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. Peckham 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

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

5 "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 divergence of law and custom" would have his ears boxed. A schoolboy

who could not see the difference between the Finance Bill against which appeal has been made and the Finance Bills the Lords have passed during a couple of hundred years without serious challenge, would certainly deserve chastisement. Lloyd Georgian finance is nothing more nor less than a piling up of the agony which began with Sir William Harcourt's Death Duties, and in calling a halt in this reckless progress the peers discharged a responsibility which they could not evade if they had the courage of their convictions, a responsibility none the less theirs though the country should declare them in the wrong. 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 of being a one-Chamber country in fact, a two-Chamber country 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 make the House of Lords impotent by decreeing that a measure passed three times by the Commons within the life of one Parliament should become law with or without the sanction of the Second Chamber. Α Government which controlled the majority in the Lower House was to be the sole interpreter of the nation's will. The British people were not to have the same right of being consulted reserved by the Swiss. A Government might head the ship of State full steam for the rocks; the most violent agitation in the country alone might induce them to give a turn to the wheel; and the Second Chamber would have no alternative but to register the captain's log.

The Radical to-day goes one worse even than Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. His registrars are to be neither hereditary nor elected: they are to be nominated. That is sheer, stark, staring constitutional lunacy, and in no sense of the word reform. That there is plenty of room for reform and improvement in the House of Lords, that great changes may be made with immense benefit, no one doubts. Lord Salisbury never denied it, any more than Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Balfour deny it. But to throw away the good with the bad in the House of Lords, and, having done that, to refuse to set up an effi. cient substitute, would be to bring England back to the rule of the few-the very condition which it has been the aim of the constitutional struggle of centuries to defeat.

It was John

What we have to do, what I hope a Unionist Government will undertake, is to confirm the House of Lords in its loyalty to democracy. Stuart Mill's belief that in a really democratic State the House of Lords would be of no practical value as a moderator. The House of Lords, being the less powerful, in any conflict must, he said, suffer utter defeat. It can only act with advantage to itself, not by compelling everyone to declare himself for or against it, but by "taking a position among rather than in opposition to the crowd." Is not that precisely what they are doing now? The Lords must not appear at all as an antagonistic body, said Mill, and "the really moderating power of a democratic constitution must act in and through the democratic House." What Mill and the philosophical Radicals did not see, any more than the latter-day would-be-practical Radicals are prepared to admit, was that the lack of moderation in the Commons might leave the Lords no alternative but to take action which should test the moderation of the country. Mill again was

unable to conceive how in a state of democracy, if there were two Chambers, one considered representative of the people, the other of a class, the second House would have "any real ability to resist even the aberrations of the first." But that is the very thing, in a state of democracy rounded off by the Radicals themselves in 1884, that the Lords have done. They resisted the Home Rule aberration, for instance. Mill, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was much nearer the sentiment of the beginning of the twentieth when he said that the Second Chamber "should be composed of elements which, without being open to the imputation of class interests adverse to the majority, would incline it to oppose itself to the class interests of the majority, and qualify it to raise its voice with authority against their errors and weaknesses. These conditions evidently are not found in a body constituted in the manner of the House of Lords.” He thereupon proceeded to outline a scheme which, in its essentials, was remarkably like that adopted by the Rosebery Committee in 1908.

The report of that Committee, the best effort we have had to grapple with the problem of a Second Chamber that should not merely be an efficient instrument but command the unqualified respect of the people, is strangely neglected. Why do not the Unionists run it for all it is worth? That the Radicals should ignore it is easily to be understood: they could only advertise its merits by discussion, and emphasize their dislike of real reform by criticism. Lord Rosebery and his colleagues propose to abolish the right of peers to sit in Parliament because they are peers; but the hereditary principle is not to be dispensed with entirely. The whole body of the peers would constitute a sort of electoral college to elect from among their number-now roughly 665 Representative Government.

-200 Lords of Parliament: the spiritual Lords of Parliament would be limited to two archbishops and eight bishops; there might be representatives of the chief Nonconformist Churches, and the high officials representing the Colonies in London might also be included. Others entitled to receive a writ of summons would be Cabinet Ministers or ex-Cabinet Ministers, Viceroys or ex-Viceroys, Governors-General or ex-Governors-General, those who have served the Empire for a period of years, attained a certain rank in the Navy or Army, any who had earned certain high judicial office, or rendered certain service in the House of Commons. Life peers might be created and summoned at the rate of four peers per annum, their number never to exceed forty, the membership of the House all told amounting to some four hundred. The Fortnightly Review.

Peers who hold aloof from candidature for the position of a Lord of Parliament would be free to secure election, if possible, to the House of Commons. but no person who had once sat in the House of Lords would be eligible for election to the other House. "Such a Chamber," we may say in the words of Mill, "would be fitted for much more than a merely moderating body," and might go far to realize the suggestion that "if one is the People's Chamber, the other should be the Chamber of Statesmen." It would eliminate the lordly undesirables-the blacklegs, the incompetents, the backwoodsmen, and the dregs of nobility. It would reduce the Chamber to more reasonable proportions and be a guarantee that the lump was leavened by the best. whether among the aristocracy of birth or the aristocracy of ability.

