The House of Lords

THE refusal of the House of Lords to pass the Budget until the people have been given a chance of pronouncing upon its provisions precipitates an issue that is likely, for some time to come, to remain the master-question of British politics. That issue, in brief, is the place the Upper Chamber shall hold in the framework of British government, and the powers that shall belong to it. The problem is as vital and contentious as any that a democracy can be called upon to solve, and its emergence has long seemed to be inevitable. More than sixteen years ago, in the last speech he ever delivered in the House of Commons, Gladstone pointed to it as “ a controversy which, when once raised, must go forward to an issue.” Nothing came of his warning.

From 1895 to 1906 the question of the House of Lords slumbered. But within the past four years it has been reawakened, as it was bound to be, as every one foresaw it must be, by the accession of a powerful and earnest Liberal Government. Four times at least since 1906, and twice over measures of first-class importance, the Liberals have clashed with the Lords and have been worsted by them. They have seen bills which had passed the House of Commons by a majority of three hundred so mutilated by the Lords that they have had to be thrown into the wastepaper basket. They have seen measures dealing with land-valuation, with plural voting, and with licensing reform, rejected outright by the Upper Chamber. They have felt debarred from tackling other problems because they were aware beforehand that their solutions would be found unacceptable by the hereditary House. It has, in short, been borne in upon them that free scope for the development of Liberal policy cannot be secured so long as the Lords retain their present constitutional prerogatives, and exercise them in the spirit they have manifested during the past four years. Quite apart, therefore, from the Budget, it has been evident that the Liberals were being rapidly driven to the necessity of subordinating everything else to a settlement of the House of Lords question. But the fate of the Budget has enormously broadened that question, and complicated it, — has vested it indeed with a sudden and unlooked-for gravity, and has given it a turn that involves nothing less than the fundamentals of the British system of government.

Even, however, if the relations between the Liberals and the Lords had been as smooth as they have been acrimonious, even if the Budget had not been of a character to foment their old quarrel, I am inclined to think that the whole problem of the House of Lords could not for long have been prevented from pushing its way to the front. No one who has kept an eye on the recent tendencies of political thought in England can have failed to note its growing alienation from the philosophy, the methods of reasoning, the spirit, and the instincts, which Burke, for instance, and the men of his school, brought to bear on the problems of government. The Englishman of today is much more of a precisian in politics than were his forefathers. He is more apt than they were to test institutions and arrangements by the rule of thumb; more apt to take up the severely logical and mathematical standpoint; more sensitive to anomalies that offend his sense of symmetry, and less curious to inquire whether, after all, they may not work well; more concerned with the names and appearances of things and less with their substance; more disposed to believe that in politics there really are absolute rules which can be applied with the conciseness of an algebraical formula.

With such standards and habits of mind as these, it is the easiest possible thing to make out a case against the House of Lords. It is an assembly that seems to contradict most, if not all, of the basic principles of democracy. It is not elected by the people, yet it has the power of thwarting and sometimes of overriding the people’s will. By rejecting the Budget, — for what it has done is equivalent to rejecting the Budget, — the House of Lords is at this moment asserting a claim which, if admitted, gives it the ultimate power of the purse, makes every government dependent upon its forbearance for the very means to live, and thus raises itself to the position of paramount authority in the State. Of its six hundred odd members, twenty-six owe their places solely to the fact that they are Archbishops or Bishops of the Established Church; five are lawyers of eminence on whom life peerages have been conferred to enable the Upper Chamber to fulfill its functions as the highest court of appeal; sixteen are Scottish “representative” peers, representative, that is, in the sense that they are selected by their brother peers to sit in the House; twenty-eight are Irish representative peers; four are princes of the royal blood; and over five hundred and forty are hereditary peers. Some of these, the first of their line, have been rewarded with peerages for personal distinction and achievements, or for past services in the party cause that cannot otherwise be requited; but the vast majority of them have inherited seats in the Upper Chamber together with their titles and estates.

