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 The Reform 
 of the House of Lords 
 
 With a Criticism of 
 
 the Report of the Select Committee 
 
 of 2nd December, iqo8 
 
 By 
 
 William Sharp McKechnie 
 
 ''' -^ LL.B., nPu.,, 
 
 'iiLiviiai Liiw and HiMoiy in wiasynv. v, iiiNcibit; 
 
 i; a Commentary,' 'The State and the Individual 
 
 James MacLehose and Sons 
 
 'J'^'J
 
 The Reform of the House of Lords
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW, 
 flubUsltcce to U\e finibtreitg. 
 
 MACMILLAN 
 New Voyk, 
 Toronto, - 
 London, ■ 
 Cambridge, 
 Edinburgh, 
 Sydney, • 
 
 AND CO., LTD., LONDON. 
 
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 Th- Mactniltan Co. of Canada. 
 
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 MCMIX.
 
 The Reform 
 of the House of Lords 
 
 With a Criticism of 
 the Report of the Select Committee 
 ,., of 2nd December, 1908 
 
 By 
 
 William Sharp McKechnie 
 
 M.A., LL.B., D.Phil. 
 
 Lecturer on Constitutional Law and History in Glasgow University 
 Author of 'Magna Carta; a Commentary,' 'The State and the Individual,' &c. 
 
 
 Glasgow 
 James MacLehose and Sons 
 
 Publishers to the University 
 1909
 
 > ■ 
 • • •• 
 
 » t • • • . 
 
 ,*-'»*•• . - ' 
 
 GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 BV ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
 
 
 V 
 » 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The Reform of the Upper Chamber is the 
 question of the hour. The Government and the 
 '** Select Committee of the House of Lords have 
 •\ placed before the country rival schemes upon 
 which the electors of the House of Commons 
 may soon be called to express a deliberate opinion. 
 No judgment on a theme of such importance can 
 profitably be formed without some knowledge of 
 . historical antecedents ; for this problem, like all 
 other problems of the present, is deeply rooted 
 r in the past. To supply, in the smallest possible 
 - space, the indispensable minimum of information 
 '' is the object of the following articles, which 
 appeared originally in the columns of the Glasgow 
 Herald, and are here reprinted by kind permission 
 of the proprietors, in response to the suggestion 
 that, in a more permanent form, they might 
 prove useful. They have accordingly been re- 
 vised and some new matter added ; but brevity 
 and lucidity have been aimed at, rather than
 
 VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 exhaustive treatment, which, indeed, could only- 
 have been attempted in a bulky volume. It may 
 perhaps be claimed for this little book, however, 
 that it contains more of the essential facts 
 relevant to the enquiry than can be found else- 
 where within equally narrow compass. It would 
 hardly have been practicable, even if it had 
 been desirable, to give detailed references to the 
 original or derivative authorities for facts which 
 are the common property of historians ; or to 
 distinguish, in every case, between those con- 
 clusions that seemed original to the author and 
 those that may have been suggested by the 
 writings of others. Reference should here be 
 made, however, to Mr. Luke Owen Pike's 
 masterly treatise on the Constitutional History of 
 the House of Lords, which ought to be in the 
 hands of all who desire a thorough knowledge 
 of the subject on its historical side. Information 
 on the political and international aspects of a 
 complex theme has been collected from scattered 
 sources. Some original contributions have been 
 added ; particularly in the section which illustrates 
 the difficulties surrounding the adoption of the 
 Referendum as a mediator between the two 
 Chambers of the Legislature ; in the criticisms 
 hazarded upon the scheme of reconstruction pro- 
 posed by Lord Rosebery's Committee ; and in
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 the outline suggested, in the final section, as an 
 alternative framework for a reformed House of 
 Lords. The main purpose of these articles, 
 however, is to supply information likely to prove 
 useful in the formation or modification of opinions 
 that are still in process of development, or in 
 verifying and supporting conclusions that have 
 already been accepted as final. 
 
 Glasgow University, 
 I// Januaiy, 1909.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 ^, PAGE 
 
 I. 
 
 The Problem of a Second Chamber - - i 
 
 II. 
 
 The Chief Function of the House of Lords i6 
 
 III. 
 
 The Composition of the House of Lords : a 
 
 Historical Outline - - - - 28 
 
 IV. 
 
 The Powers of the Lords in Relation to the 
 
 Lower House : a Historical Outline - 42 
 
 V. 
 
 A Comparison with Foreign Upper Chambers 52 
 
 VI. 
 
 Various Proposals and Schemes ok Recon- 
 struction ------ 62
 
 X CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 VII. 
 
 The Referendum as a Mediator between the 
 
 Chambers ____.- 78 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Some Maxims of Reform _ - _ _ g6 
 
 IX. 
 
 The Select Committee's Suggested Scheme 
 
 of Reconstruction - - - - - 105 
 
 X. 
 
 The Need of an Alternative Scheme - - 122
 
 I. 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF A SECOND 
 CHAMBER. 
 
 The adage that "threatened men live long" 
 applies with peculiar force to the House of Lords. 
 There are other adages, however, to remind us 
 that history, though it repeats itself, does not 
 repeat itself for ever. Indications are not wanting 
 that the time is ripe for the reconstruction of the 
 Upper Chamber. 
 
 Two independent movements, indeed, in favour 
 of far-reaching reforms have been recently in- 
 augurated — one coming from without and the 
 other from within ; one hostile and the other 
 friendly ; one seeking to diminish the power of 
 the House, the other to alter its composition. 
 
 The question of the continuance, abolition, or 
 reform of the Second Chamber is thus the problem 
 of the day. Two rival schemes are before the 
 nation, and the electorate may soon be called to 
 judge between them. The solution of the Govern-
 
 2 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 ment, as embodied in the late Sir Henry Campbell- 
 Bannerman's Resolution of June 26, 1907, would 
 leave the House of Lords unreformed and in 
 the enjoyment of its purely ornamental ancient 
 privileges, but deprived of all real legislative 
 power. The Commons after tolerating for a few 
 months the futile criticisms of the Lords would be 
 empowered by mere lapse of a brief fraction of a 
 year to ignore the very existence of a Second 
 Chamber, and to proceed to pass their statutes on 
 their own authority, like the ordinances of the 
 Long Parliament during the Civil War. 
 
 An alternative scheme proceeds from the House 
 of Lords itself, and consists in the recommenda- 
 tions of the Select Committee, which, appointed 
 on June i2, 1907, and re-appointed January 30, 
 1908, has now, after the labours of some eighteen 
 months, under the experienced Chairmanship of 
 Lord Rosebery, placed its Report upon the table 
 of the House. Before proceeding to discuss the 
 merits of these rival schemes, some preliminary 
 consideration of facts and principles will be 
 required. 
 
 An initial difficulty arises from the antagonistic 
 points of view, whence opposed schools of poli- 
 ticians survey the proposed field of enquiry. Any 
 scheme that honestly endeavours to be reasonably 
 impartial is sure to be condemned and scouted by
 
 THE PROBLEM STATED 3 
 
 extreme men of both parties — by those, on the one 
 hand, who still regard the existing Upper Chamber, 
 exactly as it stands, as the perfection of human 
 wisdom ; and by those, on the other, who reject as 
 inadequate all reforms short of total abolition, root 
 and branch. Leaving aside these irreconcilables, it 
 may yet be worth while to attempt to narrow the 
 main issues to within reasonable limits, by search- 
 ing for common ground on which moderate men 
 of both parties may stand together. 
 
 Four principles may be provisionally suggested 
 as almost possessing the force of axioms — namely, 
 that, alike in theory and in practice, the two- 
 chambered form of Legislature has been every- 
 where accepted as the normal type of Parliament ; 
 that where, as under the British Constitution, 
 Parliament is legally omnipotent, a Second 
 Chamber of some sort is a practical necessity ; 
 that, notwithstanding this, the existing House of 
 Lords, at the present stage of its development, 
 must not be assumed, without proof, to fulfil the 
 requirements of a perfect Upper Chamber, equally 
 suited to all times and circumstances ; and that 
 the remodelling of the Lords, if inevitable, had 
 better come with moderation from within than 
 violentlv from without. A tew words may l)e 
 profitably atidcd to enforce each of these pro- 
 positions.
 
 4 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 I. The Preference for a Two-chambered Legisla- 
 ture. 
 
 The countries of modern Europe have with 
 remarkable unanimity — the small nations of 
 Servia, Greece, and Norway form unimportant 
 exceptions — given practical effect to their prefer- 
 ence for the two-chambered form of Legislature ; 
 while the great Anglo-Saxon races of three 
 continents — the United States of America, the 
 Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of 
 Canada, and the various divisions of South Africa 
 — have all taken the most effective method of 
 endorsing their belief in what may safely be 
 regarded as the normal type of Parliam^t. 
 
 Experiments, it is true, have sornetimes been 
 attempted towards governing by means of a single 
 legislative Chamber in more than one of the great 
 nations of the modern world ; but these experi- 
 ments have proved, without exception, shortlived ; 
 and yet have in most cases lasted long enough to 
 teach important object-lessons by bitter experience. 
 The Long Parliament in 1 649 abolished the Upper 
 House and established the rule of an intolerant 
 one-chambered Legislature, claiming to be supreme 
 in Church and State. England escaped from this 
 galling bondage, only to fall under the military 
 domination of Cromwell and his Ironsides ; and
 
 THE PROBLEM STATED 5 
 
 equilibrium was not permanently re-established 
 until the Restoration brought back the ancient 
 House of Lords along with the ancient Monarchy, 
 
 Under the influence of Franklin, again, the 
 American Confederation of the thirteen original 
 States adopted in 178 1 the principle of a Single 
 Chamber ; but the experience of a few years 
 persuaded the framers of the American Constitu- 
 tion in 1787 that their Congress must include a 
 powerful Senate as well as a House of Repre- 
 sentatives — an arrangement that has existed 
 unchallenged until the present day. 
 
 Finally, two experiments in the direction of a 
 Single Chamber, made in 1791 and 1848 respec- 
 tively, have twice conducted France in the same 
 vicious circle through political anarchy to absolut- 
 ism. Other instances might readily be culled from 
 history, but sufficient has perhaps been said to 
 support the contention of the late Professor Lecky 
 that " the necessity of a Second Chamber, to 
 exercise a controlling, modifying, retarding, and 
 steadying influence, has acquired almost the posi- 
 tion of an axiom." 
 
 2. Special Urgency under the British Constitu- 
 tion. 
 
 The principle thus accepted in practice by all 
 modern nations of importance — whether on
 
 6 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 grounds of abstract theory or as the result of their 
 own experience — is in a special sense a necessity 
 for the British Empire. Alone among first-class 
 Powers, Great Britain submits to the absolutely 
 unfettered authority of a supreme Legislature. 
 The most cherished among the rights of individual 
 citizens, as of societies and corporations, are held 
 on sufferance — held merely at the goodwill of a 
 Parliament which is entirely devoid of all those 
 checks and balances that have been carefully devised 
 to restrict the power of other law-making bodies. 
 
 The British Parliament has more power than 
 any other Legislative Assembly in the world. 
 Unlike the Congress of the United States, which 
 is limited strictly to eighteen topics specified in 
 the written Constitution ; unlike the Legislatures 
 of countries such as Belgium, against whose inter- 
 ference certain individual rights are guaranteed as 
 " fundamental " and unalterable ; unlike the 
 Assemblies of Canada and Australia, restrained 
 \ both by the veto vested in the Executive and by 
 V the overshadowing supremacy of the Mother 
 Parliament, that Mother Parliament itself is an 
 absolutely Sovereign Legislature. It can do any- 
 thing that is not logically or physically impossible, 
 and it is therefore legally omnipotent. 
 
 This is the reason, sufficient and conclusive in 
 I [itself, why it is necessary to divide the power of
 
 THE PROBLEM STATED 7 
 
 Parliament between two Chambers, neither of 
 which is completely under the domination of the 
 other. fPov^ers so tremendous and unexampled -«:^^ 
 cannot safely be entrusted to the arbitrary decision 
 of the fluctuating majorities of any Single Cham- 
 ber, no matter what may be the franchise on which 
 it has been elected, or the principles on which it 
 conducts its business. 
 
 Supplementary arguments, if such were neces- 
 sary, for the continuance of an efl^cient Second 
 Chamber in Great Britain could readily be found. 
 The Tower House, for example, even in non- 
 contentious legislation, may sometimes make 
 mistakes ; and therefore a good Revising Chamber 
 is required to remedy defects in the workmanship 
 of bills as originally drawn. ^The House of 4;^ 
 Commons is too large a body for the making of 
 ideal laws. ) Individual responsibility is lowered 
 by the sense of numbers. The attendance, 
 further, varies from night to night, and thus the 
 continuity of amendments is not preserved ; while 
 want of leisure necessitates, too frequently, the 
 hustling through of important bills without full 
 consideration, resulting in motley patchwork, 
 where foreign Legislatures, less " free and repre- 
 sentative " perhaps, l)ut guided by professional 
 experts, would have achieved a higher level of 
 scientific excellence.
 
 8 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 For all these reasons a Revising Chamber is 
 desirable and necessary. ' Further, second thoughts 
 are sometimes best, and mere delay in carrying 
 through legislative changes may prove to be a 
 ...^vjj^ain, in protecting the democracy against the 
 impetuosity of its own decisioriT.'l The House 
 of Lords in this respect stands for a principle of 
 appeal " from Philip drunk to Philip sober." 
 
 Changes noted by recent writers in the poise 
 and balance of our modern Constitution, within 
 the last quarter of a century, augment rather than 
 diminish the cogency of these arguments in favour 
 of a Second Chamber. The increasing dependence 
 of the Lower House upon the Ministry of the 
 day, and the curtailment of debate (regrettable 
 even if necessary) by means of the constant appli- 
 cation of the " closure " and its more drastic 
 supplement known to politicians as the " guillo- 
 tine," have been pointed out with some appre- 
 hension as tending towards the iron despotism of 
 mechanical majorities. The House of Commons, 
 for all its nominal ascendancy, has become the 
 tied bondman of the Government of the day. 
 Party discipline is enforced with iron rigour ; both 
 sides vote to order ; the rights of private members 
 are reduced to zero ; all initiative among the rank 
 and file has been crushed out. 
 — ^An Upper House is thus required for many
 
 THE PROBLEM STATED 9 
 
 purposes — to revise and check the legislative 
 measures of the Lower House, to guarantee con- 
 tinuity of policy, to safeguard individual rights 
 against the hasty decisions of the Lower House, 
 and to give stability and endurance to the constitu- 
 tional framework on which the whole body politic 
 depends. ( A strong Second Chamber (accepted as 
 a necessity^ by all) is particularly desired by at least 
 three classes — by those who regard the tyranny of 
 a mechanical majority as the worst of all possible 
 despotisms ; by those who dread that a Single 
 Chamber might, in a period of crisis, be captured 
 by the friends of reaction, thus undoing in a brief 
 space the work of many centuries in building up 
 the liberties of the nation ; and by those who, 
 like the late Herbert Spencer, seek to combat the 
 increasing tendency of an inquisitorial paternal 
 government to multiply legislative activities, and 
 so to reduce private initiative to vanishing point, 
 through regulating all spheres of human activity 
 by Act of Parliament. 
 
 These are subsidiary points. The main reason 
 for the continued existence of the House of Lords, 
 as already stated, lies in the impossibility of vest- 
 ing the supreme power of the Sovereign Imperial 
 Parliament in any Single Chamber, however 
 perfect. 
 
