Part 14

This is the bare record of the sequence of events in the Parliamentary struggle between the two Houses, each supported by one of the two great political parties. In the course of the controversy the real significance of the conflict was liable to be hidden under the mass of detail connected with constitutional law, constitutional and political history, and Parliamentary procedure, which had to be quoted in speeches on every platform and referred to repeatedly in debate. The serious deadlock between the Lords and Commons was not a mere inconvenience in the conduct of legislation, nor was it purely a technical constitutional problem. The issue was not between the 670 members of the House of Commons and the 620 members of the House of Lords, nor between the Liberal Government and the Tory Opposition. The full purport of the contest is broader and far more vital; it must be sought deeper down in the wider sphere of our social and national life. In a word, the rising tide of democracy has broken down another barrier, and the privileges and presumptions of the aristocracy have received a shattering blow. This aspect of the case is worth studying.

There could be no conflict of any importance between the two Houses so long as the Commons were practically nominees of the Lords. At the end of the eighteenth century no fewer than 306 members of the House of Commons were virtually returned by the influence of 160 persons, landowners and boroughmongers, most of whom were members of the other House. Things could work smoothly enough in these circumstances, as the two Houses represented the same interests and the same class, and the territorial aristocracy dominated without effort over a silent and subservient people.

The Reform Bill of 1832 was the real beginning of the change. By its provisions not only was the franchise extended, but fifty-six rotten boroughs, represented by 143 members, were swept away. There was something more in this than electoral reform. It was the first step toward alienation between the two Houses. There was a bitter fight at the time because the Lords foresaw that if they once lost their hold over the Commons the eventual results might be serious for them. It was far more convenient to have a subordinate House of nominees than an independent House of possible antagonists. The enfranchisement and emancipation of the people once inaugurated, however, were destined to proceed further. The introduction of free education served more than anything, and is still serving, to create a self-conscious democracy fully alive to its great responsibilities, for knowledge means courage and strength. Changes in the industrial life of the country led to organization among the workers and the formation of trade-unions. The extension of local government brought to the front men of ability from all classes of society, and the franchise became further extended at intervals. The House of Commons, now completely free and independent, kept in close touch with the real national awakening and reflected in its membership the changes in social development. But the House of Lords, unlike any other institution in the country, remained unchanged and quite unaffected by outside circumstances. Its stagnation and immobility naturally made it increasingly hostile to democratic advance. The number of Liberal Peers or Peers who could remain Liberal under social pressure gradually diminished. Friction caused by diversity of aim and interest became consequently more and more frequent. There were times of reaction, times of stagnation, times when the national attention was diverted by wars, but the main trend taken by the course of events was unalterable. The aristocracy, finding that it was losing ground, made attempts to reenforce itself with commercial and American wealth, thereby sacrificing the last traces of its old distinction. Money might give power of a sort--a dangerous power in its way--but not-power to recover the loss of political domination. The South African War and the attempt to obliterate the resentment it caused in the country by instituting a campaign for the revival of Protection brought about the downfall of the Tory party. The electoral _débâcle_ of 1906 was the consequence and served as a signal of alarm in the easy-going Conservative world. Till then many who were accustomed to hold the reins of government in their hands, as if by right, had not fully realized that the control was slipping from them. The cry went up that socialism and revolution were imminent. _The Times_ quoted _The Clarion_. Old fogies shook their heads and declared the country would be ruined and that a catastrophe was at hand. But it was soon found, on the contrary, that the government of the country was in the hands of men of great ability, enlightenment, and imagination; trade prospered, social needs were more closely attended to, and, most important of all, peace was maintained. The House of Commons had opened its doors to men of moderate means, and the Labor party, consisting of working men, miners, and those with first-hand knowledge of industrial conditions, came into existence as an organized political force.

