Part 8

In a reform of the House of Lords it is difficult to feel any confidence. The hereditary principle seems to be thoroughly dead. In the Middle Ages it had a root in the faith and in the ignorance of mankind; it had its temporary uses, and at the same time it had its correctives. A mediæval lord was obliged to exert himself that his lordship might not be taken by another. A mediæval king was obliged to exert himself if he wished to keep his crown upon his head. Now, except in the rare cases of men moulded of Nature’s finest clay, with whom nobility acts really as an obligation, hereditary rank and wealth kill duty in the cradle. It is found impossible to get a decent attendance in the House of Lords. In answer to Lord Rosebery’s appeal, a Peer says that he will be happy to attend if the nation will re-enact the Corn Laws, so as to enable him to keep a house in town. To indulge a mere whim, the hereditary wearers of the crown refuse to visit Ireland, and thus fling away the affections of the Irish people. The historical cause has been tried during this controversy and the issue is not doubtful. We have seen how the House of Lords, since it assumed its present character, which it did under the second Tudor, has worked. That it has acted as a court of mature wisdom, revising on grounds of impartial statesmanship the rash decisions of the popular House, is as complete a fable as its Norman pedigree. It has simply opposed the selfish resistance of a privileged order to change of every kind. Could it have its way, not only Rotten Boroughs and Sinecurism, but the old Criminal Code, Religious Intolerance, Arbitrary Imprisonment, the Censorship of the Press, the Paper Duty, even Slavery and the Slave Trade, would still be cumbering the earth; or, rather, long ago, the nation would have been compelled to choose between political death and revolution. To fear, on questions which caused national excitement, the House of Lords has at last given way; but not to reason and justice. A multitude of minor reforms it has strangled, by its obstructiveness, altogether. The only great measure of change which this organ of mature wisdom ever readily passed was the Franchise Bill of 1867, which was described by its own author as a leap in the dark, and had been devised with the view of swamping progressive intelligence in a flood of ignorance and beer. Nor has obstruction been the only sin of that order of which the House of Lords is the organ; it has given to the general policy of England a class bias; it stimulated the crusade against the French Revolution, and unlike the crusading Barons of the Middle Ages, it stayed at home revelling in high rents and in a mass of sinecures, of which it sacrificed not one penny, while the people bled and starved in a cause which was not theirs. It has fostered militarism generally as a diversion from domestic reform. On economic questions the legislation of the Lords has been mere landlordism. As mere landlords they have acted, from the day on which they sold the national religion to the Pope for a quiet title to the Church lands, to the day on which they passed the Arrears Bill, after showing their sense of its character, in order that they might recover some of their back rents. If twice in the course of their long history they have been for a moment on the side of freedom, fear for their Church lands, combined with jealousy of ecclesiastical favorites, was the cause. The period of their most complete ascendency, in the last century, was the epoch of political corruption; and the conduct of the House at the time of the railway mania, when it formed a Ring in the landlord interest, was, to say the least, not a proof that hereditary wealth lifts its possessor above commercial motives. Many histories are darker than that of the House of Lords; few are less heroic; and the facts are now deeply imprinted on the minds of the people. Faith in the “noble blood” of the scapegrace son of a law lord, once dissipated, is not likely to return. The hereditary wealth itself, which is the real basis of aristocratic influence, and without which the Peerage would be a thing of shreds and patches, is reduced by agricultural depression, and will be greatly broken up by the abolition of primogeniture and entail,—a change which is sure to come, for it will be found that the only antidote to agrarian communism is the free acquisition of land. The hereditary principle is dead, and can serve England or civilized humanity no more. Introduced into, or retained in, any Senate, it will carry with it the seeds of death. As soon as it obeys, as obey it certainly will, its obstructive instinct, the cry against it will be renewed. It will not become less odious by becoming weaker. If the life element which it is proposed to introduce remains antagonistic to the hereditary element, the tribunal of mature wisdom will be divided against itself and fresh conflicts will ensue. If it is assimilated, you will have the House of Lords over again, and more odious than ever, since the life element will be regarded as having apostatized and betrayed its trust.

