During the last few years a crisis in English politics has led to a very general demand for a modification of the status of the House of Lords, while almost similar conditions have led to the beginning at least of a similar demand for the modification of our Senate in this country. Both these upper chambers have come to represent vested interests to too great a degree. The House of Lords has been the subject of special deprecation. The remark is sometimes made that it is unfortunate that England is weighted down by this political incubus, the House of Lords, which is spoken of as a heritage from the Middle Ages. The general impression, of course, is that the English House of Lords, as at present constituted, comes down from the oldest times of constitutional government in England. Nothing could well be more untrue than any such idea.
The old upper chamber of England, the medieval House of Lords, was an eminently representative body. Out of the 625 or more of members of the English House of Lords at the present time about five hundred and fifty hold their seats by heredity. Only about seventy-five are in some sense elective. At least one-half of these elected peers, however, must be chosen from the hereditary nobility of Ireland and Scotland. Nearly nineteen-twentieths of the membership of the House of Lords, as at present constituted, owe their place in national legislation entirely to heredity. Until the reformation so-called this was not so. More than one-half of the English House of Lords, a good working majority, consisted of the Lords spiritual. Besides the Bishops and Archbishops there were the Abbots and Priors of monasteries, and the masters of religious orders. These men as a rule had come up from the people. They had risen to their positions by intellectual abilities and by administrative capacity. The abbots and other superiors of religious orders had been chosen by their monks as a rule because, having shown that they knew how to rule themselves, they were deemed most fitting to rule over others.
Even in our day, when the Church occupies nothing like the position in the hearts of the masses that she held in the ages of faith, our Catholic Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops, both here and in England, are chosen as members of arbitration boards to settle strikes and other social difficulties, because it is felt that the working class has full confidence in them, and that they are thoroughly representative of the spirit of democracy. In England Cardinal Manning served more than once in critical social conditions. In this country we have had a series of such examples. From these we can better understand what the Lords spiritual represented in the English House of Lords. There were abuses, though they were not nearly so frequent as were thought, by which unworthy men sometimes reached such positions, for men abuse even the best things, but in general these clerical members of the House of Lords were the chosen intellectual and moral products of the kingdom. Since they were without families they had [{435}] less temptation to serve personal interests and, besides, they had received a life-long training in unselfishness, and the best might be expected of them. For an ideal second chamber I know none that can compare with this old English House of Lords of the Middle Ages. How much it was responsible for the foundation of the liberties of which the English-speaking people are deservedly so proud, and which have been treated in some detail in the chapter on Origins in Law, would be interesting to trace.
III. THE PARISH, AND TRAINING IN CITIZENSHIP.
Mr. Toulmin Smith, in his book on "The Parish," and Dom Gasquet, in his volume on "The Parish Before the Reformation," have shown what a magnificent institution for popular self-government was the English medieval parish, and how much this contributed to the solution of important social problems and to the creation of a true democratic spirit. Mr. Toulmin Smith calls particular attention to the fact that when local self-government gets out of the hands of the people of a neighborhood personal civic energy goes to sleep. The feeling of mutual responsibility of the men of the place is lost, to the great detriment of their larger citizenship in municipality and nation. In the parish, however, forming a separate community, of which the members had rights and duties, the primal solid basis for government, the parish authorities took charge of the highways, the roads, the paths, the health, the police, the constabulary, and the fires of their neighborhood. They kept, besides, a registry of births and deaths and marriages. When these essentially local concerns are controlled in large bodies the liability to abuse at once becomes easy and political corruption sets in. He mentions, besides many parochial institutions, a parochial friendly society for loans on security, parish gilds for insurance, and many other phases of that thoroughly organized mutual aid so characteristic of the Middle Ages.
These parishes became completely organized, so as to be thoroughly democratic and representative of all the possibilities of local self-government under King Edward at the end of the Thirteenth and the beginning of the Fourteenth Century. Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in "After the Great Pillage," tells the story of how the parishes were broken up as a consequence of the confiscation of their endowment during the so-called reformation. The quotation from him may be found in Appendix III. in the section on "How it all stopped."
Toulmin Smith is not so emphatic, but he is scarcely less explicit than Jessopp. "The attempts of ecclesiastical authority to encroach on the civil authorities of the parish have been more successful since the reformation." As a matter of fact, at that time all government became centralized, and complete contradiction though it may seem to be of what is sometimes declared the place of the reformation in the history [{436}] of human liberty, the genuine democratic institutions of England were to a great extent impaired by the reform, and an autocracy, which later developed into an autocratic aristocracy, largely took its place. Out of that England has gradually lifted itself during the Nineteenth Century. Even now, however, as pointed out in the preceding chapter that might have been, the House of Lords is not at all what it was in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries when the majority of its members were Lords spiritual, men who had come up from the masses as a rule.
IV. THE CHANCE TO RISE.
We are very prone to think that even though there may have been excellent opportunities for the higher education in the Thirteenth Century and, in many ways, an ideal education of the masses, still there was one great social drawback in those times, the lack of opportunity for men of humble birth to rise to higher stations. Nothing, however, is less true. There probably never was a time when even members of the poorest families might rise more readily or rapidly to the highest positions in the land. The sons of village merchants and village artisans, nay, the sons and grandsons of farmers bound to the soil, could by educational success become clergymen in various ranks, and by attaining a bishopric or the position of abbot or prior of a monastery, reach a seat in the House of Lords. Most of the Lord High Chancellors of England during the Middle Ages—and some of them are famous for their genius as canon and civil lawyers, for their diplomatic abilities and their breadth of view and capacity as administrators—were the sons of humble parents.