 B
 
 lo THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 -V 
 
 3. The ^estion of Reform. 
 
 It is doubtful whether the warmest of the 
 admirers of the existing House of Lords is entirely 
 satisfied with its present position in the Constitu- 
 tion of the British Empire. Some of its Tory 
 well-wishers regret that it has fallen from its high 
 estate, and would raise it once again to its old 
 legislative equality with the Lower House, or 
 restore its ancient right to amend and initiate 
 money bills. ■"4f politicians of a certain type freely 
 spoke their minds, they would endow the Upper 
 Chamber with the right to reject, not temporarily, 
 but permanently and finally, the successive bills 
 sent up from the Commons, even though a General 
 Election on a definite issue had supervened since 
 the previous rejection. 
 '^ "^ A different type of politician, more outspoken, 
 clamours for a reduction of existing powers ; and 
 a third would leave the authority of the Upper 
 House intact, while altering its composition. In 
 any view, it can hardly be expected that the status 
 quo should give satisfaction to keen supporters of 
 Liberal Governments, who find their favourite 
 legislative measures thrown out by the Upper 
 Chamber or essentially altered there, while, as^hey 
 allege, the bills promoted under the auspices of 
 Conservative Cabinets pass the Lords with mono-
 
 THE PROBLEM STATED ii 
 
 tonous regularity, practically without criticism or 
 amendment. ^-^ A"*"* 
 
 The Upper House, in their opinion, fails at all 
 times to perform its pretended functions of a 
 checking and revising Legislative Chamber, for 
 it either rejects wholesale or accepts wholesale, 
 according as one party or the other is in power. 
 Any satisfactory scheme of reform would require 
 to keep in view this serious defect, and endeavour 
 to devise some system which would tend to effect 
 a greater approximation to equilibrium in the 
 relations between the House of Lords and the 
 Government of the day. 
 
 The question of reform, however, is not one to 
 be approached on a purely party basis. There 
 have been occasions in the past — as at the passing 
 of the Treaty of Utrecht, and again throughout 
 the reigns of the first two Georges — when the 
 House of Lords stood as a great Whig bulwark 
 against the encroachments of Tories and the in- 
 trigues of Jacobites ; and it must not be assumed 
 that in the future, as in the present, that House 
 will necessarily show itself the constant friend of 
 one party and the enemy of the other. 
 
 That Upper Chambers, in this twentieth cen- 
 tury, are not necessarily viewed with distrust by 
 the friends of popular rights and liberties is amply 
 proved by the favour with which the people of the
 
 12 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 separate States of the American Federal Union 
 venerate their Senate as their protector, and uphold 
 it in the exercise of an authority greater out of 
 all proportion than that of the British House of 
 Lords. 
 
 History, on the other hand, would seem equally 
 to prove the folly of those who deny all possibility 
 of development in the future to an Upper 
 Chamber which has shown so great a power of 
 adaptation to new conditions in the past. CThe 
 entire history of the House of Lords has been an 
 unbroken record of alteration and advanced Of 
 the various titles by which its present members sit, . 
 not one, except perhaps that of the twenty-six 
 prelates who still retain their seats, would have 
 been recognised as valid during the early centuries 
 of the history of the Upper Chamber. 
 
 Llowever experts may decide the question of 
 origins, the embryonic House of Lords (whether 
 we begin its history with the Norman Curia Regis 
 or go still farther back to assert its identity with 
 the Witenagemot of Wessex) was certainly not in 
 its rude beginnings an assembly of hereditary 
 legislators ; while, if we look to the other extremity 
 of its long career, important changes may be noted 
 that have only taken effect in recent years. For 
 example, the four "law lords" (or Lords of 
 Appeal in Ordinary) were only introduced in terms
 
 THE PROBLEM STATED 13 
 
 of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act of 1876, to 
 restore efficiency to the House of Lords in its 
 capacity of a Court of final appeal ; while it was 
 so late as 1887 that another Act conferred on them 
 the right to retain their seats and votes, after 
 resigning their salaried judicial posts, thus creating, 
 for the first time, a class of life peers enjoying 
 full membership of the Upper House. 
 
 In the intervening centuries frequent and 
 weighty changes have been made. It would be 
 absurd, in the light of past experience, to expect 
 the House of Lords to stop short for ever in its 
 career of change exactly where it, for the moment, 
 stands ; and even more absurd to hail the present 
 stage of its development as denoting the zenith of 
 its course. To deny to the Upper Chamber all 
 power of further advance is to be false to its past 
 traditions — is to alter it radically from a progres- 
 sive national institution to an effete, stereotyped, 
 dead anomaly. Change is of its very essence. 1 
 
 4. The Need of Moderation in Reform. 
 
 The " mending or ending" of the House of 
 Lords has long been a favourite phrase among 
 irresponsible politicians. Whatever it may mean 
 to the ordinary "man in the street"; to Lord 
 Morlcy, who is credited with its invention, it was 
 probably merely an emphatic method of emphasis-
 
 14 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 ing the pressing need of some reform, by the use 
 of a tag of rhyme to serve at once as a half-meant 
 threat and as a phrase to catch the multitude. 
 " Mending" may be urgently desired by many, 
 but "ending" has probably not been seriously 
 contemplated by any British statesman of front 
 rank, in cool blood and after full deliberation, 
 since Cromwell's conversion to the necessity of 
 the ' ' Other House " after a short experience of 
 the alternative system. 
 
 " Slow but sure" has hitherto been the motto 
 of successful reform in Great Britain — the action 
 of the House of Lords, indeed, has materially 
 contributed at once to the slowness and the sure- 
 ness — and there seems no reason why the remodel- 
 ling of the Upper Chamber should be made the 
 occasion of a change of policy. Violent reforms, 
 like " violent delights, have violent ends, and in 
 their triumph die." Those who would lay rough 
 hands on the House of Lords should remember 
 that extreme measures, by a natural principle of 
 reaction, tend to defeat themselves. Those, on 
 the contrary, who summarily reject all suggestions 
 for improvement should, for their part, remember 
 that to save the Upper Chamber from its friends 
 may be to hand it over to its enemies. 
 
 Reform of the House of Lords, if come it must, 
 is likely to be more easily achieved, more popular.
 
 THE PROBLEM STATED 15 
 
 enduring, and beneficent if undertaken by that 
 House itself, acting on its own initiative in a spirit 
 of calm and moderation, than if effected violently 
 from without, under pressure of the angry passions 
 generated by the heat of party strife.
 
 II. 
 
 THE CHIEF FUNCTION OF THE 
 HOUSE OF LORDS. 
 
 I Any effective criticism of the Upper House of 
 Parliament must start from a correct appreciation 
 j ' of its present place in the British Constitution. 
 It is essential, above all, in approaching the question 
 of reform, to bear in mind both what the Upper 
 Chamber does, and what it does not do. On the 
 one hand, it has been called " a suspending and 
 revising Chamber " ; and the phrase neatly sum- 
 marises the two main functions now performed by 
 the House of Lords in its legislative capacity. 
 On the other hand, that House neither exercises 
 nor claims to exercise at the present day, any right 
 to oppose the deliberate and maturely-formed will 
 of "the people" — that is, of those individuals 
 who enjoy the franchise, taking them in the mass. 
 The strict letter of the Constitution, indeed, as 
 defined by law, still allows to the House of Lords 
 an authority exactly equal to that enjoyed by the
 
 FUNCTION OF THE LORDS 17 
 
 Commons in rejecting bills of every kind, and 
 also in amending or initiating such measures as 
 involve no questions of expenditure or finance ; 
 but constitutional theory has laid down binding 
 rules of practice which supplement and supersede 
 the strict rules of law. 
 
 The Upper Chamber, completely acquiescing in 
 those conventional restraints, now consistently 
 refrains from permanently and finally wrecking 
 measures which the Lower House has accepted 
 after full discussion, provided always that that 
 Lower House is unambiguously supported by the 
 nation. 
 
 The Lords, it is true, claim the right of judging 
 whether these conditions have been duly fulfilled ; 
 and this contention has some show of reason, since 
 the Commons cannot be left sole judges in their 
 own behalf between themselves and their master, 
 the Sovereign People, as to the terms of their own 
 appointment. 
 
 The chief function of the Lords, then, is to 
 interpret the will of the people, not to oppose it. 
 They claim the right to stand at times between 
 electors and elected — to protect the voters from 
 the actions of the servants they have appointed 
 when these servants seem to them inclined to dis- 
 obey instructions or to go beyond the terms of 
 their commission. 
 
 c
 
 1 8 -THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 The Lords claim the further right, in certain 
 circumstances, not only to protect the people from 
 their servants, but to protect them from them- 
 selves. They consider it their duty to delay the 
 passing of ill-digested measures. This is practi- 
 cally to exercise the function of appealing from 
 the electors in the past to the same electors in 
 the future, thus affording the constituencies an 
 opportunity, under the influence of second 
 thoughts and perhaps of fuller information, for 
 tempering their impetuosity by discretion. The 
 Upper House thus throws out bills not because of 
 its own estimate of their intrinsic faults, but 
 because of doubts as to how far the Commons have 
 accurately interpreted the instructions received 
 from their constituents at the last General Election, 
 or, if so, whether these instructions will not be 
 modified at the forthcoming one. 
 
 In rejecting, for example, the second Home Rule 
 Bill in 1893 the Lords were of opinion that the 
 electorate should be given an opportunity of form- 
 ing and expressing its opinion on the terms of a 
 measure of prime importance before it passed into 
 law, with consequences which, whether for good or 
 evil, were likely to prove irretrievable. This was 
 not perhaps the sole issue on which the election 
 of 1895 turned ; yet the overwhelming defeat of 
 the Liberal party in that year is generally held to
 
 FUNCTION OF THE LORDS 19 
 
 have justified the action of the Lords, and to have 
 proved that the Upper House at times reflects the 
 real opinion of the country more accurately than 
 the House of Commons does. 
 
 If the decision of the nation had been in favour 
 of the Home Rule Bill, it would have been the 
 recognised duty of the Lords to have given way at 
 once. Their function is thus to suspend and delay, 
 but not permanently to reject, any bill which public 
 opinion is determined upon having, when that 
 opinion has been expressed in the recognised con- 
 stitutional manner at the polling booths. 
 
 For nearly a century now — at least since the 
 passing of the Reform Act of 1832 — the House 
 of Lords has accepted this restricted view of its 
 legislative rights. Lord Derby, for example, 
 addressing the Upper House in the course of the 
 debate on the Corn Importation Bill in 1846, 
 enunciated this doctrine, amid general approval, 
 in words still worth quoting: — " My Lords, if I 
 know anything of the constitutional value of this 
 House, it is to interpose salutary obstacles to rash 
 and inconsiderate legislation ; it is to protect the 
 people from the consequences of their own im- 
 prudence. It never has been the course of this 
 House to resist a continued and deliberately 
 expressed public opinion. Your Lordships always 
 have bowed, and always will bow, to the expression
 
 20 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 of such an opinion, but it is yours to check hasty 
 legislation leading to irreparable evils." Since 
 that date the same sentiment has been repeated 
 again and again, until it has become a common- 
 place of political literature. 
 
 That such a function is at times useful and 
 necessary hardly admits of doubt. The exact 
 direction of its usefulness has, however, somewhat 
 changed in recent years, in consequence of the 
 encroachments made by the modern Cabinet on 
 the independence of the House of Commons. 
 The House of Eords, which once stood guard 
 over the actions of a too-powerful House of 
 Commons, now stands guard over a too-powerful 
 Cabinet. In these days of inflexible party organ- 
 isation, enforced by threats of dissolution and by 
 the habitual use of such harsh expedients as " the 
 guillotine," it is the Ministry of the day and not 
 the Lower Chamber of the Legislature that 
 threatens to become omnipotent. The House of 
 Lords is the only barrier — a frail one mayhap — 
 that offers resistance to the supremacy of the 
 Cabinet unrestrained and uncontrolled. 
 
 The question now before the nation is whether 
 this suspending veto should be abolished or remain 
 in force. That this is the real issue was made clear 
 by the course of debates in both Houses of Parlia- 
 ment in the summer of 1907. It was then main-
 
 FUNCTION OF THE LORDS 21 
 
 tained, on the one hand, that the House of Lords, 
 while never permanently obstructing the expressed 
 will of the country, had a perfect right, by rejecting 
 bills sent to it from the Commons, to force the 
 Government to choose between their abandonment 
 and an appeal to the country : Lord Ripon, as the ' 
 mouthpiece of the Cabinet, on the other hand, 
 declared emphatically that no House of Commons 
 and no Liberal Government could allow the House 
 '^'of Lords to claim the right to force a dissolution ; 
 while Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman maintained 
 that the predominance of the Commons must 
 prevail, without any appeal to the constituencies. 
 The issue is not only a clear one, but, as between 
 the more moderate men on both sides, one which 
 has been brought within narrow limits. The 
 Lords' veto, it is admitted by its friends, cannot 
 be exercised a second time upon bills that have 
 passed the Lower House in two successive Parlia- 
 ments ; while the Resolution of June 26, 1907, 
 claimed that the power of the Upper House should 
 be so restricted that within the limits of a sino-le 
 Parliament the final decision of the Commons 
 should prevail. 
 
 The issue must ultimately be determined by 
 the public opinion of the country, and is one which 
 demands a straightforward decision. Only two 
 attitudes are possible. The suspending veto of
 
 22 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 the Upper House may be abolished or it may be 
 maintained; but it is illogical to retain it in theory, 
 while rendering it absolutely inoperative in prac- 
 tice. A sham veto, indeed, would be worse than 
 none, producing a false sense of security. It is 
 for the public to say whether the restrictions which 
 the Government's Resolution proposes to place on 
 the veto of the Upper House are consistent with 
 its effective exercise, or whether the proposed 
 change would justify for the future the description 
 applied by Lord Morley in 1888 to that Upper 
 House of which he is now an honoured member — 
 " A rickety parapet on the edge of a precipice 
 which was more dangerous than no parapet at all." 
 
 For those who decide that the Upper House 
 should retain its present right to force an appeal 
 to the electorate, two subsidiary questions remain. 
 It is rightly pointed out that the circumstances 
 under which this power can be exercised are 
 entirely undefined by law, either common law or 
 statute, but depend merely on rules of constitu- 
 tional usage. They are, therefore, necessarily 
 vague and flexible, and the Upper Chamber is sole 
 judge to decide how far such rules apply to any 
 given case, its conduct being determined by 
 political or moral, rather than by strictly legal, 
 considerations. 
 
 It is sometimes argued that powers so vitally
 
 FUNCTION OF THE LORDS 23 
 
 important ought to be defined by statute. Such 
 a change — after all a mere question of detail — 
 would undoubtedly have much to recommend it ; 
 but, on the other hand, elasticity has proved in 
 past centuries a useful characteristic of more than 
 one part of the British Constitution — enabling it 
 to meet emergencies by bending where, if ham- 
 pered by fixed rules, it might more readily have 
 broken. 
 
 A more vital question must still be faced. Does' 
 the House of Lords, on its present basis, exercise 
 these suspending powers in a way that gives 
 general satisfaction ? Here, at least, the answer 
 must be an emphatic negative. Conservatives and 
 Liberals, on occasion, criticise the action of the 
 Lords as either too timid or too bold, as humour- 
 ing too much the passing prejudice of the hour, 
 or as, on the contrary, habitually mutilating 
 measures of reform of every sort. ' Mr. Birrell, 
 for example, speaking in the Commons on } 
 February 18, 1907, characterised the House of . '" 
 Lords as " a Tory pocket borough" which only 
 guarded vested interests ; and complained that 
 nothing could be done without a threat of 
 revolution. 
 
 There are, however, politicians of another way 
 of thinking. Liberals as well as Conservatives, 
 whose quarrel with the Upper House is based
 
 24 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 on different grounds ; who charge it with 
 sins of omission rather than of commission. 
 Their complaints are not so much directed 
 ao^ainst the trenchant amendments to successive 
 Education Bills, nor against the rejection of 
 measures like the Small Landholders (Scotland) 
 Bill, but rather against the timidity that induced 
 the Lords to pass the Trades Disputes Act contrary 
 to their own convictions, thus enabling the Labour 
 party to dictate terms to both Houses of Parlia- 
 ment. A really efficient suspending Chamber, it 
 is sometimes urged, would under these circum- 
 stances have insisted on sending a measure of such 
 importance back to the constituencies for their 
 reconsideration. Those who hold this view would 
 seek to strengthen the House of Lords by altering 
 radically its composition. 
 
 Some of those, on the other hand, who are^ 
 satisfied with the existing state of things, consider 
 that the weakness of the Upper Chamber is really 
 a merit, and are of opinion that any device which 
 by strengthening its authority would relatively 
 lower that of the House of Commons, would 
 necessarily lead to permanent deadlocks between 
 the two, a consequence avoided under the present 
 system, which, in spite of frequent outcries, works, 
 in the opinion of many, fairly well upon the whole. 
 