The last six years have shown the desperate attempts of the ancient order to strain every nerve against the inevitable, and to thwart and destroy the projects and ambitions of those who represented the new thought and the new life of the nation. Though apparently successful at first, the rash action of the Chamber which still represented the interest, privileges, and prejudices of the wealthier class and of vested interests, only helped in the long run to hasten the day when they were to be deprived of their most formidable weapon. They still retain considerable power: their interests are guarded by one of the political parties, and socially they hold undisputed sway. In an amazing defense of the past action of the House of Lords, Lord Lansdowne in 1906 said: "It is constantly assumed that the House of Lords has always shown itself obstructive, reluctant, an opponent to all useful measures for the amelioration of the condition of the people of this island. Nothing is further from the truth. You will find that in the past with which we are concerned the House of Lords has shown itself not only tolerant of such measures but anxious to promote them and to make them effectual to the best of its ability. _And that, I believe, has been, and I am glad to think it, from time immemorial, the attitude of what I suppose I may call the aristocracy toward the people of this country_" The last sentence is a fair statement of their case. The aristocracy are _not_ the people. They are by nature a superior class which Providence or some unseen power has mercifully provided to govern, to rule, and to dominate. They are kind, charitable, and patronizing, and expect gratitude and subservience in return. As a mid-Victorian writer puts it: "What one wants to see is a kind and cordial condescension on the one side, and an equally cordial but still respectful devotedness on the other." But these are voices from a time that has passed.

Democracy has many a fight before it. False ideals and faulty educational systems may handicap its progress as much as the forces that are avowedly arrayed against it. Its achievements may be arrested by the discord of factions breaking up its ranks. Conceivably it may have to face a severe conflict with a middle-class plutocracy. But whatever trials democracy has to undergo it can no longer be subjected to constant defeat at the hands of a constitutionally organized force of hostile aristocratic opinion. At least, it may now secure expression in legislation for its noblest ideals and its most cherished ambitions. A check on progressive legislation is harmful to the national welfare, especially when there is no check on the real danger of reaction. To devise a Second Chamber which will be a check on reaction as well as on so-called revolution is a problem for the future. For the time being, therefore, the best security for the country against the perils of a reactionary regime is to allow freer play to the forces of progress, which only tend to become revolutionary when they are resisted and suppressed. The curtailment of the veto of the Second Chamber fulfils this purpose. Whatever further adjustment of the Constitution may be effected in time to come, the door can no longer be closed persistently against the wishes of the people when they entrust the work of legislation to a Liberal Government.

SYDNEY BROOKS

The first but by no means the last or most crucial stage of our twentieth-century Revolution has now been completed; the old Constitution, which was perhaps the most adaptable and convenient system of government that the world has ever known, is definitely at an end; the powers of an ancient Assembly have been truncated with a violence that in any other land would have spelled barricades and bloodshed long ago; and the road has been cleared, or partially cleared, for developments that must profoundly affect, and that in all probability will absolutely transform, the whole scheme of the British State.

Thus far, with their usual effective, good-humored, shortsighted common sense, with few pauses for inquiry, and with a characteristically indifferent grasp on the ultimate trend of things, have our politicians brought us. Our politicians, I say, and not our people, because one of the distinctive features of the Revolution so far is that it has been a political rather than a popular movement. It did not originate in the constituencies, but in the Cabinet; it was not forced upon the caucus by an aroused and indignant country, but by the caucus upon the country; nine-tenths of its momentum has been derived from above and not from below; the true centers of excitement throughout its polite and orderly progress have been the lobbies of the House and the correspondence columns of _The Times;_ it was only at the last that the urbanities of the struggle between the "Die-hards" and their fellow Unionists furnished the public as a whole with material for a mild sporting interest. When Roundheads and Cavaliers were lining up for the battle of Edgehill a Warwickshire squire was observed between the opposing forces placidly drawing the coverts for a fox. The British people during the past twenty months have seemed more than once to resemble that historic huntsman. They have answered the screaming exhortations of the politicians with whispers of more than Delphic ambiguity; they have gone unconcernedly about their pleasures and their business, to all appearances unvexed by the din of Revolution in their ears; they have presented the spectacle, more common in France than in England, of a tranquil nation with agitated legislators.

The Ministerial explanation of this lethargy and indifference is that the people had no occasion to grow excited; their "mandate" was being fulfilled, they were getting what they wanted, demonstrations were superfluous. But no one who has read the history of the Reform Bill of 1832 or of the Chartist movement or who remembers the passions stirred up by the Franchise agitation and the Home Rule struggle of the eighties will swallow that explanation without mentally choking.

