the House of Lords, and delays or refuses to apply for a writ of summons, the House of Commons is entitled, and may, in the interest of the constituency, be bound to ascertain the fact of the suc- cession by such inquiry, and upon such evidence as it con- siders appropriate to the case." Now, we venture to declare that the proposition here set forth is absolutely without precedent. Let us see what it lays down, and where it takes us. It lays down that the House of Commons is entitled to, and may, "in the interests of the constituency "—note that phrase, a somewhat perilous one in the region of law, and not a little indicative that expediency, not the facts, governed the decision of the Committee—" ascertain the fact of the succession by inquiry." That seems at first sight a very innocent phrase, but consider what it really means. It means that the House of Commons shall adjudicate on claims to a peerage, and settle who is, and who is not, entitled to sit in the Upper House. But the House of Lords has hitherto claimed the sole right to do this, and we presume will still continue to claim it. If it does, we have two perfectly independent bodies of co-equal authority in their own eyes examining the same facts. But under such circumstances, it might happen that the Commons would decide A B to be a Peer, and the Lords would decide that he was not. If such a case were to arise, and there is nothing to prevent it, we might have some unfortunate man left stranded between the Lords and the Commons. No doubt such a case is very unlikely to arise, but the unlikelihood does not matter. Its possibility shows the unsoundness of the position assumed by the House of Commons. When you reach a reductio ad absurdum, you may be pretty sure that one of your premisses is bad. That is a very safe rule to remember. Depend upon it, when a Committee arrives at a report telling the House of Commons to assume the special duties of the House of Lords, there is something wrong with its premisses. Yt another proof of this fact is to be found in the form or the resolution which the House was obliged to adopt in regard to the issue of the writ for West Edinburgh. It was for the issue of a writ for a Member to serve "in the place of William Waldegrave Palmer, commonly called Viscount Wollner, now Earl of Selborne." It alleges nothing as to Lord Wollner having vacated his seat in the Commons, or having become a member of the other House of Parliament. It merely says that he is now Earl of Selborne. Here is another example of the rapid pace with which men travel down the slope of bad premisses. A little deflection of the facts and the arguments drawn from them, make the House of Commons first act the part of the House of Lords, and then revolutionise their procedure in the matter of issuing writs.
Before we leave the subject of the Vacating S3ats Com- mittee, we must draw attention to one fact. The Committee never quite screw up their courage to say that succession vacates a seat. They could not quite do that, we suppose, in the face of the evidence, and therefore any clause to that (fleet is conspicuous by its absence. They merely infer it. But the truth is, the Report makes, as we have said above, no sort of attempt to grapple with the law. It merely hacks a tiresome knot in two. One seems, indeed, to miss a final paragraph from the Report. "And if that isn't the law, why, damn it, it ought to be." People whose tone is of this kind, and we do not think we are exaggerating the temper caught by the Committee from the House, must not be expected to be very close remoners. It cannot, then, be said that from the point of view of constitutional law anything has really been settled. Bos locutus eat ! The beefy imperviousness of the House (. f Commons to argument has had its way ; but the fact remains that it is the writ of summons to sit in the House of Lords, and not the supposed ennoblement of blood, which prevents a man who has received the writ continuing to sit in the Commons.
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