 This suspending function, which some reformers
 
 FUNCTION OF THE LORDS 25 
 
 would strengthen, others would weaken, and others 
 again desire altogether to abolish, is not the only 
 duty performed by the House of Lords, although 
 undoubtedly it is the most important. The 
 " Revising Function," which mainly concerns bills 
 of a non-contentious nature (or, alternatively, the 
 comparatively non-contentious details of party 
 bills) must be carefully distinguished. 
 
 The House of Commons has no time for scien- 
 tific accuracy, as is shown by the frequency with 
 which amending Acts are called for, even before 
 the principal statutes have come into operation. 
 The workmanship of Acts of Parliament would be 
 even more imperfect than it is, if it were not for 
 the amending powers of the Upper Chamber. 
 
 Walter Bagehot, writing in 1868, laid stress 
 upon this function ; and Mr. Sidney Low, in his 
 recently published Governance of England^ has 
 repeated familiar arguments in suggestive words 
 that may be quoted. " Under the House of 
 Commons' conditions bills are hustled through 
 with half their clauses undiscussed and the other 
 half a mass of contradictions, absurdities, and in- 
 consistencies. These ragged, amorphous measures 
 may be cut and trimmed into shape in the House 
 of Lords and sent back again shorn of the excre- 
 scences fastened upon them by embarrassed 
 ministers, overwhelmed with work, and distracted 
 
 D
 
 26 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 by the necessity of conciliating one or other section 
 of their miscellaneous following." 
 ; A bare reference is all that need here be made 
 to important s ubsid iary fuiictiQas performed by 
 
 ' the Lords. Their judicial duties as the Supreme 
 Court of Appeal for all litigations arising in Eng- 
 
 '~land, Scotland, or Ireland are performed, it is true, 
 by what is, in reality though not in name, a 
 Committee of the House ; but that House, as 
 a whole, is still, in Bagehot's phrase, *' a reservoir 
 of Cabinet Ministers"; while it divides with the 
 Commons the arduous work of sifting private bills, 
 a duty which, if unshared, might prove completely 
 beyond the unaided energies of the overburdened 
 Lower House. Lastly, the Upper House is in- 
 valuable as what has been called " a ventilating 
 and criticising chamber " — that is, as a place for 
 airing grievances and discussing the policy of the 
 administration, whose actions it does not claim to 
 control. 
 
 One function with which the Upper House has 
 sometimes been credited, it does not perform. As 
 Bagehot emphatically declared forty years ago, 
 " The common notion evidently fails that it acts 
 as a bulwark against imminent revolution." It is, 
 in truth, quite powerless to dam back the rising 
 tide of popular demands, however unwise or un- 
 reasonable these at times may be. No Senate or
 
 FUNCTION OF THE LORDS 27 
 
 Upper Chamber that has ever been invented is 
 strong enough by itself to hold an excited and 
 
 determined nation in check. ^ 
 
 Every one desirous of remodelling the House 
 of Lords in its composition or of modifying its 
 powers, must keep these fundamental facts in 
 mind, forgetting neither the functions it performs, / 
 nor those it is incapable of performing. The 
 question of reform may, then, be approached along 
 any one c/^lo^ main lines : the _:gQlitxc>al^ the 
 historical, the international, or the abstractly ex^^ 
 perimeiital. The first-named may be at once 
 discarded as full of dangers and poisoned at the 
 source. The short-lived and changing interests 
 of party warfare are untrustworthy guides for 
 pointing the road to cardinal alterations upon 
 venerable institutions. 
 
 The three other lines of inquiry are all legiti- 
 mate and helpful, and, whether adopted separately 
 or according to some principle of combination, 
 they suggest three sources from which the public 
 may look for information to guide them towards 
 a just estimate of any schemes of reform that may 
 be placed before them. To supply some elemen- 
 tary information along each of these three lines 
 of inquiry will be the object of the four following 
 sections.
 
 III. 
 
 THE COMPOSITION OF THE HOUSE OF 
 LORDS: A HISTORICAL OUTLINE. 
 
 No two statements are more frequently made 
 about the Upper Chamber than that it is ex- 
 clusively regulated by the hereditary principle, and 
 that its members represent nothing beyond them- 
 selves and their own interests. 
 
 Neither of these statements can claim to be even 
 approximately accurate. The hereditary element 
 is tempered by the Crown's right to add to the 
 number of existing Peers — a prerogative exercised 
 on the advice of the Prime Minister and the 
 Cabinet of the day. This right is used every year 
 with a freedom that is certainly not decreasing, and 
 the constant creation of new Peers acts in some 
 measure as a counterpoise to the purely hereditary 
 element. The possibility of effecting such nomi- 
 nations in a wholesale way acts uniformly as a 
 check, even when it is recognised to be a dangerous 
 power, reserved for a last resource.
 
 COMPOSITION OF HOUSE 29 
 
 On the other hand, the " representative " prin- 
 ciple — not to be confUsed with the "elective" 
 principle, with which it is often associated — finds 
 embodiment in the prelates, who hold their seats 
 not as individuals, but as representing the National 
 Anglican Church, and in the Lords of Appeal in 
 Ordinary, four life Peers, who represent in some 
 measure the legal profession. Only once — for a 
 short period of eighteen years — was the House of 
 Lords a purely hereditary Assembly, when the 
 leaders of the Parliamentary Opposition, on the 
 brink of Civil War in 1 642, excluded the Bishops, 
 who were not reinstated until the Restoration of 
 1660. 
 
 The Upper House at present includes five 
 classes: (i) The two Archbishops and the twenty- 
 four Bishops in order of seniority (except the 
 occupants of the great sees of London, Winchester, 
 and Durham, who always have a right to sit) ; 
 (2) the hereditary Peers of England, Great Britain, 
 and the United Kingdom; (3) sixteen representa- 
 tive Peers of Scotland, elected for each separate 
 Parliament ; (4) twenty-eight representative Peers 
 of Ireland, elected for life ; and (5) four Lords of 
 Appeal in Ordinary appointed by the Crown under 
 the provisions of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 
 of 1876, who retain since 1887 their seats for life. 
 
 It is not necessary for the purposes of this
 
 30 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 article to distinguish between those hereditary lords 
 of Parliament who owe their seats respectively to 
 creations prior to 1707, subsequent to 1800, or 
 between these dates. All Peers of England and 
 of the earlier and the later United Kingdoms have 
 seats in Parliament, and may be conveniently 
 arranged according to their five grades, of which 
 two — those of Earl and Baron — were known at 
 the Norman Conquest, while Edward the Black 
 Prince was the first Duke summoned, and the 
 oflSces of Marquess and Viscount date respectively 
 from 1386 and 1441. At the beginning of 1908 
 there were 31 Dukes (including Princes of the 
 Royal blood), 25 Marquesses, 164 Earls, 45 
 Viscounts, and 268 Barons. 
 
 Of these 543 hereditary Peers,^ a small and 
 varying number are debarred from their rights 
 of membership by reason of non-age or other 
 recognised disabilities at statute or common law. 
 More than five-sixths of the Upper House, as at 
 present constituted, is thus composed of hereditary 
 legislators ; but the influential minority cannot be 
 ignored. 
 
 ^ This figure includes three Princes of the Royal blood, 
 but does not include seven Peers created during 1908, nor, 
 of course, the 44 elected Peers of Scotland and Ireland. The 
 figure given by the Select Committee is 592, which excludes 
 the former, and includes the whole of the latter.
 
 COMPOSITION OF HOUSE 31 
 
 It is as erroneous to maintain that the hereditary- 
 principle alone prevails, as to argue that the com- 
 position of the House depends exclusively on 
 prerogative. Four separate principles must be 
 reckoned with — the hereditary principle, the 
 principle of nomination, the official principle, and 
 the elective principle (the last-mentioned applying 
 to the representatives of the peerages of Scotland 
 a^d Ireland). 
 
 A brief historical sketch will serve to show how 
 these four principles have at different times been 
 combined with one another and with other prin- 
 ciples, now obsolete, in the composition of the 
 House of Lords. 
 
 Such a survey may possibly afford valuable 
 lessons for the future, for it must never be for- 
 gotten by the reformer who understands the 
 national temperament of the British people, that 
 changes in the form of ancient institutions are 
 likely to be more popular, more easily effected, 
 and more durable in proportion as they avoid a 
 sudden break with tradition, or at least succeed in 
 cloaking new expedients under the semblance of a 
 return to the past. Professor Redlich, of Vienna, 
 has recently repeated an ancient truth by emphasis- 
 ing the " well-known characteristic of the British 
 Constitution : the retention of old forms with 
 perfectly new contents." In England, if any-
 
 32 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 where, the teachings of history have an immedi- 
 ately utilitarian value. 
 
 In compressing the events of many centuries 
 into the brief space here available, it is impossible 
 to deal adequately with the question of origins. 
 It will be well, indeed, to avoid all reference to 
 what has been stigmatised by the ignorant as mere 
 "antiquarian rubbish" — a phrase that raised the 
 ready ire of the late Professor Freeman. There 
 is no need to dwell on the various theories of the 
 composition of the Witenagemot, that venerable 
 ancestor of the modern Parliament. 
 
 It seems clear, however, that the personal pre- 
 ferences of the Kinoes of Wessex formed a main 
 factor in determining the membership of their 
 Councils, and that the early rulers of the Norman 
 dynasty also retained a preponderating influence 
 over the assemblies of their feudal barons. Few 
 great men were great enough to force their pre- 
 sence on an unwilling King, while the monarch 
 had power to raise up even from the dust those he 
 desired to honour, and invite them to join as royal 
 thegns the councils of the nation. The right of 
 the King's servants to be present among the Witan 
 is beyond question, and their predominance in 
 number must be taken as showingr that the House 
 of Lords began its long career mainly as an 
 assembly of royal nominees, tempered by the
 
 COMPOSITION OF HOUSE 33 
 
 official element, represented by the prelates on the 
 one hand and the ealdormen or earls — governors 
 of provinces or counties — on the other. 
 
 The hereditary element was thus by no means 
 the dominating feature of the House of Lords 
 in its earliest stage of development. The thegns 
 originally owed their position to the King's 
 personal selection, while the office of Earl did not 
 necessarily pass from father to son, and was almost 
 as little regulated by hereditary principles as were 
 the appointments to bishoprics. 
 
 The nobility — if such a phrase may be permitted 
 of the eleventh century — was a nobility of service 
 rather than of birth. It is true that the hereditary 
 principle, from an early date, forced itself into 
 prominence ; but it was long before it came to 
 dominate the situation. On the contrary, the 
 ancient nobility of service gave way to a nobility 
 of landowners, before that in turn gave way to a 
 hereditary nobility. 
 
 After the Norman Conquest the King's Council, 
 or Curia, was primarily an assembly of feudal 
 Barons ; and a Baron at that date may be defined 
 as anyone holding land directly from the Crown. 
 Earls and Bishops were present too, but each of 
 them held Crown lands — Earl's baronies and 
 Bishop's baronies. Debatable questions need not 
 be here raised ; as to whether, as Professor Free- 
 
 E
 
 34 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 man maintained, the prelate owed his seat in the 
 King's Council to his spiritual office or, as other 
 writers insist, to the possession of the lands which 
 necessarily accompanied it. As plain matter of 
 fact, the Council, or embryo Parliament of the 
 Norman Kings, was an assembly of Crown vassals. 
 Every man present held land of the King, whether 
 he was summoned for that reason or for some 
 other. 
 
 The smaller Crown landholders (bar ones 
 minor es) soon sank back into the class of ordinary 
 knights, while the title of " baron " was reserved 
 for those who held important fiefs under the 
 Crown — the line, it is true, being drawn for long 
 in a somewhat wavering fashion. Mag^na Charta 
 in 1 21 5 confirmed and stereotyped the practice 
 whereby only those recognised as greater barons 
 were individually summoned to the Council, while 
 the lesser Crown tenants, summoned collectively, 
 soon lost by neglect their right to attend. 
 
 Hitherto the Council, or fledgling Parliament, 
 had consisted only of one Chamber, made up 
 exclusively of those who held baronies. It was 
 during the thirteenth century that representatives 
 of the counties and chief boroughs of England 
 took their place as essential members of a national 
 Parliament ; and during the reign of Edward III. 
 that Parliament itself took the form it has since
 
 COMPOSITION OF HOUSE 35 
 
 retained, for many centuries, of a two-chambered 
 assembly. Long after that change had been 
 effected, the Upper House remained (as the entire 
 assembly had previously been) a Council composed 
 of the holders of baronies. 
 
 The conception of a barony, however, has 
 passed through various phases : — 
 
 (i) " Barony by tenure" was the original con- 
 ception. A baron was at first the owner of a 
 Crown fief which from its extent or importance, 
 had acquired a prescriptive right to be treated as a 
 barony. When such lands fell to a lady, her 
 husband was occasionally summoned by the King, 
 for the word " baron " did not yet denote any 
 personal dignity. This conception, though gradu- 
 ally jostled aside by rival conceptions, only became 
 finally extinct in comparatively recent years. 
 Although the judges had declared in 1669 that 
 baronies by tenure " had been discontinued many 
 years," and could not be revived, the point was 
 indirectly raised again by the claimant in the 
 Berkeley Peerage case in 1861, to be finally set 
 at rest by an adverse decision. 
 
 (2) " Barony by writ of summons" succeeded 
 the conception of barony by tenure. Every holder 
 of a barony had the right under Magna Charta, 
 to receive a royal writ individually addressed to 
 him, whenever Parliament was called together.
 
 36 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 The reception of such a summons, combined with 
 the fact that it had been acted on in practice, came 
 to confer upon the person so acting a complete title 
 to the rank of baron — and this right descended to 
 his heirs for ever. The King gradually lost the 
 power to refuse his summons to these individuals 
 and their heirs, but retained his unfettered right 
 to summon, in addition, whomsoever he desired. 
 At this stage in the development of the House 
 of Lords it is clear that its composition was deter- 
 mined by the combination of the two principles 
 of hereditary descent and the royal right of 
 summons. 
 
 (3). Meanwhile " Barony by patent" had suc- 
 ceeded barony by summons. The Crown gradu- 
 ally adopted the convenient method of issuing 
 letters patent in favour of those individuals whom 
 it desired to raise to the position of hereditary 
 councillors. The new method was first adopted in 
 1387, and the ancient way of creating barons by 
 writ of summons was allowed to lapse. Long 
 before these changes had occurred, all connection 
 between the title of Baron and the ownership of 
 land had come completely to an end. The con- 
 ception of an Earldom had also suffered change. 
 The character of an Earl or Count, who had been 
 at first a magistrate appointed by the King to rule 
 a county, passed through a feudal stage, and finally
 
 COMPOSITION OF HOUSE 37 
 
 settled into its present meaning of a special rank in 
 the Peerage. These facts make abundantly clear 
 the principle, often insisted on by Professor Free- 
 man, that " the hereditary character came in like 
 other things, step by step, by accident rather than 
 by design." 
 
 These modifications in the nature of "Baronies" 
 and " Earldoms," and the addition of other ranks 
 of Peers, are by no means the only momentous 
 changes that the House of Lords has suffered in 
 the course of centuries, though limits of space 
 confine us to a simple enumeration of a few of 
 the historic landmarks that have influenced the 
 composition of the Upper Chamber. The Re- 
 formation, accompanied by the ruin of the 
 monasteries, removed the Abbots from their places 
 in Parliament, and altered the proportions in which 
 lay and spiritual lords had previously stood to 
 each other. The bishops remained an influential 
 minority, however, until deprived by the Exclusion 
 Bill, which Puritan zeal forced through Parliament 
 in 1642. 
 
 The lay lords, who agreed to the exclusion of 
 the lords spiritual, did not long outlast them, but 
 were contemptuously ejected in 1649 ^7 ^^^ Lower 
 House, or, rather, by that rump or remnant of it 
 that had survived " Pride's Purge." Cromwell's 
 attempts to establish a one-chambered Parliament, 
 
 •J
 
 38 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 or " Representative," as he preferred to style it, 
 and his conversion to the need of an " Other 
 House," require only a passing notice. At the 
 Restoration the lay Peers resumed their attendance 
 at Westminster, and took the necessary measures 
 for repealing the Bishops' Exclusion Bill. 
 