The truth probably is, first, that the multiplication of cheap distractions and enjoyments and of cheaper newspapers has not only weakened the popular interest in politics, but has impaired that faculty of concentrated and continuous thought which used to invest affairs of State with an attractiveness not so greatly inferior to that of football; secondly, that for the great masses of the democracy the politics of bread and butter have completely ousted the politics of ideas and abstractions; and thirdly, that the Constitutional issue was precisely the kind of issue in which our people had had no previous training, either actual or theoretical, and which found them therefore without any intellectual preparation for its advent. Up till the end of 1909 we had always taken the Constitution for granted, and were for the most part comfortably unaware that it even existed. We had never as a nation, or never rather within living memory, troubled ourselves about "theories of State," or whetted our minds on the fundamentals of government. There is nothing in our educational curriculum that corresponds with the _instruction civique_ of the French schools, nor have we the privilege which the Americans enjoy of carrying a copy of our organic Act of Government in our pockets, of reading it through in twenty minutes, and of hearing it incessantly expounded in the class-room and the Press, debated in the national legislature, and interpreted by the highest judicial tribunal in the land.

When, therefore, we were suddenly called upon to decide the infinitely delicate problems of the place, powers, and composition of a Second Chamber in our governing system, the task proved as bewildering as it was unappetizing. Any nation which regarded its Constitution as a vital and familiar instrument would have heavily resented so gross an infraction of it as the Lords perpetrated in rejecting the 1909 Budget. But our own electorate, so far from punishing the party responsible for the outrage, sent them back to the House over a hundred stronger, a result impossible in a country with any vivid sense, or any sense at all, of Constitutional realities, and only possible in Great Britain because the people adjudged the importance of the various issues submitted to them by standards of their own, and placed the Constitutional problem at the bottom, or near the bottom, of the list. In no single constituency that I have ever heard of was the House of Lords question the supreme and decisive factor at the election of January, 1910. It deeply stirred the impartial intelligence of the country, but it failed to move the average voter even in the towns, while in the rural parts it fell unmistakably flat.

Even at the election of December, 1910, when all other issues were admittedly subordinate to the Constitutional issue, it was exceedingly difficult to determine how far the stedfastness of the electorate to the Liberal cause was due to a specific appreciation and approval of the Parliament Bill and of all it involved, and how far it was an expression of general distrust of the Unionists, of irritation with the Lords, and of sympathy with the social and fiscal policies pursued by the Coalition. That the Liberals were justified, by all the rules of the party game, in treating the result of that election as, for all political and Parliamentary purposes, a direct indorsement of their proposals, may be freely granted. It was as near an approach to an _ad hoc_ Referendum as we are ever likely to get under our present system. Party exigencies, or at any rate party tactics, it is true, hurried on the election before the country was prepared for it, before it had recovered from the somnolence induced by the Conference, and before the Opposition had time or opportunity to do more than sketch in their alternative plan. But though the issue was incompletely presented, it was undoubtedly the paramount issue put before the electorate, and the Liberals were fairly entitled to claim that their policy in regard to it had the backing of the majority of the voters of the United Kingdom.

Whether, however, this backing represented a reasoned view of the Constitutional points involved and of the position, prerogatives, and organization of a Second Chamber in the framework of British Government, whether it implied that our people were really interested in and had deeply pondered the relative merits of the Single and Double Chamber systems, is much more doubtful. "When he was told," said the Duke of Northumberland on August 10th, "that the people of England were very anxious to abolish the House of Lords, his reply was that they did not understand the question, and did not care two brass farthings about it." That perhaps is putting it somewhat too strongly. The country within the last two years has unquestionably felt more vividly than ever before the anomaly of an hereditary Upper Chamber embedded in democratic institutions. It has been stirred by Mr. Lloyd-George's rhetoric to a mood of vague exasperation with the House of Lords and of ridicule of the order of the Peerage. It has accepted too readily the Liberal version of the central issue as a case of Peers _versus_ People. But while it was satisfied that something ought to be done, I do not believe it realizes precisely what has been accomplished in its name or the consequences that must follow from the passing of the Parliament Bill. There are no signs that it regards the abridgment of the powers of the Upper House as a great democratic victory. There are, on the contrary, manifold signs that it has been bored and bewildered by the whole struggle, and that the extraordinary lassitude with which it watched the debates was a true reflex of its real attitude.

CAPTAIN GEORGE SWINTON, L.C.C.

It has been more like a bull-fight than anything else, or perhaps the bull-baiting, almost to the death, which went on in England in days of old. For the Peerage is not quite dead, but sore stricken, robbed of its high functions, propped up and left standing to flatter the fools and the snobs, a kind of painted screen, or a cardboard fortification, armed with cannon which can not be discharged for fear they bring it down about the defenders' ears. And in the end it was all effected so simply, so easily could the bull be induced to charge. A rag was waved, first here, then there, and the dogs barked. That was all.