Yet the whole theory of a Second Chamber as a necessary part of Parliamentary institutions appears to have no other origin nor any sounder basis than a mistaken view of the nature of the House of Lords, which all the world has supposed to be a Senate, when in fact it was an estate of the feudal realm, representing not a higher grade of deliberative wisdom but simply the special interest of the great landowners. The only valid argument in favor of the retention of the House of Lords is, in fact, the difficulty which the Bicamerists find in devising anything to be put in its place. Nomination is a total failure; the nominated Senate of Canada is a legislative cypher, the debates of which are not even reported, and the places in it are a mere addition to the bribery fund of the party leader. If both Chambers are elective, as in Victoria, the result is a collision and a deadlock, out of which, in the case of sovereign assemblies, there would be no colonial officer or governor to point a way. Co-option in any form, or election by an order, would give us the oligarchy over again, perhaps in a worse shape than ever, since the members would have to cultivate the good graces of a privileged and reactionary electorate. Not only as to the mode in which their Senate is to be elected are the Bicamerists at fault; they are equally at fault as to the special materials of which it is to be composed. If age or wealth is to be the qualification, impotence or odium will be the result. If the wisest are to have their seats in the Senate, the popular House will be deprived of its best leaders. Supreme power must centre somewhere; it will centre in that body which most directly represents the national will. Let the assembly, then, which is the seat of supreme power, be the seat of collective wisdom. Concentrate in it, as far as possible, all the best available elements, those of a conservative character as well as the rest. Frankly recognize its authority, and invest it at the same time with a full measure of responsibility. Notoriously the existence of a Senate diminishes the sense of responsibility in the popular chamber, and diminishes it out of proportion to the control really exercised; for a Senate soon gets tired of incurring the unpopularity of rejection. This surely is a more rational and hopeful plan than that of abandoning the seat of supreme power to popular impulse, and affixing by way of safeguard an artificial regulator to its side. Checks and balances belong to mechanics, not to politics; in mechanics you can apportion force, in politics force cannot be apportioned, though nominal authority may. That there are good and useful elements in the House of Lords, especially among the new creations, nobody doubts. Let them be transferred, with any social influence which in these democratic times may adhere to them, to a sphere where they can act with effect. At present they are ostracized by seclusion, as is clearly perceived by some Radicals, who on that ground deprecate a reform of the House of Lords. Let Lord Salisbury go to the Commons and Lord Hartington stay there. The Lords are warned by their partisans against imitating the foolish abdication of the French aristocracy in the famous holocaust of feudal titles. To that it may come, if they do not take care. But this is an earlier stage of the revolution, and the day of grace has not yet expired. Let the Lords do that which the French aristocracy ought to have done, and by doing which they might have averted the catastrophe. Let them at once go over frankly to the _Tiers Etat_, and strengthen by their accession the conservative forces in the national assembly. Convulsive efforts to retain an obnoxious privilege only inflame the revolutionary spirit, and at the same time make it still more desperately difficult for rational statesmanship to deal with the situation. Tory democracy is apparently a plea for founding aristocracy on demagogism, and for stemming Socialism by heading it and combining it with a foreign policy of violence. Can the House of Lords be so blind as not to see in what such a course must end? What has been the end of other attempts of privilege to save itself by an alliance with extreme Radicalism against moderate reform?

