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Parliament among men both willing and able to receive instruction from their opponents. But such debate, as we have seen, is becoming increasingly impossible. And the conclusion to which I am driven is, that the House of Commons is becoming an assembly increasingly unfit to deliver a final and national award on any issue which profoundly stirs and divides the passions of the people. For it will, I believe, be admitted by any man of common sense that in a free country, and in the case of an acute division of opinion, the solution which it is desirable to obtain is not that of either party in the dispute, but that which the cooler heads on both sides would be willing to accept as practically reasonable under all the circumstances, having regard both to the arguments and to the forces of the combatante And though

in minor matters, no doubt, such a solution may be roughly attained by the clash of opinions and votes in the representative House, yet I have given reasons for thinking that in the case of a really democratic assembly, having to deal with the fundamental question of property, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the party that might be in a minority to obtain a fair consideration for its claims.

If there be anything in the preceding argument it will appear that we are thrown back, as the only possible remedy for the evils indicated, upon some kind of Second Chamber. Here, however, we are

met by various difficulties and objections. Of these, the most fundamental is based upon the democratic theory itself. The will of the people, it is said, must be supreme; that will is expressed in the representative House; and to subject its decision to the approval of some co-ordinate authority is to subvert the foundations of popular government.

Accepting, for the moment, the postulate that the will of the people must be supreme, and passing over the tacit assumption that the people is identical with the majority, let us consider, to begin with, whether it is really true that the will of the majority is expressed in the representative House. Clearly, if their will is ever to be ascertained on any particular question, that question must be submitted to them by itself and on its own merits. Under our present system, not only is this not done, but it is deliberately avoided.

Let us consider what happens at a general election. A number of measures, not necessarily connected by any common principle, are adopted by one or other of the great parties and submitted to the electors. Each of these measures is calculated to attract some section or other of the people; to the rest each section may be indifferent or even opposed. But it is necessary to vote for all or none; either to reject what you do want, or to take with it what you do not. The result is that a majority is returned pledged to a whole programme,

of which possibly no single item is approved by a majority of the nation. Of these tactics the election of 1892 was a striking example. The Liberals went to the country with a batch of measures, of which Home Rule, the disestablishment of the Welsh Church, and the creation of Parish Councils were only three of the more prominent and important. The constituencies voted according to their predilections; Wales was interested primarily in the disestablishment of the Church, London in a progressive municipal policy, the agricultural labourers in parish councils, the town artisans in Employers' Liability, the miners in the Eight Hours Bill; and, as the result of the whole process, a Liberal majority was returned. What had this majority a 'mandate ' to perform? All these things, or none of them? Surely, on the democratic theory, none. For on

no single issue had the will of the people been fairly ascertained. All that was really certain was that the majority of the constituencies had voted positively for one or other item in the programme, and had been content negatively to acquiesce in the rest.

The statement, then, that the House of Commons represents the people is only true in a certain modified sense. It does not mean that the principle of every bill which may be carried through the House has been considered, weighed, and accepted with full responsibility by the

majority of the electors. It may mean merely that every section has been so much pre-occupied with the measure immediately affecting its own interests that it has been ready to allow all the others to pass without a protest.

Particularly will this be the case when one of the measures submitted to the electors is at once so complex in its issues and so remote in its effects that it requires the imagination of a statesman to comprehend and weigh its real bearing on the common good. The elector will dismiss with impatience what he cannot understand and what does not appear to affect his immediate interest; and a party may return to the House with what it calls a mandate from the people to perform what the people have never taken the trouble to consider at all.

Precisely such a measure was that of Home Rule for Ireland; and precisely such a mandate, believe, had the Liberal party to carry it. But whether this was so or not, the general situation is clear enough. With the present method of employing the democratic machinery it is possible that bills of the first importance may be passed by the House of Commons on the strength of a passive acquiescence on the part of the electors, which may merely indicate not that they approve but that they have not seriously thought about the matter at all.

To say that, under such conditions, the House

of Commons represents the will of the people, even if 'the people' be identified with the majority, is to employ an empty and sophistical phrase. Nor can I conceive upon what grounds, democratic or other, the devolution upon such an assembly of supreme and absolute power can be seriously contemplated by any reasonable man. Some check, clearly, is demanded; and from the democratic point of view, the most obvious check would be the 'Referendum.' This would, at any rate, ensure two great advantages: first, that the issue to be decided would be placed fairly before the electors; secondly, that under the necessity of voting for a single definite point they might be driven to realise their own responsibility. If people are to govern themselves, they ought at least to know what they are doing and take the consequences. Nothing could be more demoralising than a system which vests the responsibility nowhere, but allows the representatives to toss it to the electors, on the plea that they have received a 'mandate,' and the electors to return it to the representatives on the plea that it was not to that particular question that they intended the 'mandate' to apply. So essential, indeed, is the Referendum to the complete theory of democracy, that when we find a hesitation on the part of democrats to apply it, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion, so forcibly suggested by history, that after all, a democrat, as a rule, is only a Jacobin in disguise.

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