fortnight after the Bill was thrown out, from a Radical fighter of the most undeniable mettle in a London constituency: Not that I think they (the Lords) at the present moment are in danger, for if there is going to be a fight, I do not think it wise to fight someone stronger than oneself. It will not do to fight over the Education Bill or the Licensing Bill . . . some other question must be found to fight the Lords on. I assure you that although there has been a loud cry 'to arms,' strange to say I have seen no one rushing about. Still the best thing to do is to keep on shouting, and then we may be able to persuade the crowd that there is something in it. I quite agree. There has been wonderfully little general confusion over the course taken by Lord Lansdowne and carried into effect by the House of Lords. But whilst I agree with the truth to life of Punch's cartoon, and with my utilitarian correspondent, I do not think that in this matter of his liquor traffic, Mr. John Bull, somnolent on the garden seat, is right. He may be quite right to be indifferent about the House of Lords, and the readjustment of constitutional balances, and of its relations with the House of Commons. He may feel very little interest in the new relations proposed to be established by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's resolutions of 1906, which, we were told by the Prime Minister at the National Liberal Club, are still to the fore. But, to pass away from Mr. Bull-when we come to this practical question of the recovery by the State, that is, by the public, not only of the control of the liquor traffic but of a valuable monopoly-I put Temperance' considerations entirely on one side-it seems to me that with an any Two-Powers Standard' affirmed by the Government, with Old Age Pensions unprovided for, and with, as I hold, vital interests in the maintenance of Free Trade, we cannot afford to reject an opportunity of recovering an asset variously valued at several millions which, after all, really belongs to the public, and which, in all the circumstances, the public has many reasons, outside finance and economics, for wishing to regain. According to Lord Russell, the Duke of Wellington said to a Protectionist peer who expressed a bad opinion of the Bill for the abolition of the Corn Laws: Bad opinion of the Bill, my lord! You could not have a worse opinion of it than I have; but it was recommended from the Throne, it was passed by the Commons by a large majority, and we must all vote for it.' And I think it was in 1895, in June of that year, that Lord Salisbury explained in a letter to the Times, that he had spoken and voted in favour of the disestablishment of the Irish Church in 1869, after having spoken and voted against it in the preceding session, not because he had changed his opinion-he still considered the measure to be founded on dangerous principles--but because a greater authority than the House of Lords had spoken, and because the powers of the House of Lords were limited to the ascertained will of the people. How far the Duke of Wellington would have gone in any active allegiance to the high constitutional ideals which he put before the Protectionist peer in the matter of the recent Licensing Bill it is difficult to say and impossible to ascertain-probably not very far. But, at all events, I do not for a moment suppose that he would have hesitated to call his supporters together and decide upon what was to be done about it at Apsley House. For my own part, I find it a little difficult to understand or to appreciate the painful impression the meeting of Unionist peers at Lansdowne House appears to have made upon the minds of both Mr. Asquith and Lord Crewe. Excellent as they were in taste and phrase, Lord Crewe's asperities about the meeting in the Lords' debate were surely a little out of proportion to the circumstances; much as he, like myself and many others, may have deplored and regretted the remarkable decision arrived at in Berkeley Square. I referied just now to the genius loci' of Lansdowne House as felicitously touched upon by Lord Crewe and I dare say this had a good deal to do with what happened there. But I fancy there was something else. Lord Peterborough-the Peterborough of Macaulay's brilliant essay and the war of the Succession in Spain-declared that when he visited Fénelon at Cambrai he had to hasten away else his host would certainly have made a Christian of him. I can quite imagine the effect produced by the persuasive reasoning of Lord Lansdowne. Il m'a pris mon moi' somebody said of Kant, and I dare say many who walked in free came out bondsmen to an undertaking they felt it difficult to modify or revoke. It was a Ferguson of Pitfour who, in the early years of the last century, boasted that, though he had listened to many speeches and debates which had made him alter his opinions, he had never heard one which had made him change his vote; and Lord Lansdowne commands a phalanx