Chapter V.

Their Record on Reform.

There is something peculiarly offensive in the assumption of the House of Lords that they have a right to interfere in the methods by which the House of Commons is elected. Individual members of the House of Lords are expressly forbidden to interfere in the election of Members of Parliament. But collectively the House of Lords has always asserted a right to interfere in the election of the House of Commons as a whole. It might reasonably be thought that the House of Commons, and the House of Commons alone, had a right to decide questions relating exclusively to the manner in which it was elected. The Commons do not interfere in the way in which the hereditary Legislature renews itself. That is left to the Peers themselves. But the House of Lords constantly interferes in the way by which the House of Commons renews itself. Whether it is in prescribing who shall be allowed to vote, or how they shall vote and in what constituencies, the House of Lords has repeatedly overruled the decisions of the House of Commons, although seldom, if ever, to any good purpose.

The Parliament of 1906 afforded two illustrations of this meddling usurpation on the part of the Peers. There were few questions upon which the whole Liberal party was so unanimously pledged by the constituencies as the abolition of plural voting. The watchword, "One man, one vote," had long ago been accepted by the whole of the Liberals of the country without a single dissentient voice. An overwhelming majority of the House of Commons was elected to carry out, among other things, the abolition of the plural vote. In obedience to this pledge, the Government in 1906 introduced and carried through the House of Commons a Bill which deprived the pluralists of all votes but one, leaving them the option to decide which of their many votes they desired to retain. This Bill, after an exhaustive debate in Committee, was read a third time by 333 to 104. But when it came before the House of Lords, they threw it out after a two hours' debate by 143 to 43 on the second reading. A similar course was taken with regard to the London Elections Bill in 1908.

These are the latest instances, and not the least characteristic, of the insolence of the Peers in dealing with reforms exclusively relating to the Lower House.

In the last chapter the story has been told of the desperate tenacity with which the House of Lords attempted to deny the great body of the people the right to any voice in the election of their own representatives. They [unclear: yielded] to terrorism and the threat of the King to swamp them by the [unclear: creation] of sufficient peers to overcome their opposition. The Lords did not seriously mutilate the Reform Bill of 1832. Their fear was too great. page 29 They contrived, however, to save the freemen from political extinction. This change was reluctantly assented to by the Commons, but in other respects the Bill remained unaltered. The new constituencies, thus inoculated with corruption by the express action of the Lords, never rid themselves entirely of the taint. The evidence given before the Electoral Commissions even in recent times proves only too clearly how deep the canker has eaten into the system of popular representation. For that, as for many other similar blessings, we still "thank God for the House of Lords." Unable to prevent the people from electing their own representatives, the patrons of Gatton and Old Sarum avenged their defeat by tainting at its source the fountain of popular power.

It was not merely by insisting that the freemen should remain on the register that the House of Lords provided for the corruption of the new constituencies. When the reformed House of Commons was confronted with the evidence of the corrupt practices which prevailed at the first general election after the Reform Act, its efforts to extirpate corruption were frustrated by the deliberate and persistent refusal of the Lords to assent to the remedial measures sent up to them by the Commons. The most glaring cases of corruption reported after that general election were those of Warwick, Stafford, Hertford, and Carrickfergus. The House of Commons sent up Bills to the House of Lords disfranchising the corrupt boroughs. The House of Lords refused to accept the evidence taken by the Commons, and insisted upon hearing the witnesses at the bar of the House. As a result the corruption went unpunished. The House of Commons postponed the issue of the new writs; and even of this complaints were raised in the House of Lords that they were exceeding them rights. Although gross bribery was proved to have prevailed in the peccant boroughs, it was maintained that the House of Commons ought to issue the writs, in order to make its numbers complete. But that was not all.

In the fervour of its reforming zeal, the House of Commons sent up to the House of Lords a drastic Corrupt Practices Bill—not so drastic, it is true, as Sir Henry James's Draconian Bill, but a measure which, if passed in its entirety, would have done much to check corruption. The House [unclear: of] Lords consented to read it a second time on condition that it was referred to a Select Committee. By this Select Committee it was completely remodelled. Said Lord John Russell: "The amendments which had beer made by the Lords in this Bill were of so extensive a character as almost to render it an entirely new measure." The provisions calculated to make, it effective were struck out, and in their stead clauses were inserted giving;, the Peers a right to appoint five of their number to sit with seven members, of the House of Commons to try bribery cases, under the presidency of [unclear: a] judge. The claim of the Peers to interfere with the trial of election petitions directed against the seats of members of the House of [unclear: Commons] was naturally resented by the latter Assembly, and as it was too late in the Session (August 7th) to consider what was practically a new Bill, the Commons regretfully sacrificed their Bill.