Edward Salmon.

Great is the power of matter-of-fact, greater and made up of richer elements than perhaps we care to remember. It is part of the power-the eternal power of the story-teller over the mind of

man.

There is no great story-teller, from Homer to Scott and Guy de Maupassant, who, whatever else he may have, has not the faculty for matter-of-factness. It is the treasury from which the wit and cynic draw their income, and often the philosopher his capital. Stranger still, it is the bed-rock upon which the poets build their palaces; glorious views from top windows are made possible by the hard substance below the basement, and the men who build without it, trusting

"The Decameron." Preserved to Posterity by Giovanni Boccaccio, and Translated into English Anno 1620. With an Introduction by Edward Hutton. Four volumes. (The Tudor Translations. Nutt. £3 net.)

wholly to imagination, are not the men who endure. What reason is to faith. matter-of-fact is to imagination; and it is a striking consideration that two of the most consummately matter-offact books in existence-the "Arabian Nights" and "The Decameron”—have inspired some of the world's greatest geniuses, Chaucer and Shakespeare among them. For "The Decameron," in its defects as in its qualities, is essentially matter-of-fact. It has wit, it has invention, it has style and beauty and deftness, with a grace-may we say a chic?-all its own. Boccaccio moves with the swiftness of a swallow over the surface of life, dipping just far enough into its waters to return with

"Giovanni Boccaccio. A Biographical Study." By Edward Hutton. (Lane 16s net.) "The Decameron: Its Sources and Anslogues. By A. C. Lee. (Nutt, 12s. 6 dd, net.

glittering drops upon his beak. But he is without poetry and profundity, and so his human insight fails, his fun is dead, and he is often inordinately dull.

This is not the view of Mr. Hutton, as given in his introduction to the Tudor translation of "The Decameron."

The truth about Boccaccio [he says] can be summed up in one statement almost: he was a poet before all things, not only because he could express himself in perfect verse, nor even because of the grace and beauty of his writing, his gifts of sentiment and sensibility, but because he is an interpreter of nature and man, who knows that poetry is holy and sacred, and that one must accept it thankfully in fear and humility.

But

It is not easy to understand what Mr. Hutton means by these last phrases, or why Boccaccio is holy, or why he is sacred, or what is the difference here between the two. It seems as if Mr. Hutton had indulged in a little pulpit emotion and did not quite know what he meant himself. Besides, it is just in the "interpretation of man" that Boccaccio, who creates types not individuals, falls short. We have only (as Mr. Hutton himself admits) to compare the story-tellers of "The Decameron" with those of "The Canterbury Tales" to feel the full force of the defect. we suspect that Mr. Hutton confounds poetry with romance, as he has done in his "Giovanni Boccaccio." The well-known design of "The Decameron" is in itself romantic. The Plague had left Florence the prey of death and horror. Foovely ladies, whose relations have nearly all been swept away, meet by chance in Sta. Maria Novella, and fall in with three courtly gentlemen with whom they plan to flee the haunted city and the fear of death, and to drown their sorrows in pleasant country places. So, for ten days, on shaven lawns, in leafy glades

and palace-gardens, they daily choose a sovereign of their revels, and in turn tell each other tales till the night falls. From the first you are in a blue and golden atmosphere of pleasure, and in this old translation (the first complete translation of "The Decameron") the glamor is enhanced twofold by the beauty of the noble English-the English of 1625.

All the starres were departed out of the East, but onely that which we commonly cal bright Lucifer, or the DayStar, gracing the morning very gloriously; when the master of the household being risen, went with all the provision to the Valley of Ladies to make everie thing in due and decent readiness, according as his Lord over-night had commanded him. After which departure of his, it was not long before the King arose, being awaked by the noise which the carriages made; and when he was up the other two Gentlemen and the Ladies were quickly readie soon after. On they set towards the Valley, even as the sunne was rising; and all the way as they went, never before had they heard so many sweete Nightingales, and other pretty Birds melodiously singing, as they did this morning, which keeping them company throughout the journey they arrived at the Valley of Ladies. After they had broken their fast, with excellent Wines and Banquetting stuffe. they began to tune their instruments. and sing; because (therein) the sweet Birds should not excell them. . When dinner-time drew neere, the tables were covered under the spreading trees, and by the goodly Pond's side,. where they sate downe orderly by the King's direction; and all dinner while they saw the Fishes swimme by hugeshoales in the Pond, which sometimes gave them occasion to talke, as well as gaze on them.

This is deliciously romantic-the romance of early morning-and it is a typical passage. But romance it remains, not poetry.

Romance is. as it were. the fine