of Fergusons. History, to give vent to a resounding platitude, repeats itself, and it was Lord Lyndhurst who promised his friends that the Corporation Act of 1835-a Liberal measure-should and could be changed at will into a Conservative arrangement,' and, things being as they now are, Liberal legislation is always more or less at the mercy of the leader of the Conservative party in the House of Lords. This state of affairs, which recurs whenever the Liberals get into office, must be very discouraging—as it is now-to an able administration with pledges to redeem, heavy bills falling or overdue, 'problems which in opposition they have promised to face and solve. Many people even, like myself, who detest the Government's plan for dealing with the House of Lords, must admit and recognise this and wonder what is to be done about it, or, in a mood of more ambitious. reflection, what can be done. To my mind very little; however, be it little or much, it is quite outside the purposes and sphere of this paper. As a Whig, however, I am glad that Mr. Asquith refuses all rights of the Lords to force a dissolution. But to desert the personal equation; given the occasion, can anyone doubt that the Lords will not recognise and give way to the 'supreme power' which the Franchise Bill of 1884 gave to the people of Great Britain and Ireland ? 1 This occasion has not arisen in recent years. To go back a little way, did the newspapers appear in mourning when the Lords threw out the Home Rule Bill? Was the equivalent of a Nottingham Castle burnt down when the Education Bill came to grief two years ago? Were there any riots or broken windows when the Plural Voting Bill was thrown out? Would Lord Londonderry have been waylaid in his 'taxi'-like his distinguished ancestor in his cabriolet--had the Eight Hours Bill been thrown out? It would appear that the social and, in the ex-party and best sense, the liberal measures, which have been passed by both the great parties during the last thirty years or so, have made us into not only a less self-willed, and less selfrelying, but into a more moderate people. The mind of the electorate seems no longer set upon high things. We have only to look across the Channel to realise that the absence of Thrones, Churches, or hereditary Chambers, does not, of itself, contribute to any general raising of the standard of comfort or to the enlargement of opportunity. Comfortable considerations appear to be responsible for what was styled some years ago the new spirit in politics.' No doubt some of the measures lost or damaged beyond repair in the House of Lords were or are desired by the majority of the present House of Commons. People who are in a mood to think imperially about it all-like the Nation and the spirited, and usually suburban, letter-writers to the papers-are for a knock-out fight, but taking them as a whole I question there being much inclination this way in the Liberal constituencies or amongst the staff of local party organisations. What is to be now a knock-out fight over the Lords question does not rest with the present House of Commons, but, as Lord Palmerston said on a memorable occasion, with the Commons of England. During their term of office the Government have introduced the measures they held to be desirable and expedient. I do not think that they have aimed at devising a measure which in the Daily News jargon would stir the great heart of the people.' If they have done so they have failed; for it is not, and never has been graviter commotus ab imis, and a Licensing Bill is surely to the credit of the disinterestedness and sincerity of any Government. Differences between the two Houses have been for a long time past full of incident and situation. We live now in tamer times than when, on the Peerage Bill of 1719, Lord Sunderland exerted his powers of private exhortation upon individuals with such anxious vigour that on one occasion the blood gushed from his nose. Nothing of the kind can have occurred in Berkeley Square; the reporters would certainly have told us about it. Then 'Lord Salisbury at Newport in 1885. 6 Macaulay tells us that all London looked forward to the next day 'this was in 1700, on a Bill dealing with the annulment of royal grants of forfeited properties-with painful forebodings.' But nobody felt these apprehensions about the 28th of November last. No doubt, in all these contests, pushed to extremity, the appeal has always been, and will be, to the people, and, no doubt, with the people against them, the Peers must give way. This comforting certainty comes down to us from the late seventeenth-century days when the Peers recognised that a bad Bill was better than a revolution or a civil war, and based this recognition upon actual living experiences. It was the argument by which the Duke of Wellington got the Reform Bill of 1832 through the Lords, and by which, as I have already said, he satisfied himself as to the necessity of supporting the Bill