Two years later the House of Commons made another attempt to [unclear: deal] with one of the offending boroughs. Stafford was notoriously corrupt. [unclear: It] ten years it was proved that five elections had led to an expenditure of [unclear: no] less than £36,582 over a constituency of 1,270, of whom only 1,100 [unclear: cam] to the poll. A corrupt expenditure averaging £3 per voter per annum had been kept up for ten years. Direct bribery and wholesale [unclear: treatin] prevailed to a frightful extent, and the House of Commons determined [unclear: t] make an example of the borough. But they reckoned without the [unclear: Peers] page 30 Lord Ashburton protested against the idea that a borough should bo disfranchised for treating—" ordinary treating "—and the Bill was thrown out by 55 votes to 4.

Twelve years later the House of Commons made another attempt to get rid of the corruption which disgraced so many constituencies. It sent up, in 1848, a Bill to the House of Lords, which ordered a Special Commission to investigate corrupt practices in constituencies where a Committee of the House of Commons reported they prevailed. As it did not reach the Lords till the 24th of August, their lordships decided it was too late to consider it, although Parliament did not rise till September, and thus another attempt to deal with the evil fell through in the Upper Chamber. Next year the attempt was renewed. A Bribery Bill was passed through all its stages and sent up to the House of Lords in time to be read a first time on July 16th. A fortnight later the Peers threw it out on the motion for second reading, chiefly on account of the "monstrous" proposition that when a man had been declared by the unanimous verdict of an Election Committee to have been guilty of bribery, he should be struck off the electoral list for the rest of his life, and another attempt on the part of the Commons to prevent corruption was thwarted in the House of Lords.

It is unnecessary to pursue this theme. Enough has been said to show that if corruption has eaten into our democratic institutions, the aristocratic branch of the Legislature is largely responsible for the failure of all the remedies devised for its extirpation. The rejection of Bribery Bills was only one method of manifesting their antipathy to cheap and pure elections. The proposal to limit the polls in counties to one day instead of two had to undergo in 1852 the ordeal of rejection by the Lords before it was passed into law.

Measures adding to the number of electors were almost always rejected. In 1837 a Bill enabling duly qualified electors to vote if they had paid up their rates to within six months of voting, instead of up to the time of voting, and another permitting electors to vote, although they had changed their residence between one registration and the other, were both rejected on the ground that they added to the numbers on the register. In 1838 the Lords proposed, by adding a new clause to a Bill sent up from below, to deprive those of the franchise who exercised it as trustees, but the Commons preferred to lose their Bill altogether rather than accept such an amendment. The tendency has always been in the same direction, and every recognition of the right to vote has been gained after successive prolonged struggles against the opposition of the House of Lords.

In 1867 the second Reform Act was passed without being first rejected by the Peers. The cause of this was the fact that a Reform Bill had already fallen through in the House of Commons, and the second Bill was introduced by a Conservative Government. But even the handiwork of Lord Derby and Mr. Disraeli could not escape the reactionary meddling of the Peers. They doubled the copyhold qualification of voters in counties, stipulated that elections should he conducted by voting-papers, and created the three-cornered constituencies. The two former amendments were struck out in the Commons, but the last was permitted to remain.

Another illustration of the attitude of the House of Lords to questions of Parliamentary reform is supplied by their treatment of the Ballot Act. Although Mr. Berkeley succeeded in carrying his resolution in favour of the ballot nearly thirty years before, the subject did not come before the Peers until 1871. Smarting under the sense of defeat on the abolition of purchase in the Army, the Lords threw out the Ballot Bill by 97 to 48. In page 31 1872, although no additional reason had been advanced in its favour beyond the fact that there had been an autumnal agitation against the House of Lords, they read the Bill a second time by 88 votes to 58. In Committee, however, they rendered the Bill useless by making secret voting optional by 83 to 67. The opposition of the Commons led them to reconsider their position and annul their vote. The Bill ultimately became law without any further mutilation beyond an infringement of the secrecy of the ballot in the case of illiterate voters and the limitation of the Bill to a period of seven years. The same animus against secret voting showed itself the same year in the rejection outright of the proposal to elect School Boards by ballot. The majority, however, was small, and the vote a few years afterwards was annulled by the Lords at the demand of a Conservative Government.

