The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 81
Chapter II. — What the House of Lords Is
Chapter II.
What the House of Lords Is.
It is often assumed that those who advocate the ending or the abolition of the House of Lords are therefore necessarily opposed in principle to a Second Chamber. It would be nearer the truth to say that it is those who believe most in the importance of Second Chambers who are the most hostile to the House of Lords. That this is necessarily so will appear the moment we inquire for what purpose the Second Chamber is supposed to be needed in a representative Government, and it is still more apparent when we examine the Second Chambers of other lands.
The first duty of a Senate is to act as a revising Chamber to correct the errors and straighten out the tangles in the legislature of the popular Assembly. This duty demands for its exercise, impartiality, expert training, patience, and industry.
Its second duty is to act as a legislature, taking its fair share in the burden of legislating for the nation. The more hopelessly clogged and broken down is the popular House, the more urgent is the need that the Second Chamber should relieve it of some portion of its task.
Its third duty is to act as a strong and trusted bulwark against the aggression either of monarchs or of mobs, to defend liberty and law impartially and firmly against all assailants.
For the discharge of these duties, the first essential is the confidence of the nation, without which it cannot possess the courage to do its work. The second essential is confidence in itself: it must not feel that it is an anachronism, a mediæval ghost lingering belated in a democratic age till some revolutionary cockcrow sends it to limbo. The third essential is that its members should be held to their work by a constraining sense of public duty. And the fourth is that they should be fairly representative of the nation as a whole, and above any reproach of being connected with any special industry or interest.
For any Second Chamber to command the confidence of the whole nation it must not be identified with any section of the nation. Alike in class, in politics, and in religion, it ought to bear some proportionate relation to the people on whose behalf it legislates. To be permanently identified with either party in the State is fatal.
In the struggle upon which all nations are entering between the Haves and the Have Nots, between the Socialists and the moneyed classes, a Second Chamber should exert a moderating and balancing influence. This is not to say that it should be recruited equally from the Sansculottes and the money-bags, but it ought not to be identified with either.
The House of Lords is the only Second Chamber in the world at the present moment which is based solely upon the hereditary principle, plus the Lords Spiritual—the Bishops. That circumstance in itself is sufficient to give us pause. How is it that the universal judgment of mankind is against a strictly hereditary Second Chamber? Many Second Chambers have an infusion of the hereditary element. But the House of Lords stands alone as the one solitary survival of a hereditary House.
This is the more remarkable because it was not originally intended to be a hereditary Chamber. Mr. Edward A. Freeman has devoted much learning to demonstrate that the hereditary character was not its original essence. The hereditary legislator he regards as a late modern development which has obscured the original character of an assembly to which the King summoned whom he pleased at first, without a thought of conferring upon their descendants a right to be summoned in their turn to the legislature. Be that as it may, we have to do with things as they are to-day, and the outstanding fact is that the House of Lords is now a hereditary legislature. As such it invites, nay, challenges attack. Hereditary legislation belongs to the past. It is an anachronism and an anomaly at the present day. As Mr. Goldwin Smith says, the House of Lords was never created to serve the purpose of a Second Chamber. "It is a relic of a time in which the legislative, executive, and judicial functions lay enfolded in the same germ. The task now proposed to British statesmanship is in effect that of converting an estate of the feudal realm into a chamber of revision or senate."
Being an anachronism, the House of Lords is an assembly which is notoriously without the courage of its own convictions. It is conscious of its anomalous position, and is weak and timorous when a real Senate would be bold and strong. That, indeed, is one of the reasons why it has continued so long to exist. There are Radicals who resent any attempt to create a real Second Chamber because they regard the House of Lords as the weakest, and therefore the least mischievous, Second Chamber that the wit of man ever invented. Single Chamber Radicals, it has been wittily said, prefer to keep the House of Lords as it is for the same reason that the Russian Government preserves the Sultan at Constantinople. It is not that they love the Lords or the Turks, but they regard both Lords and Turks as less formidable obstacles to the realisation of their ulterior ambitions than any conceivable substitutes. To the revolutionist the House of Lords is almost an ideal simulacrum of a constitutional check, for it is guaranteed to disappear whenever the popular pressure rises to the point of threatened violence. But alike to the constitutional reformer and the opponent of reform, no contrivance can be so detestable as an institution which blocks the way obstinately when timely reform might avert disaster, but which vanishes from the scene the moment popular discontent develops into revolutionary fury.
The essential weakness of a hereditary House in this democratic age has been frequently deplored by staunch Conservatives. Lord Newton and Sir Herbert Maxwell are among the most recent to bear testimony in this sense. The latter, writing in 1906, said, "It would be vain to deny that the continuance of a purely hereditary Chamber in a Constitution such as ours, thoroughly democratic in theory and practice, is a salient anomaly, and as such liable to frequent and formidable attack."—( Nineteenth Century, July, 1906.) The result of being in such a position was illustrated, much to Sir Herbert Maxwell's disgust, in the passage of the Trades Disputes Bill in 1906.
