Gleanings in Europe

by James Fenimore Cooper

I was a little disappointed with the physique of the peers, who are, by no means, a particularly favourable specimen of the English gentlemen, in this respect. Perhaps I have never seen enough of them together to form a correct opinion. A Lord A——, whom I met at Paris, told me that his father had taken the trouble to count the pig-tails in the House of Lords, at the trial of the late queen, and that he found they considerably exceeded a hundred. I was aware this body was somewhat behind the age in certain essentials, but I did not know, until then, that this peculiarity extended to that precise portion of the head.

The peers of Great Britain, considered as a political body, are usurpers in the worst sense of the word. The authority they wield, and the power by which it is maintained, are the results neither of frank conquest, nor of legally delegated trusts, but of insidious innovations effected under the fraudulent pretences of succouring liberty. They were the principal, and, at that time, the natural agents of the nation, in rescuing it from the tyranny of the Stuarts, and profiting by their position, they have gradually perverted the institutions to their own aggrandisement and benefit. This is substantially the history of all aristocracies, which commence by curbing the power of despots, and end by substituting their own.

There exists a radical fault in the theory of the British government, which supposes three estates, possessed of equal legislative authority. Such a condition of the body politic is a moral impossibility. Two would infallibly combine to depose the other, and then they would quarrel which was to reap the fruits of victory. The very manner in which the popular rights were originally obtained in England, go to prove that nothing of the sort entered into the composition of the government at the commencement. Boroughs were created by royal charters. Even the peers were emanations of the royal will, and, much as might be expected, the creatures of the king’s pleasure.

In the progress of events, the servants became too strong for their masters. They set aside one dynasty and established another, under the form of law. Since that time they have been gradually accumulating force, until all the branches of government are absorbed in one; not absolutely in its ordinary action, it is true, but in its fundamental power. Parliament has got to be absolute, and the strictly legislative part of it, by establishing the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, has obtained so much control over the part which is termed the executive, as to hold it completely within its control.

An Englishman is very apt to affirm that the President of the United States has more power than the King of England. This he thinks is establishing the superior liberty of his own country. He is right enough in his fact, but strangely wrong in the inference. The government of the United States has no pretension to a trinity in its elements, though it maintains one in its action; and that of Great Britain pretends to one in its elements, while it has a unity in its action. The president has more real power than the king, because he actually wields the authority attributed to him in the Constitution, and the king has less real authority than the president, because he does not exercise the authority attributed to him by the Constitution, even as the Constitution is now explained, different as that explanation is from what it was a century since.

Were the King of England to name a ministry that did not please his parliament, which in substance is pleasing those who hold the power to make members, that ministry could not stand a week after parliament assembled. If the two houses of parliament were composed of men of different interests, or of different social elements, there would still be something like an apparent balance in the composition of the state; but they are not. The peers hold so much political control in the country, as, virtually, to identify the two bodies, so far as interests are concerned. Without this, there would be no harmony in the government, for where there are separate bodies of equal nominal authority in a state, one must openly control the others, or all must secretly act under the same indirect influence; not the influence of a common concern in the public good, for rulers never attend to that, until they have first consulted their own interests, as far as their powers will conveniently allow. In point of fact then, the peers of England and the commons of England are merely modifications of the same social castes.

In looking over the list of the members of the House of Commons, I find one hundred and sixty with those titles which show that they are actually the sons of peers, and when we remember the extent and influence of intermarriages, it would not probably exceed the truth were I to say that more than half the lower house stand, as regards the upper, either in the relation of son, son-in-law, brother, or brother-in-law, nephew, or uncle.[18] But nobility is by no means the test of this government. It is, strictly, a landed, and not a titled aristocracy. There are seventy-four baronets among the commons, and these are usually men of large landed estates. If we take the whole list, we shall not probably find a hundred names that, socially, belong to any other class than that of the aristocracy, strictly so called, or that are not so nearly allied to them in interests, as virtually to make the House of Commons, identical, as a social caste, with the House of Lords. It is of little moment whether these bodies are hereditary or elective, so long as both represent the same set of interests.

The aristocracy of England is checked less by any of the contrivances of the state, than by the extra-constitutional power of public opinion. This is a fourth estate in England, and a powerful estate every where, that, in an age like this perhaps does more than written compacts to restrain abuses. It has even curbed despotism over more than half of Europe. As the influence of public opinion will always bear the impress of the moral civilization of a people, England is better off, in this particular, than most of her neighbours, and it is probably one great reason why her aristocracy has not fleeced the nation more than it has, though I don’t know that it has any thing to reproach itself with, in the way of neglect, on this score.

The perpetuity of the ascendancy of the English aristocracy is a question much mooted just now, and I have frequently heard in private, sturdy and frank opinions on the subject. There are three prominent facts that, I think, must soon produce essential changes in this feature of the English system. In carrying out the scheme of spreading the power of the peers over the commons, as it has been done by personal wealth, individuals of the body have become offensively powerful to the majority of their own order. Influence is getting into too few hands to be agreeable to those, who, having so much, would wish to share in all. This is one evil, and I think when reform does occur, as occur it must, that there will be a great effort to arrest it, when this one point shall have been rectified.

But there is a far more powerful foe to the existing order of things. The present system is based on property, for, with a king without authority, the power of the Lords, unsupported by that of the Commons, would not be worth a straw in this age; and, though land may not be, the balance of power, as it is connected with money, is rapidly changing hands in England. There has arisen, within the last fifty years, a tremendous money-power, that was formerly unknown to the country. Individuals got rich in the last century, where classes get rich now; and instead of absorbing the new men, as was once done, the aristocracy is in danger of being absorbed by them.