It is this indiscriminate application of the hereditary principle that constitutes the most obvious weakness of the House of Lords. Whatever his competency or character, a peer, the moment he becomes a peer, becomes also a member of the governing oligarchy. Some peers have no taste for politics; others have no capacity; others again are men of unsavory reputation. Nevertheless they are ipso facto units in the House of Lords; the writ of summons to take their place in Parliament cannot legally be withheld from them; and unless they commit a felony or become bankrupt there is no way of getting rid of them. Not all peers by any means — and it is at once the salvation of the House of Lords and its condemnation that this should be so — rate their privileges very highly.

There is an inimitable conversation in one of Mr. Henry James’s tales between the son of an English duke and a young American girl on this very point.

“‘Lord Lambeth,’ said Bessie Alden, ‘are you an hereditary legislator?'

“ ‘ Oh, I say,’ cried Lord Lambeth, ‘don’t make me call myself such names as that,.’

“ ‘ But you are a member of Parliament,’ said the young girl.

“ ‘ I don’t like the sound of that either.’

“ ‘ Does n’t your father sit in the House of Lords?’ Bessie Alden went on.

“ ‘ Very seldom,’ said Lord Lambeth.

“ ‘ Is it an important position?’ she asked.

“ ‘ Oh dear no,’ said Lord Lambeth.

“ ‘ I should think it would be very grand,’ said Bessie Alden, ‘to possess simply by an accident of birth the right to make laws fora great nation.’

“ ‘ Ah, but one does n’t make laws. It’s a great humbug.’

“ ‘ I don’t believe that,’ the young girl declared. ‘It must be a great privilege, and I should think that if one thought of it in the right way — from a high point of view —it would be very inspiring.’

“ ‘ The less one thinks of it the better,’ Lord Lambeth affirmed.”

The Lord Lambeths of actual life are very numerous, and their easy, detached, minimizing attitude toward their legislative responsibilities is one of the reasons why the House of Lords still exists. If every peer were a politician, aching to take part in public affairs and to convert his share in national legislation from a useful fiction into an obstreperous and inquisitorial fact, the House of Lords would long ago have been found intolerable. But as it is, most peers, happily, are landowners, magistrates, sportsmen, business men, and so on, before they are hereditary legislators, and Westminster claims, or at any rate receives, only a fraction of their time and interest. For the most part, they simply abstain from going there. A considerable number of them do not even take the trouble to present, the writs that entitle them to sit and vote. When one hundred and fifty members are to be found in the House of Lords at the same time, it is proof that something of unusual importance is under discussion. Three are enough to form a quorum, and the ordinary routine business of the House hardly occupies an hour or so a day, or engages the attention of more than two score of members. Only two hundred peers, or less than a third of the whole House, were present during the debates which transformed the Education Bill of 1906, the principal measure of the session, beyond the recognition of its framers and led to its abandonment; and in the majority that voted a few weeks ago in favor of submitting the Budget to the people were fifty or sixty peers who had not put in a single appearance since the last Parliament, and who had to be specially sworn in for the occasion.

One consequence of all this is that in ordinary times the gilded chamber is a gilded desert. It is an old jest that the best cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and see it. A few dozen peers lolling about on the red benches, while one of their number holds forth with studied unemotionalism, among occasional faint murmurs of approval or dissent, do not, it must be owned, make an impressive, spectacle. To walk from the House of Commons down the long corridor to the House of Lords is like leaving a power-house to enter a cathedral close. There is none of the responsiveness, the animation, and vehemence about the Upper Chamber that, affect one instantaneously in the Lower House. The speakers talk not only in a lower voice but in a lower key; there is no appeal to the vulgarity of mere feeling; everything is grave, quiet, decorous, and chilling. “ My surprise knew no bounds,” wrote Lord Shaftesbury, when he drew a cheer from the House. “I had warmed Nova Zembla! ” As is the dignity of the Senate to that of the House of Representatives, so is that of the House of Lords to every other second chamber with which I am acquainted. It would continue to be dignified and unembarrassed even if Carlyle’s appalling nightmare of “a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords” were to be realized in fact. It is so dignified, so sure of itself, so confident in its traditions of courtesy and repose, that it has virtually no rules for regulating debate; its presiding officer, the Lord Chancellor, is armed with no authority even to settle a point of order or decide which of two speakers rising simultaneously shall address the House; and its only means of quelling a disturbance is to have the Clerk of the Parliament read aloud two Standing Orders, dating from the first half of the seventeenth century and prohibiting “all personal, sharp, or teasing speeches.”

