Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885

by Various

Nor has the doctrine of spiritual equality been without its effect in consoling the lowly for their inferiority of rank. Hereafter scientific conviction, derived from the study of the social organism, may supply the place of religious impressions as a motive for acquiescence in things as they are. At present it is the destructive process of science that has almost exclusively taken place in the mind of the Radical proletarian. Believing now that this world is all, he naturally desires to grasp his full share of its good things without delay. His sensibility having been quickened with his intelligence, he feels inferiority as well as privation, and is impelled by social envy as well as by desire. His education has advanced just far enough to enable him to imbibe theories which coincide with his wishes. If he cannot understand the fine reasonings of Mr. George, he can understand the confiscation, and he thinks that so much fine reasoning must make the confiscation moral. Communism and semi-communism are rife; there is a tendency to them even at the Universities, and in other high places. Perhaps the loss of faith in the Church leads some to see an indemnity for it in a communistic polity. If there is not in England, as there is in Germany, a strong Socialistic party, there appears to be a growing disposition to make a Socialistic use of the suffrage. There is certainly in many quarters an exaggerated idea of the powers and duties of the fictitious being styled the State. One conspicuous candidate for the succession to the leadership, at all events, is evidently holding out hopes of a Socialistic system of high taxation for the benefit of those who produce least, and he appears inclined to head a crusade against the property of all landowners, and of all owners of houses in towns. Nor is he without rivals in this quest of popularity on the Tory side. The ball of agrarianism which has been set rolling by recent legislation in Ireland, rolls on, and its course is not likely to stop in Skye. All this may be working for good. The writer of this paper, at all events, has no inclination to take the despondent view. But surely there is enough to warn statesmen that they must exercise forecast, that they must try, while they can, to secure to the nation a stable and rational government; that they must not hastily divorce power from intelligence and responsibility; that they must not plunge the country headlong into unorganized and unregulated democracy. If this Parliament comes to an end without having created any conservative safeguards, while it has instituted a suffrage destined evidently soon to be universal, the reins will have been thrown on the necks of the horses, and the last leverage of Conservatism will be gone. M. Taine has just shown us whither horses with the reins upon their necks may run, and what wreck they may make of their own hopes. It is true that great resignation, and even apathy, has been sometimes shown by the masses in times of suffering from dearth. No doubt the masses move slowly; but you incite them to move when you thrust into their hand the vote and send among them people to teach them that by a violent use of it they can raise themselves to the level of the rich. Able and powerful men of the ruling class itself are now, either from philanthropy or from party motives, doing their utmost to pave the way for a Socialistic revolution.

Of all the calamities that ever befell the human race, the greatest was the French Revolution. Wide, happily, is the difference between the France of a century ago and the England of the present day. In the case of England there is no Versailles, no deficit, no gulf between the aristocracy and the middle classes; while there is diffused intelligence instead of a night of political ignorance in which all sorts of spectres stalked, general habits of self-government in place of a paralyzing centralization, and a political character, as we may flatter ourselves, stronger and sounder than was that of the French. Still there are some points of similarity, especially the dangerous conjunction of social or agrarian with political revolution. In England, as in the France of the eighteenth century, scepticism has gained the minds of the ruling class; with their convictions their nerve is shaken, and it is difficult to see who would stop the avalanche if once it should begin to slide. Nor is there wanting a sybaritic Jacobinism which ominously reminds us of the Palais Royal. Pleasure-hunting and frivolity, athletic and of other kinds, appear to have reached a great height, and to public questions a sort of careless fatalism seems to prevail. No doubt there is still plenty of force and of seriousness in the country; but something like a convulsion may be needed to bring them to the front. The masses in France, though galled by the burdens of feudal lordship were not, properly speaking, Socialistic. Socialism proper can hardly be said to have shown its head before the conspiracy of Babœuf; and the nation was still at the core monarchical and Catholic, as was proved by the ease with which both monarchy and Church were restored by Napoleon. Should the manufacturing and maritime supremacy of England be still more severely challenged and continue to decline, an amount of suffering might be produced among her people hardly less than was, in reality, that of the people in France. If Socialistic legislation commences in earnest, and, as the inevitable consequence, property begins to shrink from circulation and investment, stoppage of industry and dearth of bread cannot fail to ensue, and we know what the effects of these would be in the middle of a Socialistic revolution. Much ought to be risked, if there were real hope of equalizing, by any political action, the human lot. But who seriously believes this to be possible? Who does not know that the things which we deplore and are slowly mending will only be made worse by convulsions?

Surely, if this work were in the hands of patriotic and comprehensive statesmanship, not in those of party, there would be, instead of a mere extension of the Franchise, a revision of the Constitution. Before, by the admission of a large popular element, the strain upon the conservative and regulative parts of the machine was increased, those parts would be looked over and put in order; this question of the Second Chamber would be settled, and if the result was a determination to reform the House of Lords, that determination would be carried into effect, and the institution would be placed in a condition to do its work, before the next general election.

