than is generally expected. One is apt to forget that in years to come it will probably not be so very terrible after all. As it is, the House of Lords possesses real power if it chooses to use it. Over and over again during the last two years it could have forced a general election, or, if the Government of the day held strong views against the wisdom of an appeal to the People, it could have been brought to a compromise. Again and again this Parliament has passed bills for extending the statutory term of five years. If the House of Lords had thrown out one of those bills, the days of this Parliament were numbered. There was no time in which to bring the slow-moving machinery of the Parliament Act into play. Of course the country might have condemned such a step, but that is by no means certain. It would have been, to say the least of it, an arguable case, that a Parliament elected for five years, shortened in its life by two years in consideration of the great increase of its powers and elected without any mandate to prolong its own existence from time to time, ought to renew its authority from the People at the polls, all the more so because of the gravity of the times and the burden of its responsibilities. The House of Lords took no such step; probably hardly any one stopped to consider that it was constitutionally possible. It made no attempt to use the most potent implement it will ever have, or to seize the best opportunity that it will ever enjoy.

In any survey of the lines on which the present position of that House is to be altered, it ought to be remembered that the House has now shown itself to be free from faction, and that it still possesses great powers, which, till the People manifests its will to the contrary, it remains free to use. It ought also to be remembered that the Parliament Act, for all its terrors, is hardly a working weapon of war. As long as it stands, the prerogative to create voting brigades of obedient peers is laid up in lavender; and, while it stands, it can but rarely be put into use. A Ministry, which had to keep marching its supporters through the lobbies of the House of Commons session after session in order to get its bills, at long last, passed over the head of the House of Lords would find itself ridiculous.

It is easy to understand how a concurrence of two Vol. 230.-No. 457.

2 G

opinions in the Conference led to its being taken for granted that the present state of things is past praying for. There is the opinion of the stout House of Commons men, who hold that the Upper House must always give way, and promptly too; and that, as the creature cannot set itself up against its creator, the result is best assured by letting the House of Commons appoint the members of the other House. There is, on the other hand, the aspiration of the eager House of Lords men, who think that the future of Peers lies in the House of Commons, and desire to be free from the pedantries which exclude them from it. To both it may well seem desirable that an Act should pass, beginning From and after the appointed day the assent of the Peers in Parliament assembled shall not be necessary to the enactment of any statute, but, in lieu thereof, it shall suffice if the assent be given of the Second Chamber hereby constituted and in manner hereinafter provided.' There are, however, other opinions to be considered. It is a pity that there was not a fuller representation on the Conference of persons willing to urge the view that something may still be done with the House of Lords; and that there are other ways of remodelling our ancient institutions in accordance with modern views than by making a revolution and calling it a reform.

'All political parties were represented in the Conference.' It is only one of the difficulties, which surround the whole system of these Conferences, that, whatever pains are taken to appoint representative men, true representation is hardly attainable. Conferences of this kind really have no place in our constitution, and, if resorted to as ordinary incidents of political life, would soon undermine the authority of the House of Commons and the responsibility of Ministers themselves. The questions which are referred to Conferences are precisely those whose complexity and magnitude are so great, that their examination under ordinary Parliamentary forms would occupy a large part of the time and energy available for the whole of one or, it may be, more than one Session. It is the natural desire of the members of a Conference to arrive at some agreed scheme, if possible, and at least to go hand-in-hand as far as they can. The result is apt to be an avowed

compromise, or to present a greater appearance of unanimity than really exists.

