fair, is bad economy, and at least should be sanctioned first by the nation, they are told they are acting unconstitutionally. When the people are content to tax themselves, it would be preposterous for the Lords to refuse to acquiesce, even though they felt that the tax were unwise. But when it comes to the taxation of the Lords at the bidding of any demagogue who may hold office, it is surely more than flesh and blood, blue or otherwise, can be expected to stand. Think of the absurd position in which the peers are placed. Fivesixths of them are among the best intellects in the land. The debate on the Budget was the answer to their most uncompromising critics. It had weight, dignity, knowledge, eloquence, experience, reason behind it to an extent which the most thorough-paced advocate of the Commons' supremacy would hardly claim for the shifts and excitements of the proceedings in the Lower House. A peer may be in the House of Lords because he is the descendant of someone ennobled long ago: his descent is not necessarily proof that he is not better fitted to gauge the needs of a State and the interests of a people than the man whose associations have been those of the cottage or the workroom. Other peers are there as the reward of public service or of merit; others again have been made peers because they were able to contribute largely to the party funds, and as the Liberals themselves have made more peers than their opponents in the last seventy or eighty years, the chances are that a careful investigation would show that Radical money for party purposes has purchased more elevations than Tory. It matters little how they got there; the effect is the same. Directly they are made members of the House of Lords they are subject to disabilities in the commonwealth-disabilities which the mean A est and least worthy of the community who cannot call himself a peer does not suffer. Imagine a man like Mr. John Morley being made Lord Morley of Blackburn, and then being told that in return for the privileges of the peerage he must give up the precious privilege of ordinary citizenship. peer's solitary chance of making his influence on legislation felt is to speak and vote in the House of Lords. His political rights are controlled in a way which would not be tolerated by the veriest tub-thumper and demagogue. When an election is taking place, all peers are bound and gagged: they must not vote, they must not speak. And now they are told that they must not even exercise their rights in Parliament itself. As Lord Curzon said at Brighton, "The idea that a peer's mouth might be open as wide as he liked up to a certain date, but from the issue of the writs was to be shut like a clasp, was an obsolete idea which was doomed soon to disappear." This antiquated custom may be a compliment in its way to the influence of the peers, but it is what Lord Curzon calls it--arbitrary and absurd. From the Radical point of view it is one of our ancient customs that it would possibly be well to preserve. In the preliminary skirmishes of the present campaign the peers took to the platform in unusual numbers. They faced the music of mob organization with a frank determination to place their case before the people in entire keeping with the spirit and the letter of Lord Lansdowne's motion on the Finance Bill. If at times they added distinctly to the gaiety and wit of meetings, they showed themselves quite equal to holding their own against all save the most resourceful and experienced of platform orators. Peers like Lord Lansdowne, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, Lord Rothschild are exceptional men; it is men like Lord Hardwicke who show the latent and wholly native quality which has to be reckoned with whenever the peers are permitted to take up the democratic rôle. Some of our democrats will find in noble lords rivals of no mean calibre; not men who tickle the ears of the groundlings to catch votes, but men who are prepared to take the common judgment when facts and reasons have been properly set forth. The Duke of Norfolk faced the hecklers of Brixton, and Brixton voted Unionist. "It is an essential principle of democracy that Government should be carried on with the consent of the governed. Unfortunately in practice this ideal is unattainable," writes Lord Robert Cecil. The Lords may at least claim that they have taken a course which is not inconsistent with that ideal. The case against the peers rests upon an ordinance almost as antiquated, certainly as anachronistic, as some of their so-called privileges. No one is so keen as your modern Radical on "ancient lights" when they seem to afford a pretext for his own privileges: none so ready to denounce them when he wishes to erect some structure in his own interests. Mr. E. T. Cook, one of the most level-headed, sober, and patriotic of Radical writers, takes an extract from a speech by Pitt, the great commoner, and makes it the text for an article on what Sir Frederick Pollock calls "the exorbitant action of the Lords within the limits of the Con stitution as understood by our fathers." Pitt asserted that taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power. "The taxes are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. The concurrence of the peers and the Crown to a tax is only necessary to clothe it with the form of law." Pitt was, of course, merely summarizing the well 1 The "Saturday" Handbook. 