Another result of the absenteeism of so many of the peers is that those who are constant in attendance, and who really do the work, are for the most part picked men, men with a natural taste and a trained capacity for affairs, men who have won distinction and achievement in one or other of the innumerable fields of public employment and responsibility that the possession of a great empire throws open to Britons. Take away those who are indifferent or objectionable, and there is left an active residuum of peers, say two hundred and fifty in all, who possess between them as much debating and business ability, as much knowledge and statesmanship, as can be found in any legislative chamber in the world. Archbishop Magee used to say that nothing more struck him in the House of Lords than the amount of special information possessed by its members. To go through the roll of its members, tracing back the career and achievements of each, is to be continually astonished at the wealth and diversity of aptitudes and experience that the House is able to draw upon.

In the House as it is to-day, for example, there are some twenty-eight peers, such as Lords Morley, Lansdowne, Rosebery, and Crewe, whose whole life has been a training in statesmanship; there are some thirty-five who are active railway directors; there are some thirty, like Lords Curzon, Milner, Cromer, MacDonnell, Minto, Tennyson, Aberdeen, and Grey, who have held high, sometimes the highest, administrative office in India, and who have served as colonial governors and governor-generals; there are fifteen who have spent, a large part of their time in the diplomatic service; there are at least one hundred who have seen active service in the army and navy; there are about thirty-five intimately concerned in banking; there are the twenty-six archbishops and bishops, representing an imposing array of scholarship, administrative aptitudes, and knowledge of the realities of life among all classes of the population; there are some forty peers who might fairly be called “ captains of industry”; there are over eighty who are actively engaged in the work of county administration; there are sixteen or so who would rank among the most eminent of British lawyers and jurists; there are two or three scientists, like Lords Lister and Rayleigh, of the first rank; and there are some one hundred and fifty members of the House who are large landowners in a country where the ownership of land is not only an exacting business education but has always been associated with the discharge of public duties.

To any one who really knows England, an assembly so constituted will not seem unrepresentative. Indeed, it has been ingeniously suggested, and for myself I should not like to dispute the theory, that the House of Lords as a whole, in its dullness, its aversion from change, and the ascendancy in it of the human over the professionally political point of view, corresponds more closely to the outlook and temperameat of the average Englishman than does the House of Commons. But altogether apart from such subtleties as these, I think that Mr. Sidney Low is undoubtedly right, when, in his admirable work on The Governance of England, he points out that “ a Senate cannot be deemed unrepresentative of some of the best elements of a nation, when among its elements may be included the greatest, or nearly the greatest, poets and painters of their age, the most famous savants, philosophers, and jurists, the most eloquent preachers, the most learned theologians, and many of the magnates of finance, industry and commerce. . . . In spite of the dead weight of the mere titled nobodies, there is probably more intellect and ability in the House of Lords than in any other Second Chamber that could be named. . . . The House of Lords has the influence which belongs to wealth, to high rank and ancient lineage, to landed property, to ideas and sentiments which have been interwoven into the texture of English society, and to traditions, usages and habits of mind which arc the growth of ages.” Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, again, whose two volumes on The Government of England have made all Englishmen his debtors, has justly noted the peculiar confidence which their countrymen of all ranks bestow upon those peers who have attained a position in the forefront of politics. “ There seems,” he remarks, “to be a feeling that they are raised above the scrimmage of public life; that in rank, wealth and reputation they possess already the goal of ambition, and are beyond the reach of the temptations that beset the ordinary man.”