Yet the price of challenging it may be the loss of every prospect of other legislation for a couple of years to come. Thus there is a concurrent desire to accept the scheme rather than try to make a new one. Everybody admits that the conclusions of a Conference do not bind either House of Parliament; but they are pressed upon Parliament on all hands as something already agreed between all parties, admitting of little modification without almost a breach of faith, as the material of a bill which it will save a world of trouble to pass, and about which discussion will make nobody any the wiser. If the House of Commons were to let itself accept this view, it would sink to the position of a mere registering machine. It would admit that it leaves the heavy work to be done out of doors, and reserves its interest and its time for more piquant or more personal contests. Its authority would be steadily impaired. If, on the other hand, it asserts its rights, insists on full discussion and proceeds to remodel the scheme, it must do so for itself, ill fitted as it is for the origination of complicated measures. It cannot hold Ministers to the ordinary obligations of leadership in such a case. The object of a Conference is to relieve the Administration of responsibility. Ministers' attitude is 'This is not our scheme; we created a body composed of men of all parties, and it is that body which evolved this scheme; we cannot take on ourselves to produce another. Alter it, if you will, but remember, we are not responsible. We do not stand or fall by it, nor can we give it much time. We may have to drop the subject and pass to other things.' No doubt Ministers do not say so, but this is what the Conference system really means.

If Ministers are to be fully responsible to the House of Commons for projects of legislation, and if the House of Commons is to retain its full authority as representative of the People, Ministers themselves must frame these projects and make them their own, and must submit them to the full original judgment of Parliament. The humbler the position of the Second Chamber, the more important is this consideration in the interest of the House of Commons itself. Parliament

cannot afford to leave its own work to others. Devolution is intelligible; delegation is not. It is of course the right of Ministers to seek what expert assistance they will, but for that purpose these composite bodies, in which all political parties are represented,' are inappropriate. If they do not agree, Ministers are no wiser than before; if they do, their agreement tends to take the responsibility away from those who ought to propose, and those who have to decide upon, a bill. The party system and the party machine are framed for the purpose of giving to Ministers that power which their responsibility involves, so that they may ensure the passage of the measures for which they are responsible, or fall if they fail. Such machinery is inappropriate to ensuring the passage of measures which are not the product of the mind of those whom the majority of the House support, but are the composition of selected persons who bear no real relation to that majority at all.

It is only fair, in criticising the report of the Second Chamber Conference, to bear in mind how much its scheme must suffer from the defects inherent in Conferences in general. It is an ingenious effort, and discussion of it at any rate serves to throw light on a difficult subject, but satisfactory it cannot be called. For one thing, however, the public has cause to be grateful. 'We had to remember that a plan, which philosophers might approve, would not necessarily find like favour with the bodies by whose will it would have to pass into law.' Let us at least thank the members of the Conference for trying to be practical men and for resisting the temptation to be philosophers.

SUMNER.

Art. 11.-A GREAT

HOOKER.

NATURALIST : SIR JOSEPH

The Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, O.M., G.C.S.I.; based on material collected and arranged by Lady Hooker. By Leonard Huxley. Two vols. Murray, 1918.

Ir often happens in the progress of human thought that periods of special importance are marked, not, as rarely occurs, by the emergence of a solitary genius, but by the appearance of a group of gifted men of like habit of mind and enthusiasm for a given branch of study. Their coincidence in mental activity has been due sometimes to family connexion and local association, sometimes to the system of universities in which a professor of genius is succeeded by his pupil and he again by his, so that a school' originates which may spread its members and its teaching far and wide.

In the middle of the 19th century a group of naturalists appeared in this country, who were destined to bring about a momentous change in human thought, by placing on a firm basis the doctrine of 'organic evolution'-a doctrine which includes the gradual and 'natural' development of living things from non-living matter, and further the gradual and 'natural' development of man from an animal ancestry. The group we have in view has Charles Lyell (born in 1797) as its starting-point. Devoted from his earliest years to the study of natural history-his father being an accomplished botanist-Charles Lyell, when an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford, was attracted to geological study by the lectures of Dr Buckland. He was called to the bar, but fortunately his inherited property enabled him to abandon that profession when he was thirty years old, and to give all his energy to his favourite science.

In 1830-32 Lyell published his memorable work entitled 'The Principles of Geology: an Attempt to explain the former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation.' That book and personal friendship with its author had a commanding influence upon two younger men, Charles Robert Darwin and Joseph Dalton Hooker, the former twelve years and the