The speeches of Lord Lansdowne and Lord Halsbury, as leaders of the majority, showed that they entirely shared Sir Herbert Maxwell's view of the iniquitous nature of the Bill. Lord Lansdowne told the Peers that the Bill would bring "ruin to trade, bodily suffering to individuals, and mental anguish, with loss, danger, and inconvenience to the community at large."
Lord Halsbury declared that the Bill was "dangerous, unjust, and contrary to the whole spirit of British liberty." It was "gross, outrageous, tyrannical; it legalised tyranny." It was "a disgrace to a civilised country," and contained "a section more disgraceful than any that bad ever appeared in an English statute."—(House of Lords, December 4, 1906.)
He should greatly deprecate au appeal to the people on such a ground as that. They were passing through a period when it was necessary for the House of Lords to move with great caution. Conflicts and controversies might be inevitable. But let their lordships, so far as they wore able, bo sure that if they were to join issue they did so u pon ground which was as favourable as possible In themselves. In this case the ground would be unfavourable to the House, and the juncture was one that, even were their lordships to win the victory, would be fruitless.
That really bars the claim of the House to be a revising Chamber which considers important Bills on their own merits, and reduces it to a party convention accepting the tactical decrees of the Opposition Leaders in the other House.
In my judgment the House of Lords is not a Second Chamber at all. . . . It is a permanent party organisation, controlled for party purposes and by party managers.—(Bradford, October 27, 1894.)
The House of Lords is in a most unfortunate position. If it were free to act upon its convictions as to what is best for the country it would reject unhesitatingly almost every Liberal measure sent up from the House of Commons. If the Peers did this they know they would be swept out of existence. They have, therefore, constantly to consider, not what are the merits or demerits of Liberal Bills, but whether it would be safe for them to give expression to their real sentiments. They yield everything to fear and nothing to reason. If they give way it is solely a registration of the result of a calculation that it would be dangerous to persist in their opposition to the popular demand.
The real danger of the House of Lords from a constitutional point of view is that it invites unrest, it invites agitation, and in certain cases the cup might boil over, and it might invite revolution. This is a great national question and it is a great national danger.—(Bradford, October 27, 1894.)
The House of Lords as a revising body is very much at a discount. That there is great and urgent need for a Chamber of revision cannot be denied, especially of late years, since measures have been passed undiscussed through the House of Commons by the unsparing use of the guillotine. Unfortunately the House of Lords has not risen to the occasion. Instead of revising the half-baked measures sent up from the Lower House, it has placed them on the Statute Book often without serious discussion. This slovenly habit of shirking its proper work is peculiarly manifest when a Conservative Government is in office. The House of Lords practically retires from business when its political partner has a majority in the House of Commons.
Legislatures exist in order to give statutory expression to the wishes of the legislators. Whether they do their work effectively or not is to be tested by the decisions of the Law Courts when they are called upon to interpret the statutory results of legislative activity. It is a curious fact that for the whole of the first year of the present Parliament the nation has been occupied in endeavouring to remedy the results of the imperfect drafting of three Acts of Parliament, all of which were framed by Conservative Governments and carried in their present shape by Conservative Parliaments, without a Second Chamber discovering the flaws in the drafting which nullified the intentions of their authors.
The House of Lords, as it is at present constituted, consists of three peers of the Blood Royal, 540 peers of England, Great Britain, or of the United Kingdom, 28 representative Irish peers, 16 Scotch representative peers, the 2 Archbishops and 24 Bishops of the Established Church, and 5 life peers.
Of the 600 odd peers, lay and spiritual, 400 seldom, or never, attend. The heaviest attendance occurred in 1893, when 419 peers voted against the Home Rule Bill, and 41 in its favour. In the last forty years there have only been forty divisions—just one per annum—in which more than 100 peers found themselves in the same lobby. The heaviest numbers have been on the Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, which, after they had thrown it out eight times, they suddenly accepted in 1896, without any apparent reason for this change of heart. No one was threatening them with violence, nor had any General Election been held for the express purpose of ascertaining the views of the electorate on the lawfulness of marrying sisters-in-law.
It is a popular delusion that the Peers, as a body, represent families of ancient lineage. Since 1831, no fewer than 215 peerages have been created by Liberal Governments. Of these, 30 have become extinct. In 1828, there were 128 Liberal peers. If none of them had turned their coats, there ought to-day to be 313 Liberal peers in the House of Lords. Liberalism, however, alas! does not seem to be hereditary.
For. | Against. | |
---|---|---|
1867 Disestablishment of Irish Church | 97 | 192 |
1870 University Tests Abolition | 83 | 97 |
1871 Abolition of Purchase | 82 | 162 |
1876 Burials Bill | 92 | 148 |
1880 Compensation for Disturbance Bill | 51 | 282 |
1884 County Franchise Bill | 146 | 205 |
1893 Home Rule Bill | 41 | 419 |
1906 Education Bill | 52 | 132 |
From this it would seem, with the exception of the sudden rallying of the last remnant of the Whigs to the cause of Parliamentary Reform in 1884, the Liberals have never been able to put 100 peers into the lobby in the last forty years, while the Conservatives have voted from 150 to 419. If the maximum Unionist majority may be measured by the vote against the Home Rule Bill, the Unionists have a ten-to-one majority in the House of Lords. If the divisions on the Education Bill be taken as a sample of the workaday strength of the party in the Upper House, the majority is for working purposes about three to one.