for the Abolition of the Corn Laws. Pushed to its logical issues, any Second Chamber system-at all events our Second Chamber systemis a deadlock system, and the stronger your Second Chamber the more awkward the deadlock. But the common-sense faculty of my countrymen has protected us for many years past from any such actual dilemma as should in theory, and by every rule of logic, have often occurred. Windham's principle of self-recovery, which he declared to be latent, but ever alive, in the British Constitution, somehow or other gets us back into working trim. As a free and governing people, we have been, and shall be again, made uncomfortable by the House of Lords; we should be made more uncomfortable, and more often uncomfortable, by a purged, reformed, and refreshed House of Lords. But, as a matter of fact, as long as my friend here' of Punch's admirable cartoon of the 16th of December behaves very much in reality as he is doing in that excellent drawing nothing happens. 6 'When John Bull goes round,' Lord Morley-then Mr. John Morley said to me the day after the Lords threw out the last Home Rule Bill, the House of Lords goes round.' 6 A An official of the House said to me the other night, during the debate on the second reading-of course I do not remember the ipsissima verba-'I am sorry about this; it will be said, of course, that the House of Lords puts property and interests in front of everything else.' Of course that was said the next morning by the Daily Newses and Chronicles, the Westminster Gazettes and the smaller fry. But why not? That presentment of the House of Lords in the Liberal Press and in Liberal speeches as a Peculiar incarnation of Property, combining all the defects of bloated and selfish capital and of a close corporation-all this makes me, as a muchmissed friend of mine, Mr. Lewis Flower, used to say, 'feel tired.' It is argued as if nobody else but the House of Lords had any property, almost as if it kept everybody else out of getting or having any property. I dare say that, taking an average, we-the Lords-as a body, are quite comfortably off; at all events we manage to spend a good deal of money; but, quâ Property-spelt with a large 'P’Property as an institution, as an integer in the social fabric, we are only like thousands of other folk and represent-possibly in a marked and extreme type the general community. The wealth of this country— that is, the palpable and tangible wealth of this country-is not represented by Board of Trade and Inland Revenue figures in statistics which account for and assess it, but it consists in the distribution of wealth, whether in land or investments, which can be handled or transferred; and also in the fact that each year the country finds itself with more and more well-to-do and stable-minded folk. It is in the growing number of people who have managed to get a little together, who are trying to get a little more, and who all, more or less, imagine that there resides in the particular form of property which they have acquired some sort of unearned increment or betterment, which sooner or later will improve the value of their investment. These, I say, are the people, if it comes to a real push, to a final choice, who will back the House of Lords, and, in my opinion, desert the House of Commons. It need not be because they like the politics and complexion-a fast colour-of the House of Lords; you might not even expect them to take that course from any of their antecedents or public utterances and appearances. Perhaps, for various reasons in their heads and hearts, they may not like the House of Lords, but it is their pockets, their property, which tell them that it is desirable for them, as Cromwell said after ten years' experience of a single Chamber, to have something to stand between them and the House of Commons. It must be remembered that the magic of property, if it turns sands into gold, much more easily turns hopes into fears. I believe that had it been Lord Lansdowne who was drowsing on the garden seat of the Punch cartoon the artist would have had to exhibit John Bull in a very different attitude. Happy the man whose wish and care A few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air But now this equable-minded person might feel a little anxious about these pleasant possessions when he hears a Chancellor of the Exchequer talking about 'robbing hen-roosts,' of Bills dealing with the reconstruction of society which are to be robed as Money Bills to dodge the House of Lords, and when he reads a forecast of a Budget which (to quote the Times leader of the 12th of December) the Prime Minister says, somewhat darkly," will turn out to be a powerful and flexible engine, capable of unexpected applications, and of acting in some directions as a solvent. Were I in a large way of income on property I should feel slightly uncomfortable whatever my political views. The merchant to secure his treasure Conveys it in a borrowed name. |