 The next crucial change arrived with the Union 
 of 1707, when the representative and elective 
 principles entered the Upper House in the persons 
 of the sixteen Scottish Peers, to be strengthened 
 by the advent of twenty-eight Irish Peers in 1801. 
 The same Union with Ireland also brought a slight 
 increase to the lords spiritual in the persons of an 
 Archbishop and three Bishops, who retained their 
 places until the Irish Church Act of 1869 dis- 
 established them along with their Church. 
 
 Meanwhile, in 1836 a new English See (that of 
 Ripon) had been created, the first since the reign 
 of Henry VIII. , and the new Bishop took his 
 seat in the House of Lords. An increase, even of 
 one, in the lords spiritual was unpopular, and led 
 to attempts to exclude the Bishops altogether. 
 Subsequent statutes founding new Sees, such as 
 that of Manchester in 1847, provide that the 
 number of prelates in the Upper Chamber shall 
 remain unaltered. 
 
 Membership then of the House of Lords is not 
 confined to Peers. The Bishops, though " lords
 
 COMPOSITION OF HOUSE 39 
 
 of Parliament," do not even rank as life Peers, 
 for they cannot retain their seats after resigning 
 their Sees. Their title to membership is thus 
 strictly an official one. The same character applied 
 to the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary when first 
 appointed in 1876, and therefore the statute of 
 1887, allowing them to sit and vote after resigning 
 their salaried judicial posts, created a noteworthy 
 precedent by introducing for the first time the 
 principle of life membership pure and simple. 
 A wider creation of life Peerages by Act of 
 Parliament could not now be considered an 
 innovation. 
 
 Two unsuccessful attempts to alter the composi- 
 tion of the House of Lords require brief notice. 
 In 1719 (in consequence of the creation of twelve 
 Peers to promote the policy embodied in the 
 Treaty of Utrecht seven years earlier) Lords 
 Sunderland and Stanhope introduced their famous 
 Peerage Bill, which would have stereotyped the 
 House of Lords by preventing all additions to its 
 membership. The King might create six new 
 Peers in addition to the 178 then existing, but 
 thereafter must wait till an old Peerage lapsed 
 before creating a new one to take its place. This 
 ill-considered measure, which would have made 
 the hereditary principle impregnable by removing 
 its most formidable check, the Royal right of nomi-
 
 40 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 nating new members, was only defeated by the 
 eloquence of Sir Robert Walpole. 
 
 In 1856 an attempt was made to alter the 
 balance between these competing principles in the 
 opposite direction. The Ministers of the Crown, 
 without statutory authority and against the wishes 
 of the Lords, attempted to exercise an assumed 
 right to appoint life members of the Upper 
 Chamber. Baron Parke was created a life Peer 
 under the title of Lord Wensleydale ; but the 
 Lords adroitly parried this attack by deciding that 
 whatever right the Crown possessed of creating 
 Peerages for life, they would only admit to 
 membership of the House those who were made 
 hereditary Peers in the accustomed way. Act of 
 Parliament, however, can create life Peers if pre- 
 rogative cannot. 
 
 Finally, one vital reform was effected by the 
 House itself in 1868, when it changed its Standing 
 Orders so as to prevent noble Lords from voting 
 without taking the trouble to attend. Proxies 
 were then abolished. 
 
 The chief lessons suggested by this brief outline 
 are that the House of Lords was not originally 
 formed on the hereditary principle ; that it has 
 never been identified exclusively with that prin- 
 ciple ; but that there are rival principles capable 
 of being strengthened or revived in its composi-
 
 COMPOSITION OF HOUSE 41 
 
 tion, without doing violence to the historical 
 traditions of a venerable institution which has, at 
 more than one crisis in the past, advanced the cause 
 of constitutional liberty, and may be destined to 
 perform valuable services in the future.
 
 IV. 
 
 THE POWERS OF THE LORDS IN 
 
 RELATION TO THE LOWER HOUSE: 
 
 A HISTORICAL OUTLINE. 
 
 The present generation tends to exalt the House 
 of Commons as pre-eminently the People's 
 Chamber, and to decry the House of Lords as 
 merely a Chamber of Privilege. Whether or not 
 this somewhat crude antithesis holds good to-day, 
 it certainly did not always hold. Prior to the 
 Reform Act of 1832 the Lower House was as 
 much a stronghold of the Whig oligarchy, who 
 then ruled England, as was the Upper House^ 
 
 The two Chambers in the course of ages have 
 suffered many alterations in their composition and 
 in their relations to the mass of the people, but in 
 no respect have there been greater changes than 
 in the apportionment of power between the two. 
 The Upper House, as the lineal descendant of the 
 Council of the Norman Kings — to go no further 
 back — is by many centuries the more venerable of
 
 POWERS OF THE LORDS 43 
 
 the two ; the Lower House, having come into 
 being in the thirteenth century, and having attained 
 a separate existence in the fourteenth, during the 
 reign of Edward IIL 
 
 The entire subsequent career of the Commons 
 
 has been one of aggrandisement at the expense of 
 
 the Lords. The history of the Lower Chamber 
 
 is a record of how it first gained equality of power 
 
 with its older fellow-Chamber, and then attained 
 
 supremacy. This process still goes on ; and the 
 
 more the Upper House has resigned itself to a 
 
 position of inferiority and to the diminution of 
 
 its authority, the more has the Lower House in 
 
 recent years grudged to the Lords the exercise of 
 
 the powers still legally vested in them — a meagre 
 
 residue of the ample authority formerly enjoyed. 
 
 The salient points in the past history of the two 
 
 Houses should be borne in mind by those who 
 
 seek to readjust their relations for the future. 
 
 The representatives of county and borough, 
 destined to form the future House of Commons, 
 owed their inclusion in the English national 
 Councils (previously the monopoly of the barons) 
 to the Crown's anxiety to find the most convenient 
 method of taxing them. They were summoned 
 at first by the Plantagenet Kings of the thirteenth 
 century — Henry IIL and his son Edward — not 
 that they might share the authority and responsi-
 
 44 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 bility of baron and prelate, but only to vote their 
 contributions to the Royal Exchequer and then 
 disperse quietly to their homes again. 
 
 Gradually, however, they came to participate in 
 every one of the important functions exercised by 
 the Council — or almost every one, for the judicial 
 functions of Parliament remained a monopoly of 
 the Upper Chamber. They claimed rights of free 
 discussion and other privileges. They even exer- 
 cised some measure of control over the policy of 
 the Crown, and they established a firm right to 
 concur in the passing of all new laws. This last 
 and most important right, enunciated formally in 
 1322, was finally secured under Henry VI., when 
 the early form of legislation by petition and answer 
 was superseded by the modern bill. 
 
 Meanwhile the Commons had begun to gain for 
 themselves a superior position to the Lords in 
 matters of taxation by successfully asserting, as 
 they did in 1407, that all grants of money must 
 originate with them. That was the beginning of 
 the rule still prevailing which secures to the Lower 
 House the sole right to initiate money bills. 
 
 In 1 67 1 and 1678 the Commons entrenched 
 themselves behind a new privilege, denying all 
 power of amending money bills to the Lords, who 
 were thus left with the alternative of accepting 
 such bills as they stood or rejecting them whole-
 
 POWERS OF THE LORDS 45 
 
 sale. The Lords have never formally admitted 
 this disability, but have been held as tacitly 
 acquiescing in it, because they have shrunk in 
 practice from a collision with the Lower House 
 on this question of amending money bills. 
 
 By the reign of William of Orange this dis- 
 ability was generally recognised, and the Commons 
 took unfair advantage of it, "tacking" non- 
 financial measures, obnoxious to both Crown and 
 Lords, to the end of money bills, and denying to 
 the Lords all right to amend any part of the patch- 
 work whole. This was discontinued in deference 
 to the firm attitude of the Upper House in 1702, 
 when they declared such practices unconstitutional. 
 It is true that diflliculties still continued as to the 
 exact definition of " money bills," difl!iculties 
 which the House of Commons sought to remove 
 by revision of the Standing Orders in 183 1, 1849, 
 and 1858. The scope of money bills was thus 
 somewhat extended. 
 
 Until 1 861, however, the Lords retained, practi- 
 cally unchallenged, the right to reject money bills, 
 though they used this sparingly — some thirty-six 
 times in the century and a half following the 
 accession of George I. In i860 Mr. Gladstone, 
 as Palmerston's Chancellor of the Exchequer, pro- 
 posed to abolish the paper duties. He met with 
 strenuous opposition, and on the third reading
 
 46 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 of his bill the Government majority sank to 
 nine. 
 
 The Prime Minister admitted in a private letter 
 to the Queen that under changed conditions he 
 would welcome the defeat of the measure. In 
 this he reckoned without his Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer. When the Lords, with their long 
 array of precedents behind them, threw out the 
 bill, Mr. Gladstone characterised their exercise of 
 an admittedly legal right as " the most gigantic 
 and the most dangerous innovation that has been 
 attempted in our time." 
 
 Next year the whole of the financial proposals 
 were introduced in one long bill ; and the Lords, 
 unable to amend and unwilling to take the respon- 
 sibility of wrecking the entire scheme, allowed the 
 bill to pass. The precedent has been uniformly 
 followed since that date. Mr, Gladstone thus 
 rendered practically inoperative another right of 
 the Upper House. They have never since rejected 
 a money bill. 
 
 Long before 1861 the Lords had lost another of 
 their ancient functions — the control of the Execu- 
 tive. The beginning of the doctrine that the 
 Crown Ministers are responsible to Parliament has 
 sometimes been dated from 1660, sometimes from 
 1688, and sometimes from a still later date. 
 Whatever may have been the date of its com-
 
 POWERS OF THE LORDS 47 
 
 mencement, Parliamentary control was at first 
 shared between the Lords and the Commons. 
 
 In 171 2 the support of the Upper House was 
 considered so essential that new Peers were created 
 to give the Tory Government a Tory majority in 
 both Houses. Again, in 1783-4, the elder Pitt 
 remained in office, resting on the support of the 
 Lords, in face of repeated adverse votes in the 
 Commons. Even in 1832 Lord Grey resigned in 
 consequence of an adverse vote in the Upper 
 House. The circumstances were, of course, 
 peculiar ; and, since the Reform Act of that year, 
 the Commons have successfully monopolised 
 Parliament's control over the Executive. 
 
 The appetite of the Commons has grown with 
 what it fed on. Far from content with the steps, 
 sometimes rapid, sometimes slow, whereby they 
 have dethroned the Lords, they have shown them- 
 selves increasingly dissatisfied with the vestiges of 
 power still left to the Upper House. The 
 grounds of quarrel between the two Chambers in 
 the past need not be given in detail, nor yet the 
 ancient methods of effecting a reconciliation by 
 means of conferences and other obsolete expedi- 
 ents. The dangerous device of " swamping the 
 Lords" is still open in theory ; but "an appeal 
 to the country," followed by the acquiescence of 
 the Lords in the popular verdict, is the practical
 
 48 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 and sufficient safeguard provided by the modern 
 constitution. 
 
 The history of the last three-quarters of a cen- 
 tury records numerous attacks made by the Lower 
 Chamber upon the Upper. A brief recapitulation 
 of these may not be without its lessons at the 
 present time. The movement for reform that 
 culminated in the Act of 1832 was repugnant to a 
 great majority of the Peers, and thus came to be 
 accompanied by a vigorous crusade against the 
 Upper House. 
 
 The Lords under Wellington's leadership bent 
 to the storm, allowing a bill to become law of 
 whose principles they thoroughly disapproved. 
 In absenting themselves from the House when the 
 final vote was taken, they acted under the influence 
 of a patriotic determination rather to efi^ace them- 
 selves temporarily than to run the risk of revolu- 
 tion or civil war. They were probably unaware 
 that they thus ushered in a new era in the relations 
 of the two Chambers ; but the precedent then 
 tentatively set, under stress of untoward circum- 
 stances, has become a binding one on questions 
 where the nation has formed a mature and abiding 
 determination. 
 
 The next important crisis in the relations of the 
 two Houses came in 1869 over the disestablish- 
 ment of the Irish Church. Once again the Lords
 
 POWERS OF THE LORDS 49 
 
 in deference to popular demands gave in to a 
 measure of which they emphatically disapproved, 
 but not until their firm attitude had extorted more 
 liberal terms in regard to the question of compen- 
 sation. In respect of this they may be said to have 
 forced a compromise upon the Commons, who 
 triumphed, however, on the question of principle. 
 
 In 1884 the Lords showed once more that they 
 had no intention to resign their legal rights in 
 legislation, and were successful in forcing Mr. 
 Gladstone's Cabinet to agree to supplement their 
 Franchise Bill by a bill effecting a thorough redis- 
 tribution of seats. 
 
 The year 1888 was notable alike for the intro- 
 duction of the first Home Rule Bill and for 
 renewed attacks upon the Upper House. Mr. 
 Labouchere carried a resolution in the Commons 
 that the presence of hereditary legislators in 
 Parliament was " contrary to the true principles 
 of representative government and injurious to 
 their efficacy"; while, in the other House, three 
 different schemes of reform were suggested by 
 Lords Salisbury, Rosebcry, and Dunraven respec- 
 tively. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill had met 
 its fate in the " Popular Chamber," but the respon- 
 sibility of defeating his second bill was thrown 
 upon the Lords, who rejected it on September 8, 
 
 G
 
 50 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 1893. Until a General Election occurred, two 
 years later, there were no means of judging whether 
 the majority of British voters approved or dis- 
 approved this action ; but the House of Lords 
 was immediately and bitterly assailed as deliber- 
 ately defeating the undoubted and steadfast 
 decision of the nation. 
 
 When the Queen's Address was discussed in 
 1894 Mr. Labouchere carried in the Commons, by 
 the narrow majority of two votes, an amendment 
 demanding that the Lords should be deprived of 
 what he described as their " right of veto." 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, on March i of the same year, 
 on the historic occasion on which he bade farewell 
 to the scene of many triumphs, delivered in im- 
 passioned periods what has been described as " a 
 declaration of war against the House of Lords"; 
 and Lord Rosebery, in July, 1895, insisted that 
 the real issue before the nation at the forthcoming 
 election was the question of the Upper Chamber. 
 
 In this he may have been mistaken ; but, in 
 any view, the voters decided against him with no 
 uncertain voice. 
 
 For the next decade comparatively little was 
 heard of the once famous phrases of " filling up 
 the cup " and of " mending or ending," until the 
 firm attitude of the Lords towards the Education 
 Bill and other measures promoted by Sir Henry
 
 POWERS OF THE LORDS 51 
 
 Campbell-Bannerman's Cabinet led to a new attack, 
 embodied in the words of the House of Commons' 
 Resolution of June 26, 1907. 
 
 The trend of events, thus viewed as a whole, 
 would seem to suggest thoughts that are more 
 disquieting to the friends of the Upper Chamber 
 than to its enemies. For centuries past, the extent 
 of the powers actually enjoyed by the House of 
 Lords in relation to the Commons has steadily 
 diminished. The only serious checks to its 
 gradual decline have been the result of attacks 
 made upon it, as, for example, in the years 1893- 
 95. Those who favour violent measures against 
 the Flouse of Lords ought perhaps to draw the 
 inference that their wiser course would be to leave 
 it severely alone, trusting to the operation of the 
 natural forces of decay which they decern at work 
 undermining its authority. 
 
 All recent changes in precedents and constitu- 
 tional conventions, affecting the distribution of 
 power between the two Chambers, have been in 
 favour of the Commons ; and the necessity of 
 taking action would seem to lie with the friends 
 of the Second Chamber. These friends would be 
 well advised to place the composition of the Flouse 
 upon a broader basis, if they desire to preserve 
 intact the powers still left to it.
 
 A COMPARISON WITH FOREIGN 
 UPPER CHAMBERS. 
 
 Foreign parallels are apt to prove deceptive in 
 treating of a system so distinctive and unique as 
 the British Constitution. There may, therefore^ 
 be some ground for the prevailing insular pre- 
 judice against adopting or even unreservedly 
 admiring Continental expedients where precedents 
 for alternative schemes of reform are furnished by 
 British history in abundance. 
 