2 "Contemporary Review," January, 1910. known resolutions of the Commons, one of 1671 which said— That in all aids given to the King by the Commons the rate and tax ought not to be altered by the Lords. the other of 1678 That all aids and supplies, and aids to his Majesty in Parliament, are the sole gift of the Commons; and all Bills for the granting of any such aids and supplies ought to begin with the Commons; and that it is the undoubted and sole right of the Commons to direct, limit, and appoint in such Bills the ends, purposes, considerations, conditions, limitations, and qualifications of such grants, which ought not to be changed in the Lords. By The condition of things to which that resolution applied, the condition of things nearly a century later which Pitt had in mind, was vastly different from the condition of things which obtains to-day. The Commons took their stand on their right to tax themselves, and denied the Lords the right to any voice in the aids which they "cheerfully granted" to the sovereign. the middle of the seventeenth century a great change had come over the relations of Lords and Commons. In early days-for instance, in the "Statutum de Tallagio non concebendo" of Edward I.-the King undertook that "no tallage or aid shall be levied without the goodwill and assent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses and other freemen of the land." As feudalism lost ground, the Commons began to assert what they conceived to be their special rights, and they were gradually successful in conflicts with the peers, whether it was a question of a controverted election or of interference in elections. The Petition of Rights in its preamble recites the Statute of Tallagio, and his Majesty's subjects "hum The story has been admirably and concisely told by Mr. Edward Porritt in his "Unreformed House of Commons." blie pray that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge without common consent by Act of Parliament." And this was a joint petition by Lords Spiritual, Temporal, and Commons. The whole spirit of the time was that men should be allowed to tax themselves: the Commons quite properly would not allow the Lords to interfere with any bill affecting the people's purse, but equally they seem to have made no attempt to tax the Lords. The question turns on the initiation or modification of financial measures. "The Lords could not be taxed without their consent," says Mr. Porritt, "but they could not direct the course of taxation." There is no pretence to-day that they should do the latter, though there is an attempt on the part of the Commons to do the former. If the Lords had thrown out any section of the Budget which bears upon themselves they might have raised a storm because they had dared to amend a Money Bill: -they would have been within the four corners of the birthright of every Briton-to grant taxes in his own way at his own expense through his elected representatives for the service of the State. They have never given up the power of amendment, as Mr. Gladstone said in 1861; and circumstances might arise surely such circumstances as have arisen in consequence of the admittedly novel and far-reaching proposals of the Budget-when it might be necessary to reassert their privilege. "In my opinion," said Mr. Gladstone, "the House of Commons would be very much safer if the Lords did claim and exercise the power of amendment than it would be if, without recognizing the power of amendment, it continued to send up its finances piecemeal." The pother of the platform must be judged by history; the future of the Upper House determined by its past. Not for the first time are the Lords threatened with extinction or reduction to the status of a debating society. Their record is treated as though it were one alternating between bluster and blue funk. They are called reactionaries at one time, poltroons at another. They stood in the way of the Reform Bill of 1832 until the King intervened, and they were unwise, no doubt, not to do then what they have done ever since-ascertain the views of the people, and, if adverse to themselves, accept what they did not approve with as good a grace as they could command. There is in the speeches of to-day against the hereditary legislator an amusing echo of the 'eighties, when the Lords refused to allow Mr. Gladstone to enfranchise the agricultural laborers until he introduced a Redistribution Bill. To-day Mr. Lloyd George boasts of his thousand-year-old ancestry; in 1884, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, in his attacks on the Lords, boasted that his line of descent was as proud as any baron's. The note then and now is pretty much that sounded by Millbank, the merchant prince of the County Palatine, in his talk with Coningsby. "Dukes and earls, indeed! Ancient lineage! I never heard of a peer with an ancient lineage. The real old families of the country are to be found among the peasantry. Ancient lineage was wiped out by the Wars of the Roses. The House of Commons is a more aristocratic body than the House of Lords" and so on through page after page of Disraeli's exquisite satire. On the other side, the most effective answer to Mr. Winston Churchill may be found in the speeches of Lord Randolph, who told the Radical Party that they were outraged and indignant because the Tories had adopted as their motto "Appeal to the People" and were taken at their word by the House of Lords. The abolition of the hereditary princi ple was voted by bodies so important as the Trade Union Congress. As Lord Randolph remarked, that would involve "the downfall of the ancient monarchy of England." What he said then a good many have had occasion to say since January, 1906: the House of Lords is "the only guarantee for the preservation of British liberty." Mr. Gladstone would have liked the Radicals to go to the country against the Lords in 1893; the Radicals knew better. When they did go, two years later, they were sent into opposition, and remained there for a whole decade. The Home Rule Bill, which the Lords threw out, itself contained the Lords' justification in its provision of a Second Chamber intended, as Mr. Gladstone said, to present an undoubted and unquestionable security against hasty legislation. "It interposes a certain period of time and gives opportunity for