The Liberals say with Landor, “Let us try rather to remove the evils of Ireland than to persuade those who undergo them that there are none.” They are utterly opposed to the idea that it is right to give a people free representation and then deliberately to ignore all that that representation asks. They are, it is true, in a minority at this moment, but they do not forget that all great causes have three stages—first to be laughed at, next to be looked at, and last to be loved. Home Rule has certainly reached the second stage; it will soon reach the third. The Liberals have been beaten before, but they have always won in the end. And it is well to be beaten sometimes. If life were all sunshine we should find it oppressive; an occasional cloud serves to temper the heat. To the Liberals, as to nature itself, a misty morning is often the prelude to the brightest day.
XI.—WHAT SHOULD BE DONE WITH THE LORDS?
In dealing with the other questions which the Liberals will have to consider, it will be well to take them in what may be called their constitutional order, and a beginning, therefore, may be made with the reform of the House of Lords. The theory upon which that House is upheld is that it is an assembly of our most notable men, called to rule either by descent from the great ones of the past, or by the proved capacity of themselves in the present, who discuss every question laid before them with impartiality, and who act as a check upon the hasty and ill-considered legislation of the House of Commons.
So much for the theory: what of the fact? Those peers who are not creations of to-day mainly spring either from Pitt’s plutocrats or from those who have been granted their patents because of having lavishly spent their money in electoral support of some party; those who can claim their peerage by direct descent from the great ones of the past can be numbered by tens, while the whole body is numbered by hundreds; and just as a sprinkling of successful lawyers, soldiers, and brewers adds nothing to its historical character, it in no sense brings the peerage into clear and close contact with the people. As to the impartiality displayed by the House of Lords, it is notorious that in these days it is little other than an appanage of the Carlton Club, and that, whatever the Tory whips desire it to do, it accomplishes without demur. And its power as a check upon hasty and ill-considered legislation may be judged from the fact that it never dares reject a measure which public opinion strongly demands and upon which the Commons insist.
When the history of the House of Lords is studied, it will be found that during the past century it has initiated no great measure for the public good, and a hundred times has wantonly mutilated or impotently opposed the reforms the people asked. The mischief it has done touches every department of public life. Whether it was to throw out a bill abolishing the penalty of death for stealing in a shop to the value of five shillings, on the ground stated by one of the bishops in the majority that it was “too speculative to be safe;” to again and again vote down every proposal to relieve Roman Catholics and Jews from civil disabilities; to pander to the will of George IV. in the prolonged persecution of his wife; or to defeat measures calculated to place the electoral power in the hands of the people—the House of Lords has always been one of the main forces in the army of darkness and oppression. Remember that every one of the reforms the Liberals have secured within the last 50 years has been distasteful to the House of Lords, and calculate the worth or wisdom of that institution.
It does not add to the estimation of either the worth or the wisdom that the Lords have ultimately accepted what they have bitterly opposed, for if they have consistently been a stumbling-block in the path of every reform which the people now cherish their tardy repentance is of little avail as long as they pursue the same obstructive course. And it is not merely measures which they throw out, but measures which they mutilate, that render them a power for harm. For the Lords are like rabbits; it is not so much what they swallow as what they spoil which makes them so destructive.
Those who defend the institution as it exists should, therefore, be called upon to point to some one definite case in recent history in which it can be said, “Here has the House of Lords done good.” Mere talk about the admirable administrators and the dexterous debaters it contains is no argument; for if the legislative functions of the peers were abolished to-morrow, those among them who were worthy a seat in the House of Commons would have no difficulty in securing it. What Liberals object to is the being subjected to the caprices, the passions, and the prejudices of some five hundred men, the majority of whom are not merely unskilled in legislative faculty and unqualified in administrative experience, but are drawn from a single class out of touch and sympathy with the mass of the people.