It is not difficult to be wise after the event. Everybody knows now that with the motley groups of growing strength arrayed against them it behooved the Peers to walk warily, to look askance at the cloaks trailed before them, to realize the danger of accepting challenges, however righteous the cause might be. But no amount of prudence could have postponed the catastrophe for any length of time, for indeed the House of Lords had become an anachronism. Everything had changed since the days when it had its origin, when its members were Peers of the King, not only in name but almost in power, princes of principalities, earls of earldoms, barons of baronies. Then they were in a way enthroned, representing all the people of the territories they dominated, the people they led in war and ruled in peace. They came together as magnates of the land, sitting in an Upper House as Lords of the shire, even as the Knights of the shire sat in the Commons. And this continued long after the feudal system had passed away, carried on not only by the force of tradition, but by a sentiment of respect and real affection; for these feelings were common enough until designing men laid themselves out to destroy them.

Many things combined to make the last phase pass quickly. It was impossible that the Peerage could long survive the Reform Bill, for it took from the great families their pocket boroughs, and so much of their influence. And there followed hard upon it the educational effect of new facilities for exchange of ideas, the railway trains, the penny post, and the halfpenny paper, together with the centralization of general opinion and all government which has resulted therefrom. But above all reasons were the loss of the qualifying ancestral lands, a link with the soil; and the ennobling of landless men. Once divorced from its influence over some countryside a peerage resting on heredity was doomed; for no one can defend a system whereby men of no exceptional ability, representative of nothing, are legislators by inheritance. Should we summon to a conclave of the nations a king who had no kingdom? But the pity of it! Not only the break with eight centuries of history--nay, more, for when had not every king his council of notables?--not only the loss of picturesqueness and sentiment and lofty mien, but the certainty, the appalling certainty, that, when an aristocracy of birth falls, it is not an aristocracy of character or intellect, but an aristocracy--save the mark--of money, which is bound to take its place.

Five short years and four rejected measures. Glance back over it all. The wild blood on both sides, and the cunning on one. The foolish comfortable words spoken in every drawing-room throughout the United Kingdom. "Yes, they are terrible: what a lot of harm they would do if they could. Thank God we have a House of Lords." Think now that this was commonplace conversation only three short years ago. And all the time the ears of the masses were being poisoned. Week after week and month after month some laughed but others toiled. The laughers, like the French nobles before the Revolution, said contemptuously, "They will not dare." Why should they not? There were men among them for whom the Ark of the Covenant had no sanctity. And then, when the combinations were complete, when those who stood out had been kicked--there can be no other word--into compliance, the blows fell quickly. A Budget was ingeniously prepared for rejection, and, the Lords falling into the trap, the storm broke, with its hurricane of abuse and misrepresentation. We had one election which was inconclusive. Then befell the death of King Edward. There was a second election, carefully engineered and prepared for, rushed upon a nation which had been denied the opportunity of hearing the other side. The Government had out-maneuvered the Opposition and muzzled them to the last moment in a Conference sworn to secrecy. It was remarkably clever and incredibly unscrupulous. They won again. They had not increased their numbers, but they had maintained their position, and this time their victory, however achieved, could not be gainsaid. For a moment there was a lull, only some vague talk of "guaranties," asserted, scoffed at and denied, for the ordinary business of the country was in arrears, and the Coronation, with all its pomp of circumstance and power, all its medieval splendor and appeal to history and sentiment, turned people's thoughts elsewhere.

And then, on the day the pageantry closed, Mr. Asquith launched his Thunderbolt. Few men living will ever learn the true story of the guaranties, suffice it that somehow he had secured them. Whatever the resistance of the Second Chamber might be, it could be overcome. At his dictation the Constitution was to fall. There was no escape; the Bill must surely pass. It rested with the Lords themselves whether they should bow their heads to the inevitable, humbly or proudly, contemptuously or savagely--characterize it as you will--or whether there should be red trouble first.

Surely never in our time has there been a situation of higher psychological interest, for never before have we seen a body of some six hundred exceptional men called on to take each his individual line upon a subject which touched him to the core. I say "individual line" and "exceptional men." Does either adjective require defending?

The Peers are not a regiment, they are still independent entities, with all the faults and virtues which this implies; free gentlemen subject to no discipline, responsible to God and their own consciences alone. At times they may combine on questions which appeal to their sense of right, their sentiment, perhaps some may say their self-interest; but this was no case for combination. Here was a sword pointed at each man's breast. What, under the circumstances, was to be his individual line of conduct?