In a reform of the House of Lords it is difficult to feel any confidence. The hereditary principle seems to be thoroughly dead. In the Middle Ages it had a root in the faith and in the ignorance of mankind; it had its temporary uses, and at the same time it had its correctives. A mediæval lord was obliged to exert himself that his lordship might not be taken by another. A mediæval king was obliged to exert himself if he wished to keep his crown upon his head. Now, except in the rare cases of men moulded of Nature’s finest clay, with whom nobility acts really as an obligation, hereditary rank and wealth kill duty in the cradle. It is found impossible to get a decent attendance in the House of Lords. In answer to Lord Rosebery’s appeal, a Peer says that he will be happy to attend if the nation will re-enact the Corn Laws, so as to enable him to keep a house in town. To indulge a mere whim, the hereditary wearers of the crown refuse to visit Ireland, and thus fling away the affections of the Irish people. The historical cause has been tried during this controversy and the issue is not doubtful. We have seen how the House of Lords, since it assumed its present character, which it did under the second Tudor, has worked. That it has acted as a court of mature wisdom, revising on grounds of impartial statesmanship the rash decisions of the popular House, is as complete a fable as its Norman pedigree. It has simply opposed the selfish resistance of a privileged order to change of every kind. Could it have its way, not only Rotten Boroughs and Sinecurism, but the old Criminal Code, Religious Intolerance, Arbitrary Imprisonment, the Censorship of the Press, the Paper Duty, even Slavery and the Slave Trade, would still be cumbering the earth; or, rather, long ago, the nation would have been compelled to choose between political death and revolution. To fear, on questions which caused national excitement, the House of Lords has at last given way; but not to reason and justice. A multitude of minor reforms it has strangled, by its obstructiveness, altogether. The only great measure of change which this organ of mature wisdom ever readily passed was the Franchise Bill of 1867, which was described by its own author as a leap in the dark, and had been devised with the view of swamping progressive intelligence in a flood of ignorance and beer. Nor has obstruction been the only sin of that order of which the House of Lords is the organ; it has given to the general policy of England a class bias; it stimulated the crusade against the French Revolution, and unlike the crusading Barons of the Middle Ages, it stayed at home revelling in high rents and in a mass of sinecures, of which it sacrificed not one penny, while the people bled and starved in a cause which was not theirs. It has fostered militarism generally as a diversion from domestic reform. On economic questions the legislation of the Lords has been mere landlordism. As mere landlords they have acted, from the day on which they sold the national religion to the Pope for a quiet title to the Church lands, to the day on which they passed the Arrears Bill, after showing their sense of its character, in order that they might recover some of their back rents. If twice in the course of their long history they have been for a moment on the side of freedom, fear for their Church lands, combined with jealousy of ecclesiastical favorites, was the cause. The period of their most complete ascendency, in the last century, was the epoch of political corruption; and the conduct of the House at the time of the railway mania, when it formed a Ring in the landlord interest, was, to say the least, not a proof that hereditary wealth lifts its possessor above commercial motives. Many histories are darker than that of the House of Lords; few are less heroic; and the facts are now deeply imprinted on the minds of the people. Faith in the “noble blood” of the scapegrace son of a law lord, once dissipated, is not likely to return. The hereditary wealth itself, which is the real basis of aristocratic influence, and without which the Peerage would be a thing of shreds and patches, is reduced by agricultural depression, and will be greatly broken up by the abolition of primogeniture and entail,—a change which is sure to come, for it will be found that the only antidote to agrarian communism is the free acquisition of land. The hereditary principle is dead, and can serve England or civilized humanity no more. Introduced into, or retained in, any Senate, it will carry with it the seeds of death. As soon as it obeys, as obey it certainly will, its obstructive instinct, the cry against it will be renewed. It will not become less odious by becoming weaker. If the life element which it is proposed to introduce remains antagonistic to the hereditary element, the tribunal of mature wisdom will be divided against itself and fresh conflicts will ensue. If it is assimilated, you will have the House of Lords over again, and more odious than ever, since the life element will be regarded as having apostatized and betrayed its trust.