Not in a Second Chamber, patched up or newly created, but in a well-regulated franchise and a rational mode of election, are effectual securities for the permanent ascendancy of national reason over passion in the legislature to be found. The electorate has been dealt with by successive reformers in the belief that its functions, and therefore the necessary qualifications for it, have remained unchanged. But its functions have been greatly changed, and have become infinitely more important and difficult than they originally were. Instead of merely choosing delegates to give his assent to taxation, the elector is now called upon to choose a ruler, and, at the same time, virtually to decide upon the general policy of the country. This is beyond the capacity of any ordinary voter. Everybody knows what happens, and until an immense progress shall have been made in popular education, must happen—how the intelligent elector, even supposing him to escape bribery and all other corrupt influences, votes at best for the Blue or Yellow ticket, and too often votes not even for the Blue or Yellow ticket, but with reference to some merely local or personal question, some fancy or antipathy, leaving the broad interests of the country and the qualifications essential to a legislator altogether out of sight. The author of “Round My House” tells us how opinion among the French peasantry in certain districts was swept by an angry fancy about a reduction in the value of a coin. What chance would Chatham or Peel, representing a great national policy, have stood against the lowest demagogue if he had been on the unpopular side of the question about the Cider Tax or Wood’s halfpence? An ordinary citizen, occupied in trade or manual labor, has not the leisure, if he had the knowledge and capacity, to study the complex questions put before him. Yet there are reformers who desire to set Hodge to choose not only out of the worthies of his own neighborhood, but out of all the notabilities of the country, among whom the largest vote would probably be polled by the Tichborne Claimant. From selfishness the poor are at least as free as the rich; they would vote at least as well if they knew how; but the knowledge is to them unattainable. In no sphere but that of politics does anybody propose to thrust upon people power of which it is manifestly impossible that they should make an intelligent use. Not only is it manifestly impossible that the people should make an intelligent use of the power of direct election to the governing assembly and of determining its policy: it is morally impossible that they should really make use of it at all. They are unorganized, and, though they live in the same district, unconnected as a rule with each other: they have no means of taking counsel together for the selection of a member. The selection must therefore be made for them by some self-constituted agency. That agency is the Caucus, into the hands of whose managers and masters the representation, styled popular, really falls.

Both the party organizations in England are now adopting the system, and thus confiscating the suffrage which they profess by legislation to bestow. One of them at least already has the Boss, and both of them will soon have the complete machine, with a host of professional politicians, recruited from the class which prefers place-hunting to honest trades. Government, in a word, will fall into the hands of irresponsible intriguers, and will be dominated in ever-increasing measure by Knavery and corruption. Nor is there any assignable remedy for the evil; the wire-pullers and professional politicians alone can give their time to the elections, and therefore it is hardly possible to organize the means of casting off their yoke. Attending “primaries” is often preached as the duty of the patriotic citizen; but the patriotic citizen who does attend the primary finds everything arranged by the wire-pullers beforehand and himself impotent and a laughing-stock. This will not appear in the first flush of a revolutionary movement, while the present leaders retain their ascendancy, but it will appear as soon as the revolution settles down. Public education, it is true, has been introduced in England; but it has always existed in the United States, and it has not saved that country from the Boss. To save the country from the Boss is now the highest aim of the best citizens; but they will hardly succeed without a constitutional change.

American reformers, if they want to go to the root of the evil, have a light to guide their efforts in the successful working of their Senate, which, being elected indirectly, through the State Legislatures, is a body of remarkable ability, and possesses the general confidence of the nation; while the House of Representatives, elected directly by the people, that is, by the wire-puller, who usurps the functions of the people, presents a most unfavorable contrast. Those who have sat in both say the difference between the two political atmospheres is immense. Rid the Senate of Party, and it would be about as good a governing body as any nation could reasonably desire. Indirect elections through local councils is the plan which seems to promise the best central legislature; and it takes from the primary elector nothing which at present is really his. Ordinary knowledge and intelligence ought to suffice to enable a man to choose from among his neighbors those who are fittest to manage his local affairs. But the local councillors would be a comparatively picked body; they might reasonably be expected to give their minds to the central election; they would not be too many for concert; and they would exercise their power as a trust under the eyes of the people. As permanent bodies they could not, like the College of Presidential Electors, be reduced to the mere bearers of a mandate. A high trust, by adding to the importance and dignity of local councils, would be likely to draw into them better men. Through such an organization, apparently, opinion might freely and quietly flow from the people to the depository of power. Local and social influences would no doubt be strong; but they are more wholesome than that of the Boss, and, as was said before, it is easier to enlarge the parochial than to make the wire-puller honest. Parochialism, however, has been pretty well broken up by the press and the telegraph. Hardly anybody can now live in intellectual isolation. The Caucus itself, so far as it works fairly, is a tribute to the principle of indirect election.

To begin by passing a measure of Home Rule, not for Ireland alone, but for the United Kingdom, to reconstruct the local institutions, unloading upon them part of the now crushing burden of the central legislature, and then to base the central institutions upon them, is a policy which might at least claim attention, and, perhaps, deserve partial experiment, as an alternative to central revolution, if the nation and its leaders had not surrendered themselves to the revolutionary current.