But while the House of Lords thus commands a good deal of the popularity enjoyed by its individual members and a share even of the somewhat excessive deference and consideration that will be yielded to them so long as England is England; while the part it plays in shaping legislation is assigned in general to those peers who are best able to execute it; and while, on the whole, it is a body eminently responsive to public sentiment, no one would pretend that as a second chamber it is incapable of improvement. Its imperfections, indeed, become almost painfully visible when any measure that really affects the aristocracy and its social and political allies comes up for discussion. Strange faces at such times crowd the lobbies; the hereditary legislator who had to ask a policeman the way to the House of Lords was probably no mere fable. From remote country-seats, forgotten peers rush up to town; and any bill that touches the interests of the Church or the landlords or the brewers or the Conservative party is liable to meet with short shrift at their hands. There is, however, one proviso to be attached to this statement of the case — the bill in question must have been introduced by a Liberal government.

It enormously complicates the problem of the House of Lords that its members belong almost altogether to one party. In the past eighty years the Liberals have appointed considerably more peers than the Conservatives, yet the Liberals in the House of Lords today are outnumbered by nearly ten to one. It is found that a man who was a Liberal before he joined the peerage insensibly takes the color of the class into which he steps. He begins to share its prejudices and its instinctive ways of looking at things; and even though he himself may not fall directly from the faith, nine times out of ten his son is an out-and-out Conservative. For Liberal peers to beget Conservative successors has become a phenomenon so constant that one might almost call it a law of nature.

The result is, of course, that when a Conservative government is in power the House of Lords, except as a ratifying chamber, practically ceases to exist. It passes automatically all the bills that are sent up to it; it forgets altogether that it is supposed to be a revisory and suspensory branch of the legislature; it sinks into the position of a mere annex to the Carlton Club. But directly a Liberal government comes into office, the Lords wake up. They are immediately on the qui vive; they scrutinize the government’s measures with hostile minuteness; their constitutional prerogatives take on a sudden and expanding activity.

Those prerogatives, like most things in the British Constitution, are ill-defined, and rather a matter of usage and understanding than of hard-and-fast regulation. They amount practically to this, that the Lords have the legal right and the constitutional power to amend or reject any bill they please, other than the Finance Bill of the year; but that if the Commons, after an appeal to the electorate, send the bill back again, and if public opinion clearly favors it, the Upper Chamber is bound to pass it. Their function, in other words, is to interpret the will of the people, to stand between the nation and the vagaries of a chance majority in the House of Commons, and to interpose an interval for reflection and delay during which the maturer judgment of the public on any given measure may have time to formulate itself. Thus, had Mr. Gladstone dissolved Parliament when his Home Rule Bill of 1893 was rejected by the Lords; and had the constituencies returned him to power with an equal or increased majority, the Lords would have had no option but to pass the bill. The fact that Mr. Gladstone did not dissolve Parliament was rightly interpreted as betraying a consciousness that he had not the country behind him. On that occasion, as on many others, the House of Lords was a truer exponent of the national will than the House of Commons. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that since 1832 no decision of the Lords on a measure of first-class moment has been reversed at the polls.

As between the two great parties there is unquestionably an appearance of unfairness in the use made by the Lords of their constitutional powers. Having the Upper Chamber at their backs, the Conservatives are able to play the political game with loaded dice. When they are themselves in office, Great Britain is virtually under a single-chamber system of government. When their opponents are in office, it is always open to the Conservatives to retrieve in the House of Lords the defeats sustained in the House of Commons and at the polls.

The great objection to the Lords, indeed, is not that they occasionally reject Liberal measures, but that they never reject Conservative measures; not that they do one-half of their work too thoroughly but that they do not do the other half at all. To this it may, of course, be answered that the bills brought forward by a Conservative government are in general so reasonable, so little revolutionary, and so much in harmony with popular wishes, as to make rejection or amendment unnecessary. But the plea will hardly bear the test of fact. The Education Bill of 1902, and the Licensing Bill of 1904, were both of them measures that were vehemently resented by a majority of the British people. They were precisely the kind of measures that a strong and impartial Second Chamber, free from party subserviency, and taking the broad, national point of view, would have rejected. The Lords, however, not only passed them, but strengthened some of their most obnoxious features.