Yet the whole theory of a Second Chamber as a necessary part of Parliamentary institutions appears to have no other origin nor any sounder basis than a mistaken view of the nature of the House of Lords, which all the world has supposed to be a Senate, when in fact it was an estate of the feudal realm, representing not a higher grade of deliberative wisdom but simply the special interest of the great landowners. The only valid argument in favor of the retention of the House of Lords is, in fact, the difficulty which the Bicamerists find in devising anything to be put in its place. Nomination is a total failure; the nominated Senate of Canada is a legislative cypher, the debates of which are not even reported, and the places in it are a mere addition to the bribery fund of the party leader. If both Chambers are elective, as in Victoria, the result is a collision and a deadlock, out of which, in the case of sovereign assemblies, there would be no colonial officer or governor to point a way. Co-option in any form, or election by an order, would give us the oligarchy over again, perhaps in a worse shape than ever, since the members would have to cultivate the good graces of a privileged and reactionary electorate. Not only as to the mode in which their Senate is to be elected are the Bicamerists at fault; they are equally at fault as to the special materials of which it is to be composed. If age or wealth is to be the qualification, impotence or odium will be the result. If the wisest are to have their seats in the Senate, the popular House will be deprived of its best leaders. Supreme power must centre somewhere; it will centre in that body which most directly represents the national will. Let the assembly, then, which is the seat of supreme power, be the seat of collective wisdom. Concentrate in it, as far as possible, all the best available elements, those of a conservative character as well as the rest. Frankly recognize its authority, and invest it at the same time with a full measure of responsibility. Notoriously the existence of a Senate diminishes the sense of responsibility in the popular chamber, and diminishes it out of proportion to the control really exercised; for a Senate soon gets tired of incurring the unpopularity of rejection. This surely is a more rational and hopeful plan than that of abandoning the seat of supreme power to popular impulse, and affixing by way of safeguard an artificial regulator to its side. Checks and balances belong to mechanics, not to politics; in mechanics you can apportion force, in politics force cannot be apportioned, though nominal authority may. That there are good and useful elements in the House of Lords, especially among the new creations, nobody doubts. Let them be transferred, with any social influence which in these democratic times may adhere to them, to a sphere where they can act with effect. At present they are ostracized by seclusion, as is clearly perceived by some Radicals, who on that ground deprecate a reform of the House of Lords. Let Lord Salisbury go to the Commons and Lord Hartington stay there. The Lords are warned by their partisans against imitating the foolish abdication of the French aristocracy in the famous holocaust of feudal titles. To that it may come, if they do not take care. But this is an earlier stage of the revolution, and the day of grace has not yet expired. Let the Lords do that which the French aristocracy ought to have done, and by doing which they might have averted the catastrophe. Let them at once go over frankly to the Tiers Etat, and strengthen by their accession the conservative forces in the national assembly. Convulsive efforts to retain an obnoxious privilege only inflame the revolutionary spirit, and at the same time make it still more desperately difficult for rational statesmanship to deal with the situation. Tory democracy is apparently a plea for founding aristocracy on demagogism, and for stemming Socialism by heading it and combining it with a foreign policy of violence. Can the House of Lords be so blind as not to see in what such a course must end? What has been the end of other attempts of privilege to save itself by an alliance with extreme Radicalism against moderate reform?

Not in a Second Chamber, patched up or newly created, but in a well-regulated franchise and a rational mode of election, are effectual securities for the permanent ascendancy of national reason over passion in the legislature to be found. The electorate has been dealt with by successive reformers in the belief that its functions, and therefore the necessary qualifications for it, have remained unchanged. But its functions have been greatly changed, and have become infinitely more important and difficult than they originally were. Instead of merely choosing delegates to give his assent to taxation, the elector is now called upon to choose a ruler, and, at the same time, virtually to decide upon the general policy of the country. This is beyond the capacity of any ordinary voter. Everybody knows what happens, and until an immense progress shall have been made in popular education, must happen—how the intelligent elector, even supposing him to escape bribery and all other corrupt influences, votes at best for the Blue or Yellow ticket, and too often votes not even for the Blue or Yellow ticket, but with reference to some merely local or personal question, some fancy or antipathy, leaving the broad interests of the country and the qualifications essential to a legislator altogether out of sight. The author of “Round My House” tells us how opinion among the French peasantry in certain districts was swept by an angry fancy about a reduction in the value of a coin. What chance would Chatham or Peel, representing a great national policy, have stood against the lowest demagogue if he had been on the unpopular side of the question about the Cider Tax or Wood’s halfpence? An ordinary citizen, occupied in trade or manual labor, has not the leisure, if he had the knowledge and capacity, to study the complex questions put before him. Yet there are reformers who desire to set Hodge to choose not only out of the worthies of his own neighborhood, but out of all the notabilities of the country, among whom the largest vote would probably be polled by the Tichborne Claimant. From selfishness the poor are at least as free as the rich; they would vote at least as well if they knew how; but the knowledge is to them unattainable. In no sphere but that of politics does anybody propose to thrust upon people power of which it is manifestly impossible that they should make an intelligent use. Not only is it manifestly impossible that the people should make an intelligent use of the power of direct election to the governing assembly and of determining its policy: it is morally impossible that they should really make use of it at all. They are unorganized, and, though they live in the same district, unconnected as a rule with each other: they have no means of taking counsel together for the selection of a member. The selection must therefore be made for them by some self-constituted agency. That agency is the Caucus, into the hands of whose managers and masters the representation, styled popular, really falls.