Like the mode of election, the qualification for the franchise has never undergone any rational consideration with reference to the changed status and duties of the elector, who, instead of being really a subject, is now a participant in sovereign power. Nothing has been thought of the property qualification, which by successive agitations has been reduced to the vanishing point, and the next time anybody wants to raise the political wind will finally disappear. The broader the basis of electoral institutions can safely be made the better, and with indirect instead of direct election to the central legislature, it would be safe to make it very broad. Still some qualifications are necessary, even for the primary elector; nor, if the writer may trust his own observation, is there any indisposition on the part of the intelligent working-classes to look at the matter in that light. A common education is now placed within everybody’s reach by the help of the State, and it entails corresponding obligations. A mode of ascertaining that the elector could read and write, or at least read, by means of a certificate or test, might surely be devised. Personal application for registration would also be a fair requirement, since a man would hardly be fit to share the sovereign power who did not care enough about his vote to ask for it; and it would probably act as a useful criterion, self-applied. With the full powers of a citizen should also go, in reason, the full duties—liability to serve on juries, to assist in the enforcement of the law, to take part, if called upon, in the defence of the country. There is a vague notion that all human beings, or all who pay taxes (which, directly or indirectly, everybody does), have a natural right to a vote, and this is carried so far that votes are about to be given to a multitude of Irish who openly profess themselves the enemies of the State, and announce that they will use the votes for its destruction. Perhaps this Irish experiment may help to bring us all to reason, and convince us that nobody has a right to the means of doing mischief to himself and his fellows, or to anything but that form of government which is practically the best for all.

Considering how our morality and happiness depend on the maintenance of right relations between the sexes, it is surely a proof of the desperate recklessness of party that the Conservative leaders should be willing to fling female character and ultimately the home into the political caldron for the sake of gaining the female vote. Their calculation may prove unfounded; at least on this continent the women of Conservative temperament seem to stay at home, while the revolutionary Megæra mounts the platform and, brandishing her torch among the Anarchists of Chicago, bids the poor trust in dynamite instead of trusting in God. That gentleness and purity will come with woman into public life is certainly not the decisive verdict of experience, so far as experience has gone. It rather seems that her gentleness and purity depended on her absence from the political arena. Will the government be improved by being made feminine? That is the question to be answered in the common interest of both sexes. The male nature, though not higher, is the more practical. Men, as a rule, alone are brought into daily contact with the world of action by the varied experiences and exigencies of which the balance of political character is formed. Men alone can be said to be fully responsible. Unless sentiment should undergo a total change, a female Member of Parliament or office-holder could not be called to account like a man. In this rough world how will a nation prosper which is swayed by the emotions of its women? The sexes may be co-equal, and yet, having different natures, they may have different parts to play in the community as they certainly have in the family. Laws have been made by man, because law, to take effect, must have force behind it, and the force of the community is male. If women made such laws as some of them threaten to make in the interest of their sex, men would refuse to execute the law. If women voted a war for some object of female enthusiasm, as the French women would for the defence of the Pope, men would refuse to march. The authority of government would then fall. A woman cannot support the police or take part in the defence of the country. Women are not a class with separate interests of its own, but a sex, the political interests of which are identical with those of their husbands and brothers. Their property is not of a special kind, nor can it be alleged to have suffered any wrong by general legislation. Assuredly general legislation has of late not been unfavorable to woman. Perhaps they get more from the chivalry of male legislation than they would get if, armed with political power, they were fighting for themselves. To the argument that property held by them is unrepresented, the answer is that no property is represented in any hands beyond the minimum required for a qualification in each case. This is a small hardship compared with the practical exclusion from voting of all our sailors, the flower of our industry, and of a large number of those employed by commerce in the work of distribution. Woman, if she has her disabilities, has also her privileges, which, with the general guardianship of affection, the majority of the sex would probably be unwilling to renounce for the sake of gratifying the ambition of a few. Conservatives especially may be expected to consider the effects likely to be produced on female character and on domestic life by the introduction of women into politics and the general revolution in the relations between the sexes of which that measure is an integral part. Female aspirations begin to take a new turn. An American apostle of woman’s rights told us plainly the other day that she considered maternity a poor aim for a woman’s ambition. Nature answers by dooming the race to decay.