The last great struggle between the Peers and the people took place in 1884 over the Extension of the Franchise. Mr. Gladstone's Bill, which was expected to add at least two million householders to the electorate, passed through the Commons with decisive majorities. But the Lords insisted that the measure should also include the provisions for the Redistribution of Seats which the Government proposed to embody in a subsequent Bill. In order to meet their objections, the Government gave them an outline of the principles upon which they thought Redistribution should proceed, and they inserted a clause in the Bill providing that none of the newly enfranchised should vote before January 1, 1886, so as to guard against a dissolution before Redistribution. As the Peers were not satisfied with these safeguards, the Government made a further proposal to the effect that both Houses should unite in passing identical resolutions setting forth that they had passed the Franchise Bill in reliance on the pledges of Her Majesty's advisers to introduce the Redistribution Bill in the following year, and that these resolutions should be presented by a; joint address to the Crown, so as to make it absolutely certain that Redistribution should be taken in the next Session. This also was rejected, and the House of Lords on July 8th, by a majority of 205 to 146, refused to read the Bill a second time, although they passed a resolution expressly concurring in its principle.

Then ensued a great storm of popular indignation. Mr. Gladstone sacrificed all the other measures promised for the year and announced his intention to hold an Autumn Session to pass the Bill straightway through the Commons again. A large number of meetings were held throughout the country to protest against the action of the Peers, and a huge demonstration was held in Hyde Park. "Fifty Years of the House of Lords" was widely circulated. The late John Bright said of it: "It presents a picture of class selfishness and obstinate resistance to what is liberal and just which would be astounding if we had not been so long accustomed to it."

Rival "demonstrations" in support of the Peers also took place They were comparatively few and feeble, but they afforded Mr. Gladstone who deprecated the raising of a great constitutional question, an opportunity which he eagerly embraced of entering into an arrangement with the Opposition.

The deadlock was removed by a compromise. After the [unclear: Autum] Session had begun, and the Franchise Bill had been carried through [unclear: the] Commons, the Government undertook to submit a draft [unclear: Redistribution] Bill to the leaders of the Opposition, and to move the second reading [unclear: o] the latter Bill simultaneously with the passing of the Franchise [unclear: Bil] page 32 through Committee in the Lords. These terms were accepted, and the Franchise Bill became law on December 6th.

This claim of the Peers to insist upon a dissolution before accepting the deliberate vote of the House of Commons as an expression of the national opinion has been raised again in even more preposterous terms. In 1884 the House of Commons was four years old. Mr. Gladstone's Government had been shaken by the Irish crisis. Bye-elections had gone against him; his majority had dwindled, and was dwindling monthly. In 1906 the House of Commons was fresh from the constituencies. The ranks of the Liberals were unbroken; their numerical strength, tested by the division lobbies, was more than double that of Mr. Gladstone in 1884; the bye-elections showed no ebb in the floodtide of Liberal enthusiasm. Yet their advocates insisted that the Government must seek a fresh verdict from the Constituencies before they could expect the submission of the Peers! Such a claim, when put forward in 1884, scandalised the constitutional page 33 soul of that stout; Conservative, Sir William Anson, who, writing thirteen years later, said:—

In 1884 the House of Lords not only pushed to an extreme limit their legislative rights as against the House of Commons, but even encroached upon the royal prerogative in respect of the dissolution of Parliament, The question of dissolution arose from the mode in which the majority in the House of Lords identified their House with the interests of the Conservative party.—("Reign of Queen Victoria," p. 134.)

Mr. Gladstone, as we learn from Lord Morley's book, was alarmed at the growing agitation. He did his best to damp it down. The Lords on their part intimated their readiness to accept an even more democratic Redistribution Bill than that which the Liberals had contemplated if they were but provided with a golden bridge to retreat from their dangerous position. To the no small indignation of the Radicals, Mr. Gladstone consented to provide that bridge. The Peers agreed to the enfranchisement of the county householders and to the introduction of single member constituencies, providing that their face was saved by an arrangement which would enable them to say that they had carried the technical point of dealing with both questions at once. Mr. Gladstone, who was always open to bargains of that sort, jumped at the offer, and the crisis was promptly ended.