The fact is that the House of Lords has ceased to be an obstacle to extremist legislation. It resembles a brake which fails to act, or else clogs the wheel. For example, when the Liberals in 1906 brought in the Trades Dispute Bill, — a bill exempting trade-unions from liability to be sued for their actions during a strike, — the Conservative leaders in the Lords, one after the other, denounced it in unmeasured terms. Yet they advised the House to pass it on the ground that the constituencies had been consulted as to its provisions at the general election a few months before, and that the government could fairly claim a “mandate ” for its introduction. Such reasoning is in practice an incitement to the Liberals to propose only such measures as arouse a deep public sentiment, and the measures that do this are as a rule extremist measures. By blocking the path of Liberalism, the Lords, in short, encourage Radicalism.

But do the Lords as a matter of fact “ block the path of Liberalism ”? To some extent they do. Within the last four years they have thrown out an Education Bill, a bill abolishing plural voting, a Licensing Bill, and two Scottish land bills. The three first-named measures ought in my judgment to have become law, but the Lords were, from the merely tactical and party point of view, on sound ground in rejecting them or forcing their abandonment. The Education Bill was too complicated to be really understood by the people at large; its provisions were equally obnoxious to the rigid sectarians on both sides; and although it offered, as I think, a fair settlement of an old and vicious controversy, there was little strength of public opinion behind it. The Plural Voting Bill hardly interested the average man at all. He diagnosed both its introduction and its rejection as mere moves in the electioneering game. The Licensing Bill, while it was an heroic effort to assert the supremacy of the State over the monopoly of the drink traffic, was in some ways an unwieldy measure, and was undoubtedly unpopular with the mass of the people. The “ man in the si reet ” applauded the Lords for making an end of all three bills. But is it the function of a second chamber to be thinking of what the “ man in the street ” will say; to be always paying heed to the passion and prejudice of the moment; to be judging the merits of each measure by its popularity, and never to be taking into account the permanent interests of the nation? In these three instances the Lords went, I think, against the best opinion of the country. But, on the whole, I do not see that the Liberals have much to complain of. In the past four years they have placed on the statute-book a prodigious number of laws. Every one of them represented a social or industrial reform of some description; many of them seemed to strike at the special interests which the House of Lords is supposed to guard inflexibly; yet all became law with the assent of the Upper Chamber.

Nothing was more obvious, ten months ago, than that the Liberal campaign against the Lords had hopelessly failed; and that, by fulminating against the Upper Chamber, and yet remaining in office; by vowing it would stand or fall by this or that measure, and yet continuing after its rejection as though nothing had happened; by boasting, and quite rightly, of its splendid achievements, and yet attempting to rally support for a great constitutional upheaval on the strength of the wreckage of a few bills regarded by the country either with active dislike or with tepid unconcern, the government was bountifully covering itself with ridicule. Ten months ago I should have said that the House of Lords stood quite beyond reach of a successful attack. Ten months ago they had the game in their own hands; they have now, I fear, thrown it away by their revolutionary action in regard to the Budget.

The main defects, then, in the House of Lords are, that it stands too prominently apart from the representative machinery; that it contains too many members who are triflers, incompetents, drones, or detrimentals; and that it is much too partial to one of the two great parties. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that, as the House of Commons becomes less and less able to discharge its multitudinous duties efficiently, and more and more given to turning out bills full of unintelligible and self-contradictory provisions, the old constitutional powers of the Upper Chamber, as a revisory body, become of far more actual, practical importance. Again, the Lords do admirable and essential work in the vast domain of private-bill legislation; they are able to criticise the government of the day with a freedom denied to the Opposition in the House of Commons; they frequently initiate debates that are of the highest value in forming public opinion; and while they neither make ministries nor possess the constitutional power to unmake them, they are an invaluable recruitingground from which ministers may be drafted.

It must also be borne in mind that the main characteristic of the House of Lords as a second chamber has hitherto been not tyranny, but timidity; that it exerts, not merely infinitely less authority than the United States Senate, but less than any other second chamber in the world, unless it be the Upper House of the Netherlands; that its conservatism, so far from being a reproach, is a merit — a Radical second chamber being little less than a contradiction in terms; and that, put the dangers of an unreformed House of Lords as high as you please, they are still not so great as the dangers to be apprehended from an omnipotent House of Commons in a country where there is no written constitution, no checks and balances, and where Parliament is legally competent to do whatever it pleases.

