danger of the current which is making all parts of the political machinery of a piece, breaking down all the inequalities, diversities of tendency, counterbalancing and restraining influences, on which the true liberty and the lasting security of nations so largely depends. Such a movement is naturally inimical to the heredi tary principle in legislation, and the danger has been intensified by the enormous increase during the last few years in the political difference between the House of Lords and one of the great parties in the State. This fact is especially significant as about two-thirds of the numerous creations that have been made in the present reign have been made by Liberal Governments, while an appreciable number of the earlier peerages consist of members of those great Whig houses which have been the oldest and steadiest supporters of civil and religious liberty. It is true, as I have said, that an Upper House is naturally a moderating, restraining, and retarding body, rather than an impelling one; that the bias of an hereditary class is naturally on the side of habit and tradition; and that a very opulent class is inevitably conservative in questions relating to property. But these considerations are far from accounting for the full measure of the change that has taken place. Till the death of Lord Palmerston there was no great or steady party preponderance in the House of Lords. It grew up mainly under the policy of Mr. Gladstone; but it only acquired its overwhelming magnitude when that statesman announced his determination to place the government of Ireland in the hands of the party which he had shortly before described as aiming at public plunder and the dismemberment of the Empire. The great body of the Liberal peers refused to follow him, and although he had himself, in his different ministries, created about eighty peerages, his followers in the

House of Lords soon dwindled into little more than a small number of habitual office-holders.'

The disproportion was very great; but it must be acknowledged that it would have been impossible to form, by any fair means, an Upper Chamber consisting of men of large property and considerable and independent positions, in which opinions hostile to Irish. Home Rule did not greatly preponderate. It must also be added, that the elections of 1886 and 1895 have shown beyond all possibility of doubt that, on the Home Rule question, the House of Lords represented the true sentiments of the democracy of the country.

And certainly the very remarkable parliamentary history of England from 1892 to 1895 does not weaken the conclusion. It appears that, under our present conditions, some desire for a change of representation and Government at every election acts with an almost tidal regularity on the constituencies, though the strength or weakness of the revulsion depends upon the policy of the rival parties. In the election of 1892, and after a Conservative Government which had lasted for more than six years, the Home Rule party obtained a small and precarious majority of forty votes. In England, and especially in the great towns of England, it was utterly defeated; in Great Britain as a whole it was in a minority; but the skilful organisation and large over-representation of the Irish peasantry, and the strength of the Church disestablishment party in Wales, turned the balance, and a Government was formed depending for its support on a small majority, consisting of a number of discordant factions. The

In his speech on the reform of the House of Lords, March 19, 1888, Lord Rosebery estimated the number of the Home

Rule peers at about thirty, or about 5 per cent. of the House of Lords.

remarkable House of Commons that sat in those years passed a Bill placing the government of Ireland in the hands of a separate Parliament, at the same time leaving a powerful contingent of eighty Irish members in the Parliament at Westminster; it passed a vote in favour of the establishment of a separate Parliament in Scotland; it passed another vote in favour of breaking up the British Isles into a federation, with a number of distinct legislatures. It carried by a small majority, though it afterwards rescinded, an amendment to the Address, in March 1894, praying her Majesty that the power now enjoyed by persons not elected to Parliament by the possessors of the parliamentary franchise to prevent Bills being submitted to your Majesty for your Royal approval shall cease,' and expressing a hope that if it be necessary your Majesty will, with and by the advice of your responsible ministers, use the powers vested in your Majesty to secure the passing of this much-needed reform.'

The members of the Government clearly saw that it was impossible to carry Home Rule by a direct appeal to the nation. When the Home Rule Bill, which was a capital portion of their policy, was rejected by an overwhelming majority in the Lords, they did not venture to dissolve upon the question, and submit it to the adjudication of the constituencies. They hoped to secure a Home Rule majority on other grounds, by creating and stimulating an agitation against the House of Lords. The last speech delivered in Parliament by Mr. Gladstone was truly described by Mr. Balfour as 'a declaration of war against the House of Lords.' This and the Home Rule policy were the two legacies which the retiring statesman bequeathed to his party.

As early as 1888 no less than seven members who afterwards sat in the Radical Cabinet of 1892, voted in

VOL. I.

28

favour of a resolution of Mr. Labouchere stating that, in the opinion of this House, it is contrary to the true principles of representative government, and injurious to their efficacy, that any person should be a member of one House of the Legislature by right of birth, and it is therefore desirable to put an end to any such existing rights." It is not surprising that such men should have eagerly taken up the war against the House of Lords, and Cabinet ministers took the foremost part in leading the assault. The policy of 'filling the cup' was openly avowed, and it meant that measure after measure was to be introduced which was believed to be popular, in order that the House of Lords might reject them, and might in this way be discredited with the electors. It was hoped that by such a policy the tide of democratic feeling would rise with irresistible force against the hereditary House. Mr. Morley rarely made a speech on the platform without denouncing the hereditary legislators. Mr. Shaw Lefevre informed his constituents that the wisest course at the moment is to reduce still further the power of the Lords, by depriving them of the power of veto,' thus reducing them to an absolutely impotent body, with no power of even retarding legislation. Sir William Harcourt declared that a majority of a single vote in the House of Commons is a more accurate representation of the popular will than a majority of four hundred in the House of Lords.'2

Other ministers, and their supporters in Parliament, followed suit, and outside the House Radical organisations and Radical speakers and writers vied with one another in the violence of their denunciations, in their

See Charley, The Crusade against the Constitution, pp. 514-16. 2 Ibid. pp. 437, 462.

contemptuous or arrogant predictions that the hereditary principle had had its day. Catalogues of the pretended misdeeds of the House of Lords during the last fifty years were drawn up, without the slightest intimation that it had ever fulfilled any one useful purpose. One of the most malevolent and grossly partial of these works was widely circulated with the warm recommendation of Mr. Gladstone. Another popular Radical writer observed, in a highly jubilant strain, that at the election of 1892 the country had given a clear mandate to the House of Commons to enact a Home Rule measure; that this was pre-eminently one of the Acts upon which a great and serious people never go back'; and that the House of Lords was nothing more than a farce and a nuisance, which must be speedily crushed. He graciously added that its opposition might be overcome by raising 500 sweeps to the peerage.'

6

There were signs however, that all was not moving. as the leaders of this party desired. It was a curious and significant fact that, on the retirement of Mr. Gladstone, the party found it necessary or expedient, after much heartburning, to go to the House of Lords for their leader, putting aside the claims of their leader in the Commons. Under the new system of local government a vast multitude of elections were taking place on an exceedingly democratic basis, and, to attentive observers, no feature of these elections was more remarkable than the extraordinary popularity of peers as candidates, even in places where they had no special. local interests. It is only necessary to look through the elections of the London County Council to recognise this fact. It was evident, too, that the attempt to

'Mr. Frederic Harrison, How to Drive Home Rule Home' (Fortnightly Review, September, 1892).