CHAPTER IV

ARISTOCRACIES AND UPPER CHAMBERS

Of all the forms of government that are possible among mankind, I do not know any which is likely to be worse than the government of a single, omnipotent, democratic Chamber. It is at least as susceptible as an individual despot to the temptations that grow out of the possession of an uncontrolled power, and it is likely to act with much less sense of responsibility and much less real deliberation. The necessity of making a great decision seldom fails to weigh heavily on a single despot, but when the responsibility is divided among a large assembly, it is greatly attenuated. Every considerable assembly, also, as it has been truly said, has at times something of the character of a mob. Men acting in crowds and in public, and amid the passions of conflict and of debate, are strangely different from what they are when considering a serious question in the calm seclusion of their cabinets. Party interests and passions; personal likings or dislikes; the power of rhetoric; the confusion of thought that springs from momentary impressions, and from the clash of many conflicting arguments; the compromises of principle. that arise from attempts to combine for one purpose men of different opinions or interests; mere lassitude, and mere caprice, all act powerfully on the decisions of an assembly. Many members are entangled by pledges they had inconsiderately given, by some principle they had admitted without recognising the full

extent to which it might be carried, or by some line of conduct they had at another period pursued. Personal interest plays no small part; for the consequence and pecuniary interests of many members are bound up with the triumph of their party, while many others desire beyond all things a renewal of their mandate. They know that a considerable part of the constituencies to which they must ultimately appeal is composed of fluctuating masses of very ignorant men, easily swayed by clap-trap, by appeals to class interests or class animosities, and for the most part entirely incapable of disentangling a difficult question, judging distant and obscure consequences, realising conditions of thought and life widely different from their own, estimating political measures according to their true proportionate value, and weighing nicely balanced arguments in a judicial spirit.

The confusion becomes still greater when Parliaments divide into a number of small independent groups, each of them subordinating general political interests to the furtherance of some particular interests and opinions, and when the art of parliamentary government consists mainly of skill in combining these heterogeneous fractions in a single division. The first condition of good legislation on any particular question, as of most other good work, is that it should be single-minded-that it should represent the application of the best available faculty to a special purpose. There is scarcely a contested question determined in Parliament in which motives wholly different from the ostensible ones, and wholly unconnected with the immediate issue, do not influence many votes. It is also rather the rule than the exception that a general election produces a change of Government, and the defeated minority of one Parliament becomes the majority in the next.

There is, certainly, no proposition in politics more indubitable than that the attempt to govern a great, heterogeneous empire simply by such an assembly must ultimately prove disastrous, and the necessity of a second Chamber, to exercise a controlling, modifying, retarding, and steadying influence has acquired almost the position of an axiom. Of all the many parliamentary constitutions now existing in the world, Greece, Mexico, and Servia are, I believe, the only ones in which independent and sovereign nations have adopted the system of a single Chamber, and, among these, Servia is only a partial exception. According to the Constitution of this little country, legislation is, in ordinary times, conducted by the king and a single national assembly, in which one out of every four members must be nominated by the king, and which exercises strictly limited and defined powers; but the sovereign has a right of convoking when he pleases a second and much larger assembly, which alone is competent to deal with grave questions affecting the Constitution and the territory of the State.1 Norway, being united with Sweden, is not an absolutely independent country, but it is one of the countries where legislative power is virtually in the hands of a single Chamber. The Storthing is a single Chamber, elected at a single election, but, when it meets, it elects out of its own body a second Chamber, consisting of a fourth part of its members. The extreme concentration of power resulting from this system is one of the great causes of the dangerous tension that exists in the relations of Sweden and Norway.

Demombrynes's Les Constitutions Européennes, i. 715-24. I do not include the Grand Duchy of Finland, the Provincial Diets in the Austrian Em

pire, and a few small Powers holding a completely subordinate position in the German system, in which single Chambers exist.

The experience of the past abundantly corroborates the views of those who dread government by a single Chamber. In the English Commonwealth such a system for a short time existed; but the abolition of the House of Lords was soon followed by the expulsion of the Commons, and when Cromwell resolved to restore some measure of parliamentary government, he clearly saw that two Chambers were indispensable, and he revived on another basis the House of Lords. In America, Franklin had strongly advocated a single Chamber; and in the American Confederation, which was formally adopted by the thirteen States in 1781, and which represented the United States in the first years of their independent existence, the Congress consisted of only one branch. It was invested with very small powers, and was almost as completely overshadowed by the State rights of its constituents as the Cromwellian House of Commons had been by the military power of the Commonwealth. But the very first

article of the American Constitution, which was framed in 1787, divided the Congress into a Senate and a House of Representatives. In all the separate States. the bicameral system exists, and it also exists in all the British colonies which have self-governing powers. In France, Turgot and Sieyès advocated a single Chamber, and in the French Constitution of 1791 all power was placed in the hands of such a body, the result being one of the most appalling tyrannies in the history of mankind. In 1848 the same experiment was once more tried, and it once more conducted France through anarchy to despotism.

It is not necessary for my present purpose to enter into any disquisition about the origin and early evolution of the House of Lords. For a long period of English history it was a small and a diminishing body,

and in the fifteenth century the spiritual, or life peers, considerably outnumbered the temporal, or hereditary ones. The Reformation had a capital influence on the constitution of the House. By removing the mitred abbots, it made the temporal peers a clear majority, while the vast distribution of monastic property among some of the great families added enormously to their influence. From this time the lay, or hereditary peerage steadily increased. Only twenty-nine temporal peers had been summoned to the first Parliament of Henry VII., and fifty-one was the largest number summoned under Henry VIII.; but 119 peers were summoned to the Parliament of 1640, and 139 to the Parliament of 1661. At the close of the seventeenth century the temporal peerage amounted to about 150; in the first Parliament of George III., to 174. In 1642, the bishops were excluded by Act of Parliament from the House of Lords, which thus became, for the first time in its history, a purely hereditary body; and in 1649 the House of Lords was abolished by the vote of the House of Commons. At the Restoration this vote being, of course, treated as null, the House revived, and by an Act of Parliament of 1661 the bishops were again introduced into its ranks.

The Revolution, unlike the Commonwealth, had no injurious effect upon it. The change of dynasty was largely due to the action of the heads of a few great aristocratic families; the House of Lords bore a very conspicuous part in regulating its terms; and it is probably no exaggeration to say that the steady Whig preponderance in that House mainly secured the Revolution settlement during the long period of the disputed succession. It is true that, in the re-division of

1 May's Const. Hist., i. 232-35.