With its larger numbers, the representative character of the House of Commons has been increased also. The steps by which it has acquired control of the executive as well as the legislative machinery of government need not be recapitulated here. Its moral, educational and social influence in the country is probably not proportionate to its actual power. The theory of delegacy so indignantly repudiated by Conservative speakers during the first Reform Bill debates is to-day accepted and actively illustrated by a majority of Members. More and more the tendency is for the constituencies to call into existence a Government to undertake a specific task of legislation whose scope is defined by the individual possessing for the moment the national confidence. To support in that special work that particular statesman, or, if he falls into disfavour, to thwart him, the householders send to St Stephen’s men whose discretion is restricted within very narrow limits.
This arrangement immensely increases the authority of the democratic favourite of the moment. It is less favourable to the prestige or usefulness of the Chamber as containing the collective wisdom of the nation. The aptitude for business talk that shall be to the point in Committee has not, when the House has a mind to it, declined. The great speeches, no sooner delivered than they constitute national text-books, are less frequent than the display of excellence in debate. Afraid of boring the Assembly, dreading the imputation of mere rhetoric, the Member who has something to say usually prefers delivering it to his constituents at his periodical reunion with them, or upon some other extra parliamentary occasion. The terse diction and urbane gravity of manner of Sir Charles Dilke made him, during his Foreign Under-Secretaryship, a parliamentary model. Such oratorical efforts as he sometimes made, were reserved for the meetings with his electors. The clever young politician, being on his promotion, speaks when he can that he may give his future chief a taste of his quality. Popular meetings therefore, and the periodical press have detracted from the House of Commons as a school of eloquence, or as a national educator. On the other hand the House of Lords has no constituencies in the background. Its time is less preoccupied. It is to-day far more representative of the English people than was the House of Commons a few years before the Queen’s accession. It does indeed chiefly consist now of men whose station and whose antecedents are not very dissimilar from those of the House of Commons before that Chamber had been thrice Reformed. Hence some of those debates, especially on foreign policy, or grave points of constitutional procedure that used to mark epochs in the Elective Chamber are now almost confined to the Hereditary House.
Outbursts of periodical petulance against the Peers will doubtless continue. Such Radicals as may be left in England to-day are at heart far more tolerant of a second Chamber, composed as that at Westminster is, than were the ‘root and branch’ men not merely of Cromwell’s day, but of half a century ago. Something therefore may perhaps be said on behalf of the opinion that any movement which may be successful against the House of Lords is likely to affect the House of Commons as well.[54]
CHAPTER XIX
CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS
Comparative youth not the only point of difference between the House of Commons to-day and formerly. Its reflection of social characteristics of the time shown in the disappearance of the old County Member extinct in the country as well as in Parliament. Modifications in personnel of the Liberal party since the great fortunes made in trade and since the first Reform Act; also in that of the Conservatives. Mr Gladstone’s opinion and experience on this subject. The obstacles in the way of oratorical efforts or success in the House of Commons, have increased under new conditions. Rivals to House as representative of national feelings. The press, the House of Lords and local debating societies.
The average age of its members is not the only respect in which, during the Queen’s reign, the House of Commons has been gradually transformed. If the country squire of the old school of Mr Henley has disappeared from it, that is because he is now as unknown in his own county as in Pall Mall. The social composition of the Whig, or Liberal, party was finally and entirely altered about the period of the first Reform Bill. The change had indeed been going forward from the earlier epoch when the middle class of commerce began to be, as from the days of the Edwards it was tending to become, the greatest power in the country. The replacement of the old Whig, with his territorial associations, by the new Liberal, like Mr Cobden, was only the last stage in the development of self-government in England. In truth, however, the kind of progress now spoken of was not limited to any single political connection. The Nestorian experience of Mr Gladstone testifies it to have been not less noticeable among Tories than among Whigs. There were not, he thinks, in 1835 five members of the Conservative party owing their seats to commercial or industrial influences. The change which has come about in the composition of the party since then is ‘simply marvellous.’[55] The specific legislation that has surrounded the English Crown by a democracy, is the extension of the lodger franchise to boroughs in 1867, to counties in 1884, and the cheapening of elections by the Corrupt Practices Bill of Sir Henry James in 1883. Notwithstanding these advances, the blend between authority and freedom has never been more fortunately conspicuous nor more wisely active in this country than since the period of its self-government began. Before 1870 it used to be said that the Pope, shorn of his temporal power, would exercise a prerogative not weaker, but stronger than when he was sole lord of Rome. Whether that prediction has, or has not been fulfilled, the influence that a constitutional Sovereign can exercise in the United Kingdom has increased rather than diminished since the days of absolute monarchy were over. Whatever in the way of political initiative the Sovereign has surrendered has in the department of social ascendancy and civic influence, been restored with interest to the Crown. The late Sir Henry Maine, differing in that respect from earlier political theorists, has in that very suppleness and elasticity which his predecessors praised