Out of 500 peers 60 can claim to have had nine predecessors in the title, only seven can claim 20. The immense majority of the peers are of modern creation.
The assumption that peers are men of such transcendent merit or such exceptional genius that all their descendants to the tenth and twelfth generation must be more fit than other men to legislate wisely for the nation, will not hold water for a moment. Genius is not hereditary neither is statesmanship. But even if it were, the origins of our titled legislators are not such as to justify any confidence in the law-making capacity of their progeny. The majority of men who are made [ unclear: peers] are men who have made money and who can afford to buy [ unclear: their] coronets directly or indirectly. How much it cost Mr. Alfred Harms worth in order to call himself Lord [ unclear: Northcliffe] is not stated in [ unclear: any] Parliamentary return. Neither do men know what money [ unclear: passed] before other wealthy men became entitled to receive the King's [ unclear: wri] summoning them to attend in their places in the House of [ unclear: Lords]. But it is perfectly well known that peerages are never bestowed [ unclear: upon] poor men. A title is the fancy trimming of a plutocrat. A big [ unclear: brewe] has not achieved the climax of his social ambition until he has [ unclear: scramble] over his beer barrels into the Gilded Chamber. The House of Lord is replenished in our day by the steady-going partisans who have [ unclear: spen] their money liberally in contesting seats in the House of Commons, [ unclear: an] who in compensation are allotted an undisturbed seat in the House [ unclear: o] Lords, not only for the rest of their days, but for their sons and their [ unclear: sons] sons after them, till the crack of doom. It is also recruited by men [ unclear: wh] are not good enough for office, and who must therefore be fobbed off [ unclear: wit] something, and who receive a peerage as a kind of consolation [ unclear: priz]. Then come notable proconsuls and ambassadors, who receive a peerage [ unclear: a] a kind of premium thrown in to gild their retiring pensions. Lord [ unclear: Milne] for instance, as a reward for having spent £250,000,000 in compelling [ unclear: th] Boers to call the states which they govern colonies instead of [ unclear: republic] was empowered to call himself Viscount Milner instead of Sir Alfred, thin stream of lawyers trickles into the House, men who have succeeded [ unclear: i] their own profession and who have done well by themselves. The [ unclear: principle] of recognising distinguished merit in every profession is good. But [ unclear: i] over-recognition is unnecessary. The incentive to become Lord Chancellor, to annex a province or to make a fortune, would lose none of its potency if, instead of a peerage with right of succession to male offspring, the fortunate hustler in the struggle for existence was compelled to content himself with a peerage for life. Even if his children were allowed to inherit the title, there is no necessity for adding thereto a prescriptive right, generation after generation, to a seat in the House of Lords.
Sir Wilfrid Lawson said that peers were made of men who had either "made much money, or bribed many voters, or brewed a great deal of beer, or killed large numbers of people." When the question "Who were their ancestors?" is looked into, it will be found that many owe their peerages to even less respectable sources than those enumerated by Sir Wilfrid Lawson. The peerages of Marlborough, Wellington, Nelson, Wolseley, Alcester, and Roberts were won by distinguished service in naval or land warfare. To these men the barracks and the quarter-deck were ante-chambers to the legislature. Even if the camp and the deck are the best schools of statesmanship, the qualities that raise a soldier or a sailor to the top of his profession are seldom transmitted to his posterity. In India they have a caste of "hereditary clerks who pray to their ink-horns," but it is only here that the sons of successful soldiers and sailors are supposed to be qualified to become hereditary legislators who make laws for the Empire. There are many peerages founded by lawyers which may be said to have some claim to represent exceptional ability. But the majority of our peerages are bestowed for any and every reason except a proved capacity to take a useful part in legislation.
The origin of some of our peerages, notably the Irish peerages, is infamous. Titles have been given to men for deeds for which they deserved whipping at the cart's tail. Peerages were recognised as an indispensable part of the currency of corruption. "The majority of Irish titles," said the Unionist historian, Mr. Lecky, "are historically connected with memories not of honour but of shame."
In the majority of cases these peerages were simple, palpable open bribes, intended for no other purpose than to secure a majority in the House of Commons. The most important of the converts was Lord Ely. He obtained a promise of an English peerage, and he brought to the Government at least eight borough seats.
But it is unnecessary to go seriatim over the black list. Sufficient has been quoted to show that the hereditary House of Lords has been often recruited by men whose deserts would have been more justly rewarded by incarceration in a convict prison. The progenitors of some of our noble legislators may have been men distinguished above their fellows for virtue and genius. But the progenitors of so many of the others were scamps and scoundrels that it is impossible to say, without looking up Debrett, whether a man is a hereditary legislator because his forefather was preeminent for rascality or for public spirit. Probably, as a rule, he belonged to the majority—he was pre-eminent for nothing, but belonged to the great army of wealthy, respectable mediocrities who rendered yeomen's service to their party, and who received the partisan's reward.