 Yet It would be foolish to refuse altogether to 
 profit from the lessons learned by other nations in 
 their efforts to settle the relations between the two 
 Chambers of their Legislatures. Foreign evidence 
 must, however, be interpreted in the light of the 
 essential differences separating British institutions 
 from those of the various nations concerned. 
 
 In particular, all lessons drawn from the powers 
 and composition of those Senates that are con- 
 structed on the federal principle must be used
 
 FOREIGN UPPER CHAMBERS S3 
 
 with caution. This warning applies with especial 
 force to the German Imperial Bundesrath and to 
 the Upper Chamber of the Congress of the United 
 States, each of which enjoys not only greater 
 authority in making laws than does the British 
 House of Lords, but shares, in addition, in the 
 work of the Executive, exercising, inter alia, the 
 right to concur in the making of all treaties. 
 
 I. With these warnings before us, we may pro- 
 ceed to a brief comparison of our own with foreign 
 Upper Chambers in respect of the amount of 
 authority enjoyed on the one hand, and of the 
 principles that determine membership on the other. 
 The powers of Continental Houses vary consider- 
 ably from case to case ; but if a balance were struck 
 among them, the average so arrived at would show 
 the relative weakness of our House of Lords as 
 compared with foreign Senates. Only one Upper 
 Chamber, that of the Netherlands (which cannot 
 amend ordinary bills) enjoys less constitutional 
 authority than the British House ; while the 
 majority of such Chambers, including those of 
 Germany, France, Austria, Prussia, Switzerland, 
 and the United States, possess more. 
 
 As there is at present no question of increasing 
 the powers of the House of Lords, it will be un- 
 necessary to dwell at any length on this aspect of 
 the question, or to do more than point out briefly
 
 54 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 that any fourteen members of the German Bundes- 
 rath (out of a total membership of fifty-eight) have 
 the absolute right to veto all constitutional change ; 
 that the Upper Chambers of Germany, Austria, and 
 Prussia may initiate money bills ; that those of 
 most Continental countries, as well as that of the 
 United States of America, may amend such bills 
 as well as reject them ; that the last-mentioned 
 Senate is generally " considered to be a more 
 powerful body than the House of Representa- 
 tives"; and that the President of Republican 
 France cannot dismiss the Chamber of Deputies 
 and appeal to the country without the consent of 
 the Senate, which may thus not only delay the bills 
 passed by the Lower Chamber until ratified by a 
 new General Election, but may actually delay that 
 election, preventing the nation from at once ex- 
 pressing in a constitutional manner its opinion on 
 the point at issue between the Houses. 
 
 By its firm attitude in 1896 the French Senate 
 compelled the Cabinet of M. Bourgeois to resign 
 oflfice in spite of the fact that his Ministry still 
 retained the confidence of the Chamber of 
 Deputies. 
 
 The feeling in favour of a strong Second 
 Chamber on the Continent seems even to be 
 growing, for an arrangement has recently been 
 made between the two Houses in Austria, whereby
 
 FOREIGN UPPER CHAMBERS SS 
 
 the power of the Herrenhaus will be considerably 
 augmented. In Switzerland both Chambers enjoy 
 an exact and jealously guarded equality in every 
 respect, to such an extent that it is more accurate 
 to speak of two co-ordinate Chambers than of a 
 First and a Second Chamber ; and yet no conflicts 
 have arisen within the last ten years. 
 
 Switzerland is a small country ; but in the United 
 States of America, the Senate (though debarred 
 from introducing Money Bills) enjoys, in popular 
 estimation, an equal authority with the House of 
 Representatives. Professor Bryce, the present 
 Ambassador to the States, passing over the case of 
 Switzerland, states in his standard treatise on the 
 American Constitution that " the United States 
 is the only great country in the world in which the 
 two Houses are really equal and co-ordinate." 
 
 He adds that such a system, possible under 
 Presidential government, is inconsistent with 
 Cabinet government as we have it in this country. 
 In Mr. Bryce's words, " Such a system could 
 hardly work, and therefore could not last, if the 
 Executive were the creature of either or of both 
 [Chambers], nor unless both were in close touch 
 with the sovereign people." 1 1 he British system 
 of party government requires that the Lower 
 House should retain its present pre-eminence over 
 the Upper House^
 
 S6 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 In light of the relatively favoured position 
 enjoyed by most foreign Upper Chambers, as 
 compared with our own, it is apparent that English 
 reformers will not find in this direction much to 
 serve their purposes, at a time when politicians on 
 one side are calling loudly for a decrease of existing 
 powers, while some argue on the other side that 
 an increase of the Lords' authority might lead to 
 deadlocks with the Lower House, holding, in the 
 paradoxical phrase of a recent writer (Mr. Sidney 
 Low), that " the strength of the House of Lords 
 is in its weakness." 
 
 II. On the question of the ideal constitution of 
 an Upper House, on the other hand, the expedients 
 adopted in foreign countries afford only too prolific 
 a crop of suggestions for the amendment of our 
 own. The various possible principles on which a 
 revising Chamber may be constructed are found 
 combined in perplexing variety. A good-sized 
 volume would be necessary to do justice to their 
 various refinements and details, while a mere 
 synopsis of results would tend to confuse rather 
 than to instruct. It will be better, under the cir- 
 cumstances, to pick out for emphasis a limited 
 number of such peculiar features of foreign coun- 
 tries as suggest valuable lessons to British reformers. 
 
 The great size of the House of Lords, consisting 
 as it does of more than 600 members, is often
 
 FOREIGN UPPER CHAMBERS 57 
 
 considered a bar to the effective discharge of its 
 duties as a suspending and revising Chamber, and 
 this defect would undoubtedly be more forcibly felt 
 if all the Peers availed themselves habitually of 
 their rights as hereditary legislators ; while the 
 rapid yearly increase to their numbers does not 
 allay the evil. 
 
 A reference, in this connexion, may not be out 
 of place to the policy of Hungary, which, in 1885, 
 reorganised its House of Magnates (whose mem- 
 bership originally embraced even the younger sons 
 of all Princes, Counts, and Barons), reducing 
 the number of hereditary legislators from some 
 750 to about 400 by the introduction of a property 
 qualification. This made it possible, without 
 increasing the Upper House to an unwieldy size, 
 to find room within it for the presence of official 
 members and for others who sit there either by 
 Royal appointment or by virtue of election. 
 
 It should not be forgotten, however, by those 
 who desire to effect drastic reductions in the 
 membership of the existing House of Lords, that 
 experience has shown that, ceteris paribus^ a small 
 legislative body is stronger than a larger one. 
 This is one of the causes that have contributed to 
 the superiority enjoyed by the American Senate 
 in competition with the much larger House of 
 Representatives. 
 
 H
 
 58 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 An extended study of the Legislatures of 
 foreig-n countries would afford abundant illustra- 
 tions of the practical working, in various combina- 
 tions, of the different principles which it is possible 
 to introduce into a Second Chamber. 
 
 The hereditary and landowning principles — 
 which may for convenience be taken together 
 (under certain constitutions, indeed, like that of 
 Wiirtemburg, loss of lands implies loss of heredi- 
 tary legislative rights) — are found in the Austrian 
 Reichsrath, the Bavarian Landtag, and the Prus- 
 sian Herrenhaus, in all of which officials and Royal 
 nominees are also present ; while in the Hungarian 
 House of Magnates and the Spanish Senate all 
 these principles are combined with that of election 
 — not, of course, involving any suggestion of 
 election on a popular franchise. 
 
 In not one of these foreign Upper Chambers, 
 however, is the proportion of purely hereditary 
 legislators to the total membership so great as in 
 the British House of Lords. 
 
 In Italy, again, nomination by the King, on the 
 advice of his Ministers, has been adopted as the 
 sole title to membership of the Upper House ; but 
 the law has carefully restricted the list from which 
 appointments may be made to twenty-one cate- 
 gories of distinguished individuals, who are 
 reckoned as possessing special though varied
 
 FOREIGN UPPER CHAMBERS 59 
 
 qualifications for the position. The principles of 
 nomination and election (on a restricted franchise) 
 determine the membership of the Danish Lands- 
 ting, while Belgium, France, Sweden, Switzerland, 
 and the United States have entirely rejected the 
 hereditary, official, and nomination principles in 
 favour of election pure and simple. Each of these 
 countries has two elected Chambers, on a more or 
 less extended franchise ; although the methods of 
 election, the qualifications of the electors, the 
 periods of office, and the number of the Senators 
 vary in each case. 
 
 The position occupied by the American Senate, 
 as the protector of the rights of the separate States 
 of the Union, is well known ; and so also is the 
 system of electing the 300 Senators of France by 
 Electoral Colleges, which are composed on an 
 elaborate system, and have not become a mere 
 disguise for popular election like the institution, 
 bearing the same name, which registers votes for 
 Presidential candidates in the United States. The 
 precedent set by these French Electoral Colleges, 
 which have been, since 1884, entrusted with the 
 election of the entire number of Senators, miglit 
 possibly be followed in respect of the elected quota 
 of a reformed F-nglish House of Lords of the 
 future. In that light their constitution becomes 
 of special interest.
 
 6o THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 Each College, meeting in the chief town of the 
 Department, is composed of (i) the Parliamentary- 
 Deputies ; (2) the members of the Departmental 
 Council ; (3) the members of the District Councils 
 (Conseils d'Arrondissement) ; and (4) communal 
 delegates selected by each Municipal Council. 
 
 In view of the suggestion occasionally made that 
 the British Colonies should be represented in one 
 or other Chamber of the Imperial Parliament, one 
 provision of the French Constitution is full of 
 suggestiveness ; each of the four Colonies of 
 Martinique, Guadeloupe, Reunion, and French 
 India is allowed to appoint one Senator. An 
 equally interesting suggestion comes from Sweden, 
 where the 150 members of the Upper House are 
 appointed by local bodies known as County Coun- 
 cils, which are not, however, to be rashly confused, 
 either as to functions or as to composition, with 
 institutions bearing the same name in England. 
 
 If stress, then, is to be laid by reforming zeal 
 on the finding of Continental models on which to 
 reconstruct the Upper House of that Mother of 
 Parliaments to which foreign constitutions owe so 
 deep a debt, there is no need for anxiety. 
 Analogies may be found for almost any combina- 
 tion of the various principles in bewildering 
 variety. 
 
 Two features may, perhaps, be singled out for
 
 FOREIGN UPPER CHAMBERS 6i 
 
 concluding notice. Our House of Lords would 
 seem to exert less authority in comparison with 
 other Upper Houses than is the case in any Con- 
 tinental nation (with the single exception of the 
 Netherlands) ; while, on the other hand, the 
 hereditary principle, pure and simple, is more 
 prominent in the British House of Lords than in 
 any foreign Senate or Upper Chamber. It is a 
 point for consideration how fai these two features 
 may or may not be connected, and therefore 
 whether a radical reduction in the hereditary ele- 
 ment might not tend to strengthen a Chamber now 
 suffering attack on the ground that it is too 
 strong. The experiences of Wiirtemburg in 
 this respect may not perhaps be without their 
 lessons, where a crusade against the Upper 
 Chamber in 1904 led to alteration in its com- 
 position, followed by a considerable and unexpected 
 increase in its authority, and therefore of its power 
 for good and evil. 
 
 Reforms have sometimes brought results that 
 were not anticipated by those who laboured to 
 effect them. The problem at present before the 
 country is to devise a Second Chamber sufficiently 
 strong to act uniformly and fairly and with practical 
 efficiency as a revising Chamber, and yet not strong 
 enough to enter into serious rivalry with the 
 House of Commons.
 
 VI. 
 
 VARIOUS PROPOSALS AND SCHEMES 
 OF RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 Historical precedents and foreign parallels are 
 worthy of consideration. Many advocates of 
 reform prefer, however, to argue on grounds of 
 inherent probability, anticipating experience and 
 deducing rules of utilitarian policy or abstract right 
 from the acknowledged principles of Political 
 Science, or even from their own individual prefer- 
 ences and prejudices. 
 
 Such arguments are, within certain limits, per- 
 fectly admissible. No suggested scheme of reform 
 should be contemptuously set aside as impracticable 
 because it has never yet been tried. Abstract 
 political reasoning, and even the making of experi- 
 ments on a large scale, are allowable in the science 
 of government as in other sciences ; yet it may be 
 wise to remember that the complexity of the 
 problems and the extent of the interests here at 
 stake make caution peculiarly necessary.
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 63 
 
 It is now proposed briefly to discuss, apart from 
 considerations either historical or international, a 
 few of the schemes of reform that have been sug- 
 gested within the last quarter of a century. Such 
 schemes are to be found in bewildering profusion in 
 the columns of Hansard and the pages of numer- 
 ous books and magazines ; the only difficulties are 
 those of selection and arrangement. The subject 
 naturally divides itself into three parts ; for one 
 group of reformers would reduce the powers of 
 the Upper Chamber ; another would remodel its 
 constitution ; while both parties must concern 
 themselves with methods of procedure. 
 
 I. Advocates of a further diminution of the 
 comparatively slender powers still left to the 
 House of Lords are not to be found exclusively 
 among the ranks of those who wish it ill. The 
 late Professor Lecky, for example, would have wel- 
 comed such a course as calculated to strenfjthen 
 the House rather than diminish its authority. 
 " The very magnitude of the power," so he has 
 written, " theoretically vested in the House of 
 Lords is an obstacle to its moderate exercise"; 
 and, again, " a veto limited and defined by law 
 would be more fearlessly exercised and more 
 generally accepted." 
 
 The arguments urged in favour of an agitation 
 for reducing the legal powers of the Peers are
 
 64 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 usually, however, of an entirely different com- 
 plexion. Among Labour leaders and advanced 
 Radicals there are those who would abolish 
 altogether the legislative rights of the Upper 
 House, a course open to all the disadvantages of 
 abolishing the Second Chamber outright, and with 
 additional dangers of its own. Next to these 
 annihilators of the veto come those who would 
 retain it in appearance, but render it inoperative 
 in practice. Whether to give effect to the resolu- 
 tion carried by the Government in the House of 
 Commons in June, 1907, would amount to this 
 in practice is a question which has been raised 
 already, and one which every politician must 
 attempt to answer for himself. 
 
 Other schemes of reform, which have been sug- 
 gested at various times, would deprive the Lords of 
 their right of veto only in certain circumstances ; 
 for example, where bills had passed the Commons 
 not merely by a bare majority, but by three- 
 quarters or two-thirds of the whole House. The 
 most obvious objection to such a course would be 
 that in some cases, and those perhaps where a drag 
 was most imperatively needed, the Sovereign 
 Parliament would be practically reduced to a 
 one-chambered assembly. A popularly-elected 
 chamber, newly returned by an overwhelming 
 majority of excited voters, at a time perhaps when
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 6^ 
 
 the war fever was in the air, or when exaggerated 
 rumours had produced a hysterical condition of 
 the public conscience, might be specially in need 
 of time for cool deliberation, at the very moment 
 when the magnitude of the majority in the Lower 
 Chamber automatically paralysed the House of 
 
 Lorii?. 
 
 (pertain reformers, again, would allow bills to be 
 rejected only by an overwhelming majority of the 
 Upper Chamber, which would thus retain its veto 
 unimpaired in all cases ; but could exercise it in 
 none, unless by the concurrence of two-thirds of 
 the House, or such other proportion as might be 
 fixedN. All such schemes have been adversely criti- 
 cised 'on the ground of their inherent artificiality. 
 There seems no special reason why a mechanical 
 majority of two-thirds should be fixed rather than 
 one of eight-fifteenths or of three-quarters, when 
 once we have departed from the principle of a 
 simple majority, which after all expresses in some 
 measure the mind of the assembly considered as a 
 corporate whole. Further, if it is difficult or im- 
 possible at present to stimulate a simple majority 
 of the Lords to throw out a Tory bill, it would 
 be even more difficult to obtain a two-thirds or 
 three-quarters majority for such a purpose. 
 