discovered a source of weakness to the English constitution. So shrewd an observer as Mr Goldwin Smith bitterly complains of the fickleness of popularly elected Parliaments, and their quickness to reflect the external influences of the moment, as of the chief dangers to our political stability. Into that controversy it is needless to enter. It may seem strange to those who have had more than half a century’s experience of her loyalty to constitutional principles; but in 1837 no one certainly knew whether the young Queen would not insist upon her technical right to nominate and dismiss her Ministers at will. Less than four years had passed since her uncle William IV. had practically exercised that prerogative. In 1834 Lord Althorp was called by his father, Lord Spencer’s, death to the Upper House. Lord Grey had long wished to resign the Premiership. His unsatisfactory relations with the King made him seize this opportunity of doing so. The Sovereign accepted the resignation of the Cabinet with more than alacrity. Substantially therefore, and morally, there would seem something in the statement that William IV. dismissed the Whigs to please himself.[56] As Mr Gladstone in one of his essays has shown, the principle giving cohesion as well as joint and separate vitality to the members of a Cabinet independently of the personal pleasure of the Sovereign had been established before then. First actively applied if not discovered by Sunderland, the son-in-law of the great Duke of Marlborough, the Cabinet system, as Mr Gladstone has shown, can scarcely be said definitively to have triumphed till 1828, when George IV. reluctantly accepted Canning for Prime Minister. William IV., Mr Gladstone’s first Royal master, is, it may be noticed in passing, admitted by his early servant to have used his prerogative unwisely; but is defended from the charge of having used it unconstitutionally. So great is the distance in political thought traversed since 1834 by the statesman as well as by others.
No thought of reverting to this family precedent has ever probably occurred to her present Majesty. The comparison of the position voluntarily occupied by the Sovereign to-day to that of the permanent head of a great department of the State unchanged by Ministerial or electoral vicissitudes, roughly but not altogether inaccurately conveys some idea of the practical influence of the Crown upon the politics of the period. Continuous experience of public affairs is not however the sole source of the influence upon them which a constitutional monarch may be enabled or obliged to exercise. The familiar Bedchamber Plot, presently to be mentioned more in detail, and the momentary friction between the Sovereign and her responsible statesmen that followed it, is now known to have originated in a misapprehension. The Minister only desired that a few ladies should give up their places in the Household. The Sovereign resisted the dismissal of her entire suite. If, indeed, a solution of the difficulty had not been found; if, that is, the Queen had pressed her personal wishes to the point of the Premier’s retirement, it is by no means certain that she would have lacked constitutional arguments justifying her course. A sort of plebiscite in 1841 had been given to Sir Robert Peel. On some national issues of broader import, the popular feeling at this time notoriously had not been expressed with convincing clearness. On all sides there seemed balance and consequently confusion of public opinion. From the altitude of her throne, and by the light of her ancestral knowledge, the Queen might have argued that she saw the situation more correctly than her Ministers in Parliament or her people outside, and so have vindicated the dissolution of the House had she chosen to adopt that course. This prerogative of sanctioning the recourse of a Minister to the constituencies is one of which the Crown can never finally divest itself. In the last resort, however much he may wish to abdicate his power, the first magistrate of a State must be prepared on that point for a definite individual responsibility. The latest indubitable illustration of this truth was given in 1868. In that year Mr Gladstone’s Irish Church resolutions secured the defeat of the Disraeli Government. The Conservative Premier did not, as precedent for doing even then existed, resign immediately. He placed before the Queen the alternative of a dissolution then, or six months later, leaving absolutely to the Crown the responsibility of the choice. If that situation has not since exactly repeated itself, obviously from the very nature of things it is one which may at any moment recur. Thus it will be seen that under parliamentary government, the self effacement of the Sovereign is an impossibility. Years have passed since the sense of popular disappointment at the visible results of the Grey Reform Act found expression in Coningsby, and since the Sidonia of that romance ridiculed to his young disciple the imperfect vicariate of a House of Commons. However essential a part of our institutions it may be, its power and popularity are not to-day without competitors in popular favour. These rivals to the House of Commons are in their way as much as itself integral parts of the national life. If, notwithstanding all the gibes against it, the House of Lords, composed as it is to-day, be not a representative body, nothing which exists in England can deserve that epithet. Socially the peers of the later Victorian epoch are as a whole indistinguishable from the Commoners at St Stephen’s of an earlier epoch. They reflect at least as faithfully the variety, the interests, the pursuits, and the convictions of the nation. The great difference between election to the Lower and promotion to the Upper House is that the former generally goes by local interest. The latter depends usually on political service, on personal merit, or individual achievement. That distinction was unknown before the present generation. Macaulay, a great writer and the best informed man of his day, received a peerage. His personal claims to the honour were admitted by reason of his place in the party which from 1832 he had continuously served in Parliament. His pretensions to a peerage were emphasized by his services as a State official. He had occupied Cabinet rank; he had been Secretary at War when that office was equivalent to a Secretaryship of State. No coronet was ever given to literary genius alone before that conferred upon Lord Tennyson.