Both the party organizations in England are now adopting the system, and thus confiscating the suffrage which they profess by legislation to bestow. One of them at least already has the Boss, and both of them will soon have the complete machine, with a host of professional politicians, recruited from the class which prefers place-hunting to honest trades. Government, in a word, will fall into the hands of irresponsible intriguers, and will be dominated in ever-increasing measure by Knavery and corruption. Nor is there any assignable remedy for the evil; the wire-pullers and professional politicians alone can give their time to the elections, and therefore it is hardly possible to organize the means of casting off their yoke. Attending “primaries” is often preached as the duty of the patriotic citizen; but the patriotic citizen who does attend the primary finds everything arranged by the wire-pullers beforehand and himself impotent and a laughing-stock. This will not appear in the first flush of a revolutionary movement, while the present leaders retain their ascendancy, but it will appear as soon as the revolution settles down. Public education, it is true, has been introduced in England; but it has always existed in the United States, and it has not saved that country from the Boss. To save the country from the Boss is now the highest aim of the best citizens; but they will hardly succeed without a constitutional change.

American reformers, if they want to go to the root of the evil, have a light to guide their efforts in the successful working of their Senate, which, being elected indirectly, through the State Legislatures, is a body of remarkable ability, and possesses the general confidence of the nation; while the House of Representatives, elected directly by the people, that is, by the wire-puller, who usurps the functions of the people, presents a most unfavorable contrast. Those who have sat in both say the difference between the two political atmospheres is immense. Rid the Senate of Party, and it would be about as good a governing body as any nation could reasonably desire. Indirect elections through local councils is the plan which seems to promise the best central legislature; and it takes from the primary elector nothing which at present is really his. Ordinary knowledge and intelligence ought to suffice to enable a man to choose from among his neighbors those who are fittest to manage his local affairs. But the local councillors would be a comparatively picked body; they might reasonably be expected to give their minds to the central election; they would not be too many for concert; and they would exercise their power as a trust under the eyes of the people. As permanent bodies they could not, like the College of Presidential Electors, be reduced to the mere bearers of a mandate. A high trust, by adding to the importance and dignity of local councils, would be likely to draw into them better men. Through such an organization, apparently, opinion might freely and quietly flow from the people to the depository of power. Local and social influences would no doubt be strong; but they are more wholesome than that of the Boss, and, as was said before, it is easier to enlarge the parochial than to make the wire-puller honest. Parochialism, however, has been pretty well broken up by the press and the telegraph. Hardly anybody can now live in intellectual isolation. The Caucus itself, so far as it works fairly, is a tribute to the principle of indirect election.

To begin by passing a measure of Home Rule, not for Ireland alone, but for the United Kingdom, to reconstruct the local institutions, unloading upon them part of the now crushing burden of the central legislature, and then to base the central institutions upon them, is a policy which might at least claim attention, and, perhaps, deserve partial experiment, as an alternative to central revolution, if the nation and its leaders had not surrendered themselves to the revolutionary current.

Like the mode of election, the qualification for the franchise has never undergone any rational consideration with reference to the changed status and duties of the elector, who, instead of being really a subject, is now a participant in sovereign power. Nothing has been thought of the property qualification, which by successive agitations has been reduced to the vanishing point, and the next time anybody wants to raise the political wind will finally disappear. The broader the basis of electoral institutions can safely be made the better, and with indirect instead of direct election to the central legislature, it would be safe to make it very broad. Still some qualifications are necessary, even for the primary elector; nor, if the writer may trust his own observation, is there any indisposition on the part of the intelligent working-classes to look at the matter in that light. A common education is now placed within everybody’s reach by the help of the State, and it entails corresponding obligations. A mode of ascertaining that the elector could read and write, or at least read, by means of a certificate or test, might surely be devised. Personal application for registration would also be a fair requirement, since a man would hardly be fit to share the sovereign power who did not care enough about his vote to ask for it; and it would probably act as a useful criterion, self-applied. With the full powers of a citizen should also go, in reason, the full duties—liability to serve on juries, to assist in the enforcement of the law, to take part, if called upon, in the defence of the country. There is a vague notion that all human beings, or all who pay taxes (which, directly or indirectly, everybody does), have a natural right to a vote, and this is carried so far that votes are about to be given to a multitude of Irish who openly profess themselves the enemies of the State, and announce that they will use the votes for its destruction. Perhaps this Irish experiment may help to bring us all to reason, and convince us that nobody has a right to the means of doing mischief to himself and his fellows, or to anything but that form of government which is practically the best for all.