 Other schemes, which need not be discussed in 
 detail, would distinguish between bills altering the 
 
 I
 
 66 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 fundamentals of the Constitution and ordinary 
 bills, leaving the Lords with control over the 
 former but not over the latter ; or would provide 
 that, where a difference of opinion leads to a per- 
 manent deadlock, the matter should be determined 
 by the formation pro hac vice of a special chamber 
 containing^ the members of both Houses, a 
 majority of the total votes in which should finally 
 decide. Lastly, there is the proposal — of such 
 inherent interest that it will require an entire 
 section to itself — that a popular Referendum 
 should be resorted to whenever a deadlock 
 occurs between the two branches of the Legis- 
 lature. 
 
 These expedients are not necessarily mutually 
 contradictory. On the contrary, most of them are 
 capable of combination with one another so as to 
 form an almost bewildering profusion of more or 
 less elaborate schemes. It is unnecessary, how- 
 ever, to enter this labyrinth in the meantime. 
 II. Another and usually less hostile type of 
 / reformer, while leaving the powers of the House 
 untouched, would alter its composition. Some, 
 indeed, would not rest content with alterations, 
 but would sweep away the old institution and erect 
 a new one in its place. The most usual suggestion 
 for accomplishing this root-and-branch reform is 
 that the hereditary principle should be abolished
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 67 
 
 in favour either of popular election or of Minis- 
 terial nomination or of both combined. 
 
 Quite apart from the fact that such a scheme 
 would effect an annihilation rather than a reforma- 
 tion, and could only be carried by a revolution, it 
 presents other features that are open to criticism. 
 A second elective Chamber is apt — as has been the 
 case in Belgium — to claim equality with the first 
 or popular Chamber. Such a result would be 
 unpleasing to the well-wishers of the House of 
 Commons ; and might tend to a dislocation of 
 both home and foreign policy, if British Ministers 
 were required to choose between two masters 
 giving opposite commands. 
 
 A purely nominated Chamber, on the other 
 hand, would be a packed Assembly of supporters 
 of the Ministry, who would then, under modern 
 conditions, wield absolute authority over both 
 Houses of Parliament as well as over the Crown's 
 right of veto, securing an unrestrained control over 
 the various factors into which the wisdom of our 
 ancestors had split up the legislative omnipotence 
 of Parliament. 
 
 A solution so fraught with danger to the national 
 liberties and to national stability could not readily 
 be advocated by any responsible statesman, except 
 perhaps immediately after a General Election when 
 flushed with victory and elated by the new-born
 
 68 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 "insolence of office"; for both Houses would 
 thus become "pocket boroughs" under the 
 Cabinet's control. The whole boasted system of 
 " checks and balances," the glory and the safe- 
 guard of the British Constitution for many 
 centuries, would be at an end. The powers so 
 carefully separated from each other and entrusted 
 to different hands would be pieced together again 
 and placed at the absolute disposal of the Ministers 
 of the Crown. 
 
 The numerous schemes of reform put forward 
 during the last twenty years have usually pro- 
 ceeded on lines less dangerous and more feasible, 
 and most of them have at least this much in 
 common that they would reduce the hereditary 
 element without abolishing it, and fill up the 
 vacancies so created by the addition of new 
 members owing their seats to one or more of the 
 other principles at present inadequately represented 
 in the Upper Chamber. These other principles 
 may be summarised as delegation, nomination, 
 office, and election. 
 
 I. Delegation. 
 
 It has been proposed that the 543 hereditary 
 Peers who sit at present in their own right should 
 delegate their authority to a smaller number of 
 their own selection, thus cutting down the present
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 69 
 
 membership of the House to two-thirds or one- 
 half, or even one-third of its present size. Minor 
 questions as to methods of selection need not 
 meanwhile be discussed — whether or not the Peers 
 of Scotland and Ireland should cease to be separ- 
 ately represented and throw in their lot with the 
 other Peers ; whether the separate ranks of Dukes, 
 Marquesses, Earls, etc., should have separate repre- 
 sentatives ; whether the cumulative vote should 
 be adopted, or whether some other device may be 
 better fitted to secure the representation of minori- 
 ties ; and whether any change should be made in 
 the number or position of the bishops. 
 
 2. Nomination. 
 
 Room would thus be left for the introduction of 
 new members according to one or more principles 
 of appointment. Only a few of the numerous 
 suggestions need be here repeated. Statutory 
 power might be conferred on the Crown to create 
 a more or less numerous body of life Peers, so 
 many to be appointed each year or under such 
 other restrictions as might seem good. The field 
 of selection, for example, might be confined — 
 according to the Italian precedent — to individuals 
 who had held definite official posts or had served 
 the community in some capacity to be specifically 
 mentioned in making the appointment. All the
 
 70 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 nominated members, however, need not be made 
 life Peers or even life members. Some might 
 merely hold office during one Parliament, or for 
 a definite number of years. If it were desired that 
 our self-governing Colonies should be represented 
 in the Imperial Parliament, the Crown might be 
 required to select a specified number of these nomi- 
 nated members from lists supplied by the Colonial 
 Legislatures. 
 
 3. ^laJification by Office. 
 
 The introduction of the official principle pure 
 and simple has also been advocated, but is not 
 without its dangers. It might tend, on the one 
 hand, to dissipate the energies of the individuals 
 thus honoured, especially where the seat of their 
 official duties lay remote from Westminster ; and, 
 on the other hand, it would create an almost irre- 
 sistible temptation to make these particular offices 
 the reward of services rendered to the party in 
 power. These dangers would be to some extent 
 obviated by allowing the official principle to be 
 combined with that of nomination. Life Peers 
 would naturally be chosen in great measure from 
 present and past holders of the more important 
 diplomatic, judicial, military, or civilian posts. 
 
 Somewhat similar objections apply to a proposal 
 ■which was prominently before the public twenty
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 71 
 
 years ago — to wit, that the convenership of a 
 County Council should carry with it a seat in the 
 Upper Chamber of Parliament. This suggestion 
 recommended itself to the historical imagination 
 of Professor Freeman, who saw in it a return to 
 the usages of the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemot, with 
 its representatives of the shires in the persons of 
 their Ealdormen or Earls. When Mr. Rathbone 
 in the House of Commons in 1888, actuated by 
 more prosaic considerations, proposed to give seats 
 in the House of Lords to County Council con- 
 veners, Lord Rosebery " in another place " raised 
 the pertinent objection that these gentlemen would 
 be better employed in performing the local duties 
 for which they were appointed, than in neglecting 
 them for new responsibilities at St. Stephen's. 
 
 4. Election by Outside Bodies..^ 
 
 Any claims, indeed, which the County Councils 
 may have to representation in the Upper Chamber 
 might be more readily gratified by means of the 
 elective principle. Each Council, or each group, 
 say, of three, might be allowed to elect one " Lord 
 of Parliament." There would seem, however, to 
 be no sufficient reason for extending this privilege 
 to the governing bodies of counties, while denying 
 it to Municipal or even to Parish Councils ; and 
 if this particular reform were adopted the French
 
 72 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 precedent might perhaps be profitably followed of 
 forming in each district of convenient size an 
 Electoral College, composed of the local members 
 of the Lower Chamber of the Legislature, and of 
 delegates appointed by the urban and rural coun- 
 cils of the district, in numbers varying according 
 to their importance and population. 
 
 Important modifications of this theory, again, 
 might be made, according as the field of selection 
 allowed to these Electoral Colleges was restricted 
 or unrestricted. Candidates for election to the 
 Upper House might be required to possess certain 
 senatorial qualifications in respect of age, wealth, 
 experience, or office. It would even be possible 
 to combine the elective with the hereditary prin- 
 ciple by making membership of the House of 
 Lords as at present constituted a necessary quali- 
 fication for election to it as reconstituted in the 
 future. 
 
 These are only a few of the suggestions that 
 have at different times been made for the remodel- 
 ling of the Upper House. The difficulty clearly 
 does not lie in finding another principle to apply as 
 an antidote to the preponderance of the hereditary 
 element, but rather how best to choose wisely 
 amidst the endless variety that presents itself. 
 Among the most interesting schemes of recent 
 years may be named Earl Russell's proposal in
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 73 
 
 1869 to authorise the Crown to appoint twenty- 
 eight life Peerages (four a year) and the more 
 limited scheme proposed as an amendment by Lord 
 Cairns ; the two elaborate reconstructions sug- 
 gested by Lord Rosebery in 1884 and 1888 
 respectively ; and those of Mr. Rathbone, Lord 
 Salisbury, and Lord Dunraven in the year last 
 mentioned ; while Lord Newton laid the outlines 
 of a new plan before the House in June of 
 1907. The recommendations of Lord Rose- 
 bery's Committee will be discussed in a separate 
 section. i 
 
 III. The means whereby reform is to be effected 
 have also been the subject of discussion. Three 
 methods of procedure have been suggested — by 
 prerogative,. by resolution, and by statute, (i) It 
 is still occasionally argued that the Crown has the 
 right to create an unlimited number of life Peers, 
 who would also be life members. This opinion 
 was shared and acted upon by Lord Palmerston 
 and his legal advisers in 1856. A vigorous 
 opposition, headed by Lord Lyndhurst, resulted in 
 the adverse decision of a Committee of Privileges 
 appointed by the Lords, who decided that in the 
 absence of precedents for at least four hundred 
 years the Crown had no such prerogative. These 
 proceedings, known as the Wenslcydale Peerage 
 Case, finally settled the matter, for the Lords 
 
 •■\ 
 
 V
 
 74 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 exercise an exclusive jurisdiction over questions 
 affecting the composition of their own House. 
 
 Another method of procedure by prerogative 
 has been proposed, apparently in all seriousness, 
 though intended rather as a means of compelling 
 [, the Upper House to consent to its own reconstruc- 
 tion, than of permanently reconstructing it against 
 its will. The Lord Chancellor is simply to refrain 
 from summoning to Parliament such Peers as are 
 likely to vote against Government measures ; and 
 a purged House of Lords would thus be assembled 
 ready to do as it was bid. The advocates of this 
 expedient struggle to minimise the fact that when 
 Charles I. refused a writ to the Earl of Bristol in 
 1626 the Lords protested, and showed that no 
 precedent for such a course had been discovered 
 during the preceding two hundred years. If any 
 revolutionary Lord Chancellor could be found 
 sufficiently reckless to adopt so violent and un- 
 precedented a procedure, he would lay himself 
 open to an action of damages at the instance of 
 every Peer who had thus been deprived, by an 
 administrative act, of his right to a summons. 
 
 The political and historical grounds of objection 
 to such a course are as strong as the purely legal 
 ones. To those who have profited by the lessons 
 of English history in the sixteenth, seventeenth, 
 and eighteenth centuries it would seem a mon-
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 75 
 
 strous and retrograde measure to allow the 
 Executive to adopt any expedient which enabled it 
 arbitrarily to exclude duly qualified members of 
 either branch of the Legislature. 
 
 (2) To proceed by resolution of the House of 
 Commons, followed by a referendum to the holders 
 of the ordinary franchise, although apparently 
 advocated by Lord Rosebery in 1895, would also 
 be a dangerous and unconstitutional expedient. 
 The House of Commons, though the predominant 
 partner in a legally omnipotent Parliament, is not 
 by itself omnipotent ; nor can it by the most em- 
 phatic of resolutions make itself omnipotent, or 
 add in any respect to its own powers. This has 
 been made abundantly clear in a series of legal 
 decisions, beginning with the leading case of 
 Stockdale versus Hansard in 1839 ; while the 
 referendum, being entirely unrecognised by the 
 present law of England, could do absolutely 
 nothing towards turning an illegal course of action 
 into a legal one. Procedure by resolution must 
 thus be set aside as ineffective, unless it be con- 
 sidered merely as a preliminary to procedure by 
 violence or threats. 
 
 (3) A third method of procedure — by statute — 
 still remains, and is the only constitutional ex- 
 pedient available. It was at one time feared — and 
 such fears are responsible for driving moderate-
 
 76 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 minded men into a tolerance of extreme courses — 
 that the House of Lords would render this method 
 also ineffectual by obstinately refusing to consent 
 to any Act of Parliament embodying a sufficiently 
 thorough scheme of reform. 
 
 Such an attitude is perhaps no longer to be 
 feared. The interests and the patriotic instincts 
 of the Lords alike urge them to adopt an attitude 
 more amenable to reason. That they no longer 
 cling to a purely obstructive policy will be apparent 
 from a brief reference to the progress made in 
 recent years, within the House itself, by the move- 
 ment in favour of reform. . Lord Rosebery's 
 motion of June 20, 1884, " that a Select Com- 
 mittee be appointed to consider the best means of 
 promoting the efficiency of this House," was nega- 
 tived by a majority of 39. Letters addressed by 
 him in December of that year to a number of his 
 brother Peers, inviting their co-operation in the 
 work of reform, seem to have met with practically 
 no response ; and his motion of March 19, 1888, 
 " to call attention to the constitution of this House 
 and to move that a Committee be appointed to 
 inquire thereon," was defeated by 97 votes to 50. 
 The progress made in twenty years is shown by 
 the more favourable reception given to the resolu- 
 tion moved by Earl Cawdor, which, couched in 
 somewhat similar terms, was carried on May 6,
 
 SCHEMES OF RECONSTRUCTION 77 
 
 1907, by a majority of 198 against 46, followed by 
 the actual appointment of the Select Committee 
 on Reform, which has now formulated its Report. 
 Difficulties in plenty still remain to be overcome ; 
 but the outlook for moderate reformers is brighter 
 at the present day than it has been for many 
 centuries.
 
 VII. 
 
 THE REFERENDUM AS A MEDIATOR 
 BETWEEN THE CHAMBERS. 
 
 Among the numerous expedients for preventing 
 friction between the Houses of Parliament the 
 Referendum is perhaps the greatest favourite with 
 the educated public. Not only does it bring with 
 it an atmosphere of reasonableness and plausibility, 
 but it claims the merits of simplicity, directness of 
 aim, practicability, and rapidity of action, without 
 infringing on vested interests or involving organic 
 alterations of existing institutions ; while any 
 disadvantages it may have are far from obvious 
 to the casual observer. 
 
 I. The Case for the Referendum. 
 
 It is only within the last ten or fifteen years that 
 the Referendum has come prominently before the 
 British public, and therefore a short explanation of 
 its leading features may not be out of place. Its 
 general purport is clear enough ; for while it is
 
 THE REFERENDUM 79 
 
 capable of taking many different forms in points of 
 detail, its essential characteristic is always the same. 
 Entirely in accord with modern democratic con- 
 ceptions of government, it provides that questions 
 affecting the people should be referred to the 
 people's own decision, that decision being ascer- 
 tained by an actual adding up of votes cast on 
 either side. 
 
 The Referendum in its best known form (as it 
 exists in Switzerland, for example) may be defined 
 as the requirement that all bills (or certain classes 
 of bills), after being approved by Parliament, must, 
 before they become statutes, be " referred " to the 
 direct decision of those who possess the ordinary 
 Parliamentary franchise. A plain issue of Yes or 
 No is placed before each individual voter, and the 
 fate of the measure depends on the result, as shown 
 by a simple sum in addition and subtraction. 
 
 Such is the Referendum proper, in its simplest 
 aspect known as the " obligatory " (or compulsory) 
 Referendum, to distinguish it from the " faculta- 
 tive " (or optional) form of the expedient, where 
 bills, not necessarily subject to the popular veto, 
 may be made subject to it in certain conditions ; 
 for example, if so declared in the text of the bill 
 itself, or, alternatively, if demanded by the written 
 petition of a definite number of registered voters. 
 
 The theory of the Referendum (though not the
 
 8o THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 name) has been known for ages, and was definitely 
 enunciated as a legislative device by George 
 Buchanan, in the sixteenth century, in his famous 
 De Jure Regni.^ The honour of introducing 
 it as a practical expedient in modern politics was 
 reserved for Switzerland, where, after being tested 
 in the separate Cantons, it was incorporated with 
 the Federal system in 1848, and greatly extended 
 in its scope in 1874. The existing Swiss Consti- 
 tution legalises both forms of the Referendum — 
 the compulsory and the optional. All constitu- 
 tional changes require the endorsement of a 
 majority of the electors, while since 1874 any 
 measure whatsoever may be placed under the same 
 necessity by the demand of 30,000 voters (or, 
 alternatively, by the demand of a majority of the 
 Cantons). 
 