The two movements of reform that for some years past have been gradually converging upon the House of Lords are concerned respectively with changing its composition, and restricting its powers. The first is a friendly movement, originating in the Upper Chamber itself; the second is a hostile movement, aimed at the veto of the Lords, by the Liberals and the Radicals. But there is this to be said about any and every scheme for reforming the House of Lords from within: you may diminish its membership; you may bring into it elements more directly and obviously representative of the nation; you may mingle the hereditary with the elective principle; but directly you do so you make the House of Lords a far stronger and more assertive body than it is at present. So long as an upper house exists, it must have certain prerogatives, and those prerogatives will increase in proportion as the assembly wielding them becomes more immediately representative of the people. But that is the very last thing the Radicals desire. Their attitude toward the internal reform of the House of Lords is very like the old attitude of Austria-Hungary and Russia toward the internal reform of the Ottoman Empire. They prefer to wait “till all be ripe and rotten.” They have therefore consistently ignored the somewhat tardy and feeble efforts of the Lords to improve their composition, and have concentrated instead on the task of checking or nullifying the veto power of the Upper Chamber.

The late Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, elaborated over two years ago a plan for making the final decision of the Commons prevail within the limits of a single Parliament; but little has been heard of it since. All such plans suffer from two defects. The first is that, under whatever safeguards, they in effect knock the House of Lords out of the Constitution, and place Great Britain under a permanent system of single-chamber government. The second is that, if the Lords refuse, as they naturally would, to join in decreeing their own extinction, there is no constitutional method of overcoming their resistance except by creating, or by securing from the King distinct permission to create, a sufficient number of peers to carry whatever scheme is decided upon through the Upper House. That is a device which was effective in 1832, and would doubtless be effective again. But it is one that no statesman would resort to except in the direst emergency: to head off a revolution, or when there was no other means whatever of carrying on the King’s government.

In 1836 Macaulay was quite certain that the House of Lords would follow the rotten boroughs into extinction, and the Duke of Wellington about the same time was complaining to Creevey that “nobody cares a damn for the House of Lords. The House of Commons is everything in England; the House of Lords nothing.” Time, in this instance, has justified neither the historian nor the soldier. The House of Lords has gained greatly in prestige and popularity; and the conviction, not alone of its necessity, but of its utility, has steadily deepened in the national consciousness. If I were to attempt a rough-and-ready précis of the predominant feeling of the country toward the House of Lords, I should say that most Englishmen would gladly see it reformed from within, reduced in numbers, and made more palpably representative; that very few Englishmen desire to blot it out of the Constitution; that, generally speaking, it is an assembly with a stronger backing of popular affection and good-will than any upper house I know of; and that so long as its powers are exercised with due forbearance and discrimination, and with due regard for the tacit compromises and understandings, the conventions and traditional practices of the Constitution, there is no real popular desire to curtail them.

The trouble, however, at this moment is precisely that the Lords have ignored the settled usages of the Constitution, and have taken their stand on a legal and technical right that is wholly at variance with one of the most vital principles of the British governing system. In refusing to pass the Budget they have committed what is nothing less than an act of usurpation. It is an act which, if ratified by the people, means that the Lords have it in their powder to force any and every government to dissolve — a prerogative that hitherto has belonged solely to the Crown. It is an act which denies the right of the elected representatives of the people to an exclusive voice in framing and apportioning taxation; which places every Liberal ministry at the absolute mercy of the hereditary house; which upsets the whole balance of the constitution by making the Lords the decisive authority in the State, with power of life and death over the cabinet of the day; and which plunges the finances of the country into abrupt and well-nigh inextricable confusion. Such an act, and the pretensions on which it is based, must and will be defeated at any cost, and the most stringent precautions must be taken against its ever being attempted again.

The problem before the British people is now to enforce the financial predominance of the House of Commons, to see to it that it can never again be challenged, and at the same time to preserve to the House of Lords those suspensory and revisory powers which all democracies feel the need of vesting in some institution, and which, in a land where Parliament is unfettered and supreme, are preëminently essential to the stability of the State.