reflection and for full consideration." The House of Lords have done no more. Talk of the Liberal measures they have thrown out is little better than gas for purposes of rhetorical explosion. They passed hundreds of measures sent up by the Commons during the last four years, and rejected only such obviously unfair proposals as were embodied in the Plural Voting, the Education, the Land Values, and the Licensing Bills. ham and a goodly number of by-elections were the endorsement of the Lords' action, and the real grievance is not that the peers did something in opposition to the will of the people, but that they dared to challenge the authority of Ministers who claimed a mandate to give effect to whatever prejudice they might entertain against Church or publican or political opponents. Of course it is said that they make Liberal legislation impossible, and pass Tory legislation, however ex Peck See an article, "Lords and Liberal Bills: The Facts," "Saturday Review," December 18th, 1909. treme. That view is taken by at least one authority on constitutional history, Sir Edward Creasy. The answer in every case is that the Lords did their duty as a Second Chamber and held up for a period something they believed the country did not want. They strongly disapproved of the Trades Disputes Bill in 1906, but they passed it. Lord Lansdowne explained why at the time: "We claim not for this House but for the constituencies the right to pass a final decision upon questions which the Lords thought had not been sufficiently considered. As to this particular Bill, I cannot help thinking that, whatever our opinion may be, we have to admit that the voice of the electors has been heard with regard to it." The voice of the electors had not been heard with regard to the Budget proposals; the electors were given no chance till now, and this chance they owe to the peers. It is a precious argument that what the Lords may do legally they may not do constitutionally. "Custom," says Lord Loreburn, "grounded upon the practical necessities of a self-governing community, has erected a barrier which forbids this course except to those who are prepared to violate the Constitution." * Custom has certainly not given power to one branch of the legislature to adopt revolutionary courses without check by the other branch; the Budget, to put it mildly, is at least as revolutionary as the action of the peers. If it had been allowed to go through, the peers would have shown themselves as unfitted to discharge the duties of a Second Chamber as their bitterest enemies declare them to be. "That we have not the right to exercise a legal right" is a proposition which Lord Lansdowne cannot understand. A schoolboy, says Mr. Cook, "who showed "The Rise and Progress of the English Constitution." 6 Introduction, "The House of Lords and the Constitution," by J. H. Morgan. such a pert refusal to understand the who could not see the difference be- In giving the people the chance of saying yea or nay to the finance proposals of 1909, the peers have resisted not democracy but oligarchy. Was Mr. Balfour very wide of the mark at Ipswich when he said that the House of Lords, mediæval institution though it be, has adapted itself to the needs of our democracy? Great Britain has been called an Imperial democracy. Why is the description true? Because Great Britain enjoys in an unique degree the advantages of hereditary service on the one hand and of popular self-government on the other. They are the two pillars of the Imperial structure which has been reared by the joint efforts of peers and people. Heredity stands for a vast deal in our Imperial record. "Is it not in accordance," asked Mr. Balfour at Aberdeen, "with all that is best and greatest in British traditions that what we have inherited through long centuries of constitutional controversy and popular freedom we have known how to turn to the best account?" We cannot afford lightly to deride the hereditary principle. It has sunk into the background in recent times, perhaps, and there are many among leading Radicals who would dispense with it altogether as a constitutional asset. Really, the hereditary principle is being utilized as the proverbial red herring, and the ultimate object in view is a Second Chamber which shall be no Second Chamber at all. Mr. Birrell's latest obiter dictum is "a House of Lords with no hereditary principle"-an aspiration smacking of the "bull" which implies at least one qualification for the Irish office he holds. He wants a Second Chamber which shall consider measures but "never have the power to determine whether a bill should become law or not." Great Britain, with all her traditions, with all that depends upon the co-operation of classes, is, if the Radical has his way, to become what neither the French nor the American Republic is, what none of our great self-governing Colonies has ever dreamed country in fact, a two-Chamber country of being-a one-Chamber in name only. That is what we are to understand by the assurances, from Mr. Asquith's downwards, that the Radicals are in favor of a Second Chamber, but one differently constituted from the House of Lords. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman sought to decreeing that a measure passed three make the House of Lords impotent by times by the Commons within the life of one Parliament should become law with or without the sanction of the Second Chamber. A Government which controlled the majority in the Lower House was to be the sole interpreter of the nation's will. The Britright of being consulted reserved by ish people were not to have the same the Swiss. A Government might head the ship of State full steam for the country alone might induce them to rocks; the most violent agitation in the give a turn to the wheel; and the Second Chamber would have no alternative but to register the captain's log. |