 The Referendum, in a somewhat different form 
 and not expressly under that name, is also in use 
 in the United States of America, not in questions 
 affecting the central or Federal Congress or the 
 Federal Constitution, but in certain of the separate 
 States of the Union, where the corrupt conditions 
 that surround political life have led statesmen to 
 devise additional checks upon the extravagance 
 and occasional dishonesty of local Legislatures, 
 particularly in their dealings with public funds. 
 
 ^ See Buchanan, Glasgow Quater-Centenary Studies, p. 243.
 
 THE REFERENDUM 8i 
 
 The Referendum in America is thus strictly limited 
 in its application. 
 
 Although the principle is not one with which 
 " the man in the street" in this country is yet 
 familiar, the Referendum has found zealous 
 advocates among a small but authoritative body 
 of British publicists and politicians. Mr. St. Loe 
 Strachey, the present editor of the Spectator^ 
 acclaimed it in 1894 as a convenient method of 
 mediating between the two Houses of Parliament, 
 at a time when the second Home Rule Bill was 
 before the country. He praised it as embodying 
 " the essential principle of democratic govern- 
 ment," and also, with some exaggeration, as "an 
 institution which democracies throughout the 
 world are beginning to find necessary to counteract 
 the accidents and eccentricities of representation." 
 
 Professor Dicey, without committing himself to 
 a final verdict, has put the case for the Referendum 
 with at least equal knowledge, if with greater 
 caution.' Discussing its nature in words which 
 more accurately fit the use made of it in Switzer- 
 land than the entirely difl^erent use to which it is 
 proposed to apply it in England, Mr. Dicey has 
 declared that " the Referendum is the people's 
 veto ; the nation is sovereign, and may well decree 
 
 ^Contemporary Review for April, 1890, .ind the National 
 Review for March, 1894.
 
 82 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 that the Constitution shall not be changed without 
 the direct sanction of the nation." 
 
 The same high authority specifies four respects 
 In which he anticipates beneficial effects from its 
 introduction into England, (i) By adopting the 
 Swiss principle of differentiating between ordinary 
 bills and those involving organic change, and 
 applying the Referendum only to the latter, the 
 Constitution would be protected, by the necessity 
 of this Referendum, from the constant menace of a 
 hostile Parliamentary majority in the Lower 
 Chamber. (2) By putting one isolated and clearly 
 defined question before the electors at a time, the 
 Referendum would secure that each important 
 bill should be decided on its own merits, thus 
 avoiding the confusion of issues usual at a General 
 Election, averting all danger of " log-rolling," and 
 making it possible for a voter to condemn a par- 
 ticular measure without voting at the same time 
 against the entire policy, executive and legislative, 
 of the Ministry of the day ; (3) equal weight 
 would, he argues, be given to the wishes of all the 
 voters, whereas at present the minority in a con- 
 stituency are not really represented by a member 
 elected in direct opposition to their votes ; (4) it 
 would enable, so Mr. Dicey is optimistic enough 
 to hold, voters to vote for or against a measure on 
 patriotic grounds, quite unbiassed by party pre- 
 
 is/
 
 THE REFERENDUM 83 
 
 judices or the desires of their party leaders. 
 National interests would thus be placed above all 
 factions. 
 
 This forms a somewhat ideal picture, and per- 
 haps savours rather of the cloistered academic life, 
 than of the rough-and-tumble of practical politics ; 
 but the admirers of the Referendum are by no 
 means confined to the ranks of University pro- 
 fessors. Mr. Asquith has tentatively discussed its 
 use as a possible solution of a pressing problem, 
 although not unaware of its attendant dangers. 
 
 It is in favour with the Labour party in 
 Australia, where it is viewed as a means of com- 
 pelling the Upper Chambers to surrender to the 
 Lower Houses of the various Legislatures. In 
 Queensland such a measure has been recently 
 recommended by the Ministry to the favourable 
 consideration of Parliament. 
 
 The Referendum also finds supporters among a 
 different type of politicians on the ground that 
 experience has proved it to be essentially conserva- 
 tive in its operation in Switzerland, where its use is 
 said to disclose three characteristics — " A dislike to 
 large expenditure, a dislike to centralisation, a dis- 
 like to violent innovatif)n." 
 
 Such merits, whether real or imaginary, are 
 merely subsidiary. What chiefly recommends the 
 innovation to English statesmen is the hope that it
 
 84 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 might solve the problem of the strained relations 
 of the two Houses of Parliament by referring to 
 the people all questions of quarrel. In this view 
 the arguments in its favour would at first sight 
 seem to be unanswerable. A dispute has arisen ; 
 the Commons claim that they alone can interpret 
 the wishes of the nation ; the Lords declare that in 
 this particular case they know better what the 
 people really want (or what they will come to want 
 if they are only given a little time for reflection). 
 Surely this is a question that the people themselves 
 alone can answer. Then — so the advocates of the 
 Referendum triumphantly conclude — put the 
 question to them direct. Let the voters come in 
 their thousands and answer a plain "Yes" or 
 " No." A simple addition does the rest. The 
 crisis is at once at an end. Nothing — in theory 
 at least — could be more simple or more easily 
 understood. 
 
 2. The Case Against the Referendum. 
 
 Disadvantages begin to appear whenever we 
 dive beneath the surface. Advocates of the 
 adoption of the Referendum in England have been 
 avowedly influenced by a belief in its success in 
 Switzerland. It will be shown immediately that 
 the conditions prevailing in the Swiss Republic are 
 so entirely diff'erent that the analogy is a mislead-
 
 THE REFERENDUM 85 
 
 ing one. Meanwhile it may be pointed out that 
 acute observers in Switzerland, such as M. Droz, 
 who has gained deserved distinction both as a 
 publicist and as a practical statesman, become less 
 inclined as time goes on to consider it an unmixed 
 blessino;. Four unfavourable features are pointed 
 out : popular apathy, evidenced by the smallness of 
 the average vote cast ; the ignorance of the voters 
 on the issues involved ; the absence of oppor- 
 tunities for popular discussion ; and a lowering of 
 the sense of responsibility among the legislators. 
 
 The main question, however, is not how the 
 Referendum has worked in Switzerland, but how 
 it is likely to work under entirely different condi- 
 tions in Great Britain. The boasted simplicity of 
 the expedient as a method of deciding disputes 
 quickly disappears when any serious attempt is 
 made to show how it might be applied in practice 
 to the conditions of our insular politics. In the 
 first place, the quarrels between the British Houses 
 of Parliament are rarely such as can be reduced to 
 a simple question of Yes or No. Frequently, 
 there are two bills before the nation, one promoted 
 by the Lords and another by the Commons ; or 
 two versions of the same bill, the one as amended, 
 the other as originally drawn. The question is 
 not — Will you have an Education Bill .'' Yes or 
 no."^ but rather — Is it bill A or bill B that you
 
 86 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 prefer ? — a very different issue, and one that the 
 House of Commons might in many instances 
 object strongly to place before the electors. 
 
 Further, the question thus put by no means 
 exhausts the issues at stake. A majority of voters 
 might be equally hostile to both bills — preferring 
 a compromise ; while in certain cases a majority of 
 voters might wish to maintain the status quo. 
 To get at the real opinion of the nation, then, a 
 series of questions ought to be asked — Do you 
 desire some such bill at all ? Yes or No ? If yes, 
 then, Will you accept bill A ? Yes or No ? Will 
 you accept bill B .'' Yes or No ? Will you accept 
 something between the two, say bill X.^" Yes or 
 No .'' What are the exact terms of the compromise 
 of which you would approve .'' — a question incap- 
 able of a simple answer. Even omitting this last 
 vital possibility of a compromise, it would be 
 impossible to devise a ballot paper (or other 
 mechanism of voting) capable of putting these 
 issues in a manner so simple as not to perplex the 
 illiterate or semi-illiterate voter. 
 
 These objections, when weighed at all, are 
 usually pushed aside with the ready answer that 
 what is possible in Switzerland is possible in Eng- 
 land also. In Switzerland, however, the conditions 
 are entirely different. There, before the " refer- 
 ence " takes place, all differences between the two
 
 THE REFERENDUM 87 
 
 Chambers have been threshed out and ended. 
 When the bill comes before the Swiss electors, it 
 has already been approved by both Houses of the 
 Legislature. It contains all the amendments and 
 compromises which their united or divided wisdom 
 has been capable of devising. The form of the 
 bill is fixed and agreed to by both Houses. 
 Parliament savs to the nation — Take it or leave it 
 as it stands. A simple Yes or No alone is asked for. 
 
 In England, on the contrary, it is proposed to 
 use the Referendum in cases where the Houses 
 have disagreed. In such cases the issue is rarely 
 a plain one of Yes or No. Further, where the 
 Houses have failed to ao^ree as to the substance of 
 the bill, it is more than likely that they would also 
 fail to agree upon the exact form of the issue to be 
 placed before the nation. 
 
 To allow the Ministry of the day, or (what 
 comes practically to the same thing) to allow the 
 Parliamentary majority in the Commons to deter- 
 mine the exact issue to be " referred," might at 
 times place the Cabinet in an embarrassing situa- 
 tion, but would more frequently end in depriving 
 the House of Lords of all power of amendment, 
 leaving them with no means of forcing a compro- 
 mise or of making their weight felt in Legislature 
 in any form whatever. 
 
 The Commons, whenever a Referendum seemed
 
 88 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 inevitable — and that would occur whenever the 
 Lords refused to efface themselves — would reason, 
 logically enough, that the Lower Chamber plus the 
 popular vote could make any laws they pleased ; 
 would laugh to scorn all suggested amendments ; 
 and would draft the proposed bill exactly in such 
 form as suited them, and then say to the nation — 
 " There is the bill as we have framed it. If you 
 do not take that exactly as it stands — however 
 lop-sided, unfair, or extreme you may think it — 
 you will not get any bill at all." 
 
 The electors, aware that a bill of some sort was 
 imperative, and deprived of all power of amending 
 it or even discussing it, would allow many a bad 
 bill to become law, because they considered a bad 
 bill better than none at all. The House of Lords, 
 thus reduced to a negligible quantity, would drop 
 out altogether from the practical machinery of the 
 Legislature, which would then consist of two 
 factors — the People's Chamber and the People. 
 The latter, with no opportunities of debate and 
 no power of amendment, could in no way take the 
 place of a revising Chamber. 
 
 The British Parliament would become in practice 
 a sovereign one-chambered Legislature, tempered 
 only by the people's right of veto in cases where 
 the issues were sufficiently grave to rouse them to 
 repudiate the handiwork of their own accredited
 
 THE REFERENDUM 89 
 
 agents. Of doubtful efficacy at any time, such a 
 check would be entirely useless exactly at those 
 periods of crisis when most required — to wit, 
 immediately after a General Election fought out 
 while the sound judgment of the public had been 
 disturbed by passions that had not yet had time 
 to cool. 
 
 It must not be presumed that the Referendum, 
 in thus lowering the authority of the Lords, would 
 correspondine^ly augment that of the Commons. 
 It has been maintained on the contrary that the 
 Commons, controlled by a Parliamentary majority, 
 highly drilled by the discipline of party, would 
 become a mere machine for registering the legisla- 
 tive decrees of any Cabinet that commanded a bare 
 majority of voters. 
 
 The Ministers of the Crown, relying on a 
 favourable Referendum, would then be everything : 
 Parliament, nothing. A recently appointed Minis- 
 try, controlling the royal veto, wielding undisputed 
 sway over the Lower House, and with the Referen- 
 dum as a ready means of reducing the Lords to 
 impotence, would hold in its own hand all the 
 previously scattered fragments of the power of 
 law making ; and, having upset all " the checks 
 and balances '^ that once formed the essence of the 
 world-famous, British, " mixed Constitution," 
 would enjoy the substance of legal omnipotence. 
 
 M
 
 90 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 Sufficient has perhaps been said to show that 
 the Referendum is not so simple in its application 
 and effects as its innocent appearance would sug- 
 gest. Its disturbance of existing conditions would 
 not be the less profound, because it would be per- 
 vasive and subtle. The whole of the case against 
 it has by no means yet been stated. A few of its 
 further inconveniences and dangers may be briefly 
 outUned. It would, for one thing, tend to paralyse 
 any acute sense of responsibility in Parliamentary 
 life ; members of the Commons might justify their 
 ill-considered or interested votes on the ground 
 that the last word rested with the people — who 
 must accept the final responsibility. The centre 
 of political life would be shifted from the floor of 
 the Commons to the polling booths. This would 
 detract from that widespread interest in Parlia- 
 mentary debates which has proved so educa- 
 tive an influence for the British public in the 
 past. 
 
 Then, too, the constant resort to the Referen- 
 dum, involving perpetual popular votes, and the 
 concomitants of a General Election on a small scale 
 over each contentious measure, would prove 
 an intolerable nuisance in a country such as 
 England, where legislation plays an important and 
 constant role, and affects wide. Imperial interests. 
 Whatever attempts might be made to control or
 
 THE REFERENDUM 91 
 
 prohibit canvassing, each party would feel its 
 honour at stake, and would use all means, open or 
 covert, of influencing votes; political unrest would 
 become the rule in place of the exception. It is 
 doubtful even whether the Referendum would 
 justify the expectations of those who maintain 
 that the individual issue would be disentangled. 
 Voting on a political question could hardly take 
 place on anything except party lines without effect- 
 ing a complete revolution in the habits and modes 
 of thought of the British people. 
 
 It is difficult to see how the electors could reject 
 a measure with which a Cabinet Minister had 
 identified himself without forcing that Minister to 
 retire from office ; and that again, if the existing 
 principle of the solidarity of the Ministry were 
 preserved, would involve a complete change of 
 Government. 
 
 Professor Dicey would obviate the intolerable 
 annoyance of perpetual popular votes by limiting 
 the operation of the Referendum to bills invojving 
 changes in fundamental constitutional principles ; 
 but two obvious difficulties would arise in carrying 
 this distinction into practice. In the absence of a 
 written code, there is no means of determining 
 what are, and what are not, the essentials of the 
 British Constitution, and any attempt to define 
 these would lead to endless discussions, besides
 
 92 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 destroying a leading feature of the Constitution — 
 that reign or " rule of law " of which Mr. Dicey's 
 own treatise is the classical exponent. 
 
 Further, quarrels between the Houses are by no 
 means confined to "constitutional" questions, 
 however that word may be defined ; and, accord- 
 ingly, to limit the scope of the Referendum, would 
 be to limit also the scope of the proposed solution 
 of existing difl'iculties. There would be no object 
 in introducing so great a novelty into England if 
 it failed to effect the chief purpose for which it is 
 required. 
 
 The Referendum is open to a further set of 
 objections, when we view it from a somewhat 
 different standpoint. Depending as it does on the 
 decision of a bare majority of votes it involves a 
 narrow, metallic, or mechanical conception of that 
 delicate organisation known as a Commonwealth, 
 State, or Nation. The best method of realising 
 the true principles of democracy may not be to 
 accept absolutely the Yes of 20,000,000 voters and 
 reject absolutely the No of 19,999,999 ; but rather 
 to effect some equitable compromise — impossible 
 under the Referendum — between the two. " The 
 greatest good of the greatest number " may not 
 always be best realised by a slavish obedience to the 
 tyranny of the odd vote (or even of a majority of 
 a few thousands out of a nation of many millions),
 
 / 
 
 THE REFERENDUM 93 
 
 the result mayhap of ignorance, prejudice, or mis- 
 representation. 
 
 Even if we admit that democracy means obedi- 
 ence to the dictates of a bare majority of the 
 people, the pertinent question still remains : — 
 Who are the people ? Are the voters of England, 
 Scotland, Ireland, and Wales to determine what 
 principles are to regulate the treatment to be 
 accorded to natives of India in the Dominion of 
 Canada? Must a question of Home Rule, as 
 involving the practical abrogation of a treaty, be 
 referred, in two separate applications of the prin- 
 ciple, to the people of Ireland and to those of Great 
 Britain respectively? If the men of Ulster claim 
 exceptional treatment, can the principle of a 
 separate Referendum be justly denied to them? 
 Is a question affecting Presbyterianism in Scotland 
 to be decided by a majority vote of English 
 Episcopalians ? Can the voting power of England 
 be used to force upon Scotland a Small Holdings 
 Bill of one type, while it adopts an entirely dif- 
 ferent bill to regulate its own affairs? It would 
 seem that, whether for good or evil, the Referen- 
 dum would involve the adoption of a modified 
 form of Home Rule. 
 
 Most advocates of the Referendum have dimly 
 perceived some at least of these objections, only to 
 brush them aside on the pica that the experience of
 
 94 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 Switzerland has proved them more illusory than 
 real. Why cannot the British public do what the 
 Swiss public have already done? 
 
 The answer is simple enough : the analogy 
 completely breaks down. Not only is Switzerland 
 a small country, without the complexities and im- 
 perial complications of British politics, but party 
 government, which is of the very essence of 
 our parliamentary system, is there non-existent. 
 Again, the two Swiss Chambers are of exactly 
 co-ordinate authority, in marked contrast to the 
 inferior position at present occupied by the Upper 
 House of the British Parliament. 
 
 These distinctions are so vital as to invalidate 
 all arguments founded upon analogy, but a still 
 more crucial distinction has yet to be explained, 
 one which, it would appear, has hitherto escaped 
 the notice of political theorists. The Referendum 
 in Switzerland is a weapon placed in the people's 
 hands to prevent the passing of bills of which both - 
 Houses have already approved. The Referendum 
 as proposed for Great Britain would be a weapon 
 placed in the people's hands for compelling the 
 enactment of measures of which one House has 
 finally disapproved. The one is a people's veto 
 for preserving the status quo; the other would be 
 a people's goad for hustling bills through Parlia- 
 ment that would otherwise be rejected. The one
 
 THE REFERENDUM 95 
 
 is a weapon of defence ; the other of aggression ; 
 the one entirely negative, the other entirely 
 positive. 
 
 The effect of the Referendum in Switzerland is 
 to add a third Chamber (to wit, the people in their 
 masses) to the two ordinary Chambers of the 
 Legislature. Its effect in England would be to 
 reduce the Second Chamber to impotence. In 
 Switzerland there are three bulwarks against in- 
 novation. In England there would be for practical 
 purposes only one. The difference between the 
 two systems is thus as emphatic as that between 
 black and white. 
 
 Whatever advantages the Referendum may 
 have, it is clear that it cannot be supported on 
 analogies drawn from Switzerland. The numerous 
 dangers thus seen to be latent in the system as 
 applied to the British Constitution may perhaps 
 yet be met by other arguments ; but until this 
 has been done, the Referendum must be rejected 
 as something worse than a mere leap in the dark. 
 Its operation, on nearer view, turns out to be in 
 no respect so simple, innocent, and innocuous as its 
 modest appearance would at first suggest.
 
 VIII. 
 
 SOME MAXIMS OF REFORM. 
 
 The attitude of the Abbe Sieyes towards the 
 problem of a Second Chamber is one to be envied ; 
 for, to him it presented no difficulties whatever. 
 " If a Second Chamber dissents from the First, 
 it is mischievous ; if it agrees, it is superfluous." 
 It was on similar grounds that the contents of the 
 Alexandrian Library, viewed as possible rivals to 
 the teachings of the Koran, were committed to the 
 flames. 
 
 For those students of politics who seek to re- 
 form rather than to abolish the House of Lords 
 the problem has greater complexities ; and each 
 reformer is at liberty to select from a mass of 
 evidence (a small part of which has been collected 
 in previous articles) such models as best conform 
 to its own ideals or preconceptions. 
 
 Serious difficulties thus surround any attempt 
 to formulate guiding principles in the abstract. 
 Yet from among numerous expedients, supported
 
 MAXIMS OF REFORM 97 
 
 by argument or analogy, a few axioms seem to 
 disentangle themselves ; and these may, perhaps, 
 serve as a basis for discussion, if not as a common 
 starting-point. 
 
 (i) The problem of reform must be treated as a 
 whole. The view taken of the extent of the 
 authority that may be safely or usefully vested in 
 an Upper Chamber depends mainly on the uses to 
 which that authority is likely to be put ; and that, 
 again, depends on the personal idiosyncrasies of 
 the men who compose it and the motives likely to 
 influence their votes. In brief, the powers to be 
 enjoyed will depend on the composition of the 
 reformed House of Lords. 
 
 (2) It is always wise to remember what Lord 
 Rosebery rightly described as " a cardinal principle 
 of English politics — that you should respect old 
 names and old traditions." Of two possible solu- 
 tions, that which involves less disturbance will 
 cause less friction, and will therefore be more prac- 
 ticable as well as less unpopular. Reformers of 
 the House ot Lords have to contend with two 
 classes of obstructionists — obstructive Tories who, 
 while grudgingly admitting the necessity of some 
 alteration in the abstract, are ready to condemn 
 every reform proposed in the concrete ; and ob- 
 structive Radicals who object to any device which, 
 by improving the Lords, would relatively weaken 
 
 N
 
 98 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 the Commons. A prominent Liberal Peer (Lord 
 Monkswell) thus adjured his political colleagues — 
 " Let us set our faces like steel against any pro- 
 position to strengthen the Second Chamber." In 
 face of the double menace of this two-pronged 
 opposition, it will be difficult for any measure of 
 reform whatsoever to make its way through 
 Parliament ; and it is therefore essential that every 
 unnecessary cause of stumbling should be excluded 
 from any bill that is seriously intended to be made 
 into a statute. 
 
 (3) Nothing should be done to disturb the clear 
 preponderance at present enjoyed by the Lower 
 House, alike in legislation and in controlling the 
 executive. For the Upper Chamber to attain 
 absolute or approximate equality with the Com- 
 mons, as is the case in Switzerland and in the 
 United States, would involve a radical alteration 
 in the fundamental principles of the British Con- 
 stitution. Representative government and the 
 party system, as at present understood in England, 
 would become impossible. Even if the anxious 
 jealousy of the Lower House could be overcome 
 it would be undesirable to add new powers to those 
 at present enjoyed by the House of Lords. The 
 status quo J with all its faults, has much to recom- 
 mend it. The problem is to preserve the authority 
 still possessed by the Upper House, while remov-
 
 MAXIMS OF REFORM 99 
 
 ing all reasonable grounds of complaint against the 
 way in which it is employed. 
 
 (4) These considerations have a pertinent bear- 
 ing on the problem of the proper size of an ideal 
 Upper Chamber. Radical reductions in the 
 nominal membership are frequently recommended, 
 and should perhaps be deprecated on the double 
 ground of interfering to an unnecessary extent 
 with ancient traditions and of tending unduly to 
 increase the authority of the Lords. It might be 
 advisable, however, to prevent the Upper House 
 from continuing to swell by annual accretions 
 beyond its already unwieldy proportions of 600 
 members, or even to cut it down to a Chamber of 
 350 or 400. An assembly of 100 or 150 care- 
 fully selected Senators, on the other hand, might 
 be dangerously small, since the decision of such a 
 body could not fail to carry enormous weight on 
 questions of national and Imperial policy. 
 
 (5) The substitution for the present House of 
 an entirely elective Second Chamber would be 
 foreign in an equal degree to Radical and Conserv- 
 ative ideals ; for such an Upper House would be 
 encouraged by the support of its constituents to 
 place itself in opposition to the Commons, while 
 the dislocation of the existing conditions of political 
 life in Great Britain would be complete. The late 
 Lord Salisbury contended with much force in 1888
 
 loo THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 that the only type of House capable of co-operating 
 with the Lower House, without exciting its 
 jealousy, was one composed of persons marked out 
 by birth alone. If he went too far in this, it seems 
 certain that the competition of a purely elective 
 Second Chamber would be certain to excite the 
 jealousy of the Commons. 
 
 (6) To exclude the hereditary element entirely 
 from the L^pper Chamber would, even if practic- 
 able, be open to numerous and serious objections ; 
 for not only would this amount to a virtual 
 destruction of that part of the Constitution, which, 
 next to the Monarchy, is the most venerable of 
 all, but it would materially weaken the prestige, 
 political and social, of Parliament as a whole, 
 lessening the social attractions of politics as a 
 career, and lowering the standard of public life. 
 
 (7) It by no means follows that the Upper 
 Chamber ought to retain its present preponderat- 
 ingly hereditary character. On the contrary, Lord 
 Rosebery in 1888 rightly attributed "the weak- 
 ness of the House of Lords to its indiscriminate 
 and unhampered application of the hereditary 
 principle "; and this conclusion is supported by 
 the mass of evidence collected in the preceding 
 pages — historical, international, and theoretical. 
 Abstract reason, assuredly, does not confirm the 
 claim of hereditary legislators to a monopoly of
 
 MAXIMS OF REFORM loi 
 
 legislative wisdom ; the foreign evidence affords 
 no example of a Chamber in which the purely 
 hereditary element so overwhelmingly predomi- 
 nates ; while the historical evidence proves con- 
 clusively that the English House of Lords at its 
 origin was determined by quite different principles, 
 and that the numerical preponderance of those who 
 owe their places exclusively to their birth is a 
 comparatively recent phenomenon. 
 
 (8) The proper treatment of the hereditary 
 element readily suggests itself. The present 
 House of Lords contains a majority of Peers who 
 are unfitted to act as legislators, and who have 
 acquiesced in their unfitness by habitually staying 
 away, and a minority both willing to act and well- 
 equipped for the work of the legislature by birth, 
 education, and family traditions. The conclusion 
 is obvious — retain the fit and exclude the unfit. 
 The method of selection is a comparatively minor 
 matter. The simplest method would probably be 
 here the fairest and most practicable : let,jiuL4U;£; 
 ijiait-jnewber&auakLc their owrL-sekctjon. 
 
 (9) The treatment of the Bishops, those " im- 
 memorial members of the House," as a great 
 Liberal historian has styled them, is a controversial 
 topic which is better here left undiscussed, though 
 it is a rock on which any scheme of reform might 
 readily be wrecked.
 
 I02 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 (lo) Any plan of reconstruction, to be prac- 
 ticable, must contain nothing that is artificial, 
 complicated, or difficult to understand. All 
 devices that can with appropriateness be termed 
 " fanciful " or " doctrinaire " are certain to draw 
 the contemptuous laughter of the British politician. 
 
 (ii) It has been suggested that the House of 
 Lords should be largely augmented by the pre- 
 sence of picked men sent by the great self-govern- 
 ing Colonies. Such a scheme is well fitted to fire 
 the imagination, and it receives support from many 
 solid arguments. The inherent dangers latent in 
 this proposal, such as the possible degradation of 
 the House of Commons to the position of a merely 
 local institution in competition with an Imperial 
 House of Lords, might possibly in time be over- 
 come ; but, in the present backward state of public 
 opinion on the subject of Imperial federation, any 
 attempt to secure an adequate proportional repre- 
 sentation of the Colonies would be premature and 
 doomed to failure. It might be better than 
 nothing, however, that each great Colony should 
 send one or more trusted delegates, capable of 
 representing and authoritatively explaining the 
 state of Colonial opinion on Imperial questions, 
 although making no pretence to possessing voting 
 power in any way adequate to the populations or 
 importance of the great Commonwealths and
 
 MAXIMS OF REFORM 103 
 
 Dominions which are dependent on the decisions of 
 the central Parliament. 
 
 (12) A number of additional suggestions must, 
 for lack of space, be grouped together. An ideal 
 Second Chamber, for example, ought to hold the 
 balance even between the parties that divide the 
 nation. Yet if one of its functions is really to act 
 as a drag when the coach of State is driven too 
 fast on dangerous roads, something may be said for 
 the conservative contention that an absolute equal- 
 ity is not always to be desired. In any view, the 
 reformed House of Lords must be so constituted 
 as to act as an efficient check on the Executive 
 Government. This is the more necessary at the 
 present day under conditions which threaten, by a 
 close alliance between Cabinet and Commons, to 
 disregard completely Montesquieu's doctrine of 
 the " separation of powers " as the only safeguard 
 of constitutional liberties. 
 
 An ideal Chamber, further, should be so com- 
 posed as to include a body of expert opinion on all 
 topics, military, naval, diplomatic, administrative, 
 scientific, and Imperial, that are likely to call for 
 the interference of the Legislature ; it should 
 represent the mature convictions rather than the 
 passing whims of the nation ; while the necessary 
 process of reconstruction should be so carried 
 through as to create the minimum of dislocation in
 
 I04 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 the public business, in existing institutions, and in 
 national habits and modes of thought. 
 
 These are a few of the considerations which 
 should be borne in mind in proceeding to estimate 
 the value of the various proposals made for in- 
 creasing the efficiency of the Upper Chamber.
 
 IX. 
 
 THE SELECT COMMITTEE'S SUGGESTED 
 SCHEME OF RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 This section proposes to consider whether the 
 framework of a reformed Upper Chamber outlined 
 by Lord Rosebery's Committee is capable of 
 improvement, and how far the practical recom- 
 mendations contained in the Report (dated 
 December 2nd, 1908) are consistent with the 
 postulates which its members laid down for their 
 own guidance. 
 
 I. ANALYSIS OF THE REPORT. 
 
 I. Underlying Axioms. 
 
 The detailed scheme of reconstruction is pre- 
 ceded by a statement of the abstract principles 
 accepted as authoritative by the members of Com- 
 mittee, apparently with uhimate unanimity. 
 These maxims are mainly three, namely: — {a) 
 That the mere fact of birth taken by itself ought 
 
 o
 
 io6 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 not to secure admision to the Upper House — a 
 recommendation carried, it would appear, almost 
 by acclamation; (b) that "qualification" by 
 official experience should be " the main test for 
 admission to the reformed House of Lords," a 
 principle accepted after prolonged discussion ; and 
 (c) that all reforms should be frankly based on 
 " grounds of utility," without undue deference to 
 the views of experts on the law and history of the 
 Constitution on the one hand, or to the analogies 
 of foreign Senates and Second Chambers on the 
 other. 
 
 2. The Changes Proposed. 
 
 The main features of the scheme which is 
 intended to embody these postulates may be epi- 
 tomised as follows : 
 
 (a) No one, except princes of the blood royal, 
 shall sit and vote in the House of Lords merely 
 by reason of his possession of a peerage. The 
 right to exercise legislative functions on the sole 
 ground of birth — fit counterpart of the Stuart 
 doctrine of kingship by right divine and inde- 
 feasible — would thus come to an end forthwith. 
 The wisdom of this decision will pass to-day, 
 in most quarters, unchallenged ; although the 
 proposed change tends to increase materially a 
 state o4 things declared " anomalous " in 1874 by
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME 107 
 
 a former Select Committee (on the Scottish and 
 Irish Peers), also presided over by Lord Rosebery, 
 which held inter alia " that it was undesirable that 
 a class of Peerages should be maintained that were 
 only titular and with which no legislative functions 
 were associated." What was held anomalous then 
 would in future become the rule. A majority of 
 the Peers would be freed from legislative duties. 
 
 (b) A hereditary peerage, however, combined 
 with one or other of various carefully specified 
 "qualifications" would entitle the holder to sit 
 and vote. Limitations of space prevent these 
 being here given in full. They extend to the 
 oflfice of Cabinet Minister, if held, it would appear, 
 even for one day ; to a Viceroy of India or 
 Governor-General for however short a term ; to 
 the Earl Marshal, the Lord Great Chamberlain, 
 the Lender-Secretaries of the various Departments 
 for the time being ; to former Speakers of the 
 House of Commons ; to inter alios the permanent 
 heads of Government Departments, the Governors 
 of certain Colonics, and Ambassadors of four 
 years' standing (or less in certain circumstances) ; 
 to a vice-admiral or lieutenant-general ; to certain 
 peers who have served for 20 years in the Com- 
 mons ; and to certain others who have only served 
 for 10. The Committee calculates that there are 
 at present 130 peers thus "qualified."
 
 io8 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 (c) From the remainder of the hereditary peer- 
 age 200 are to be elected for each new Parliament 
 by their fellow-peers. For this purpose the 
 holders of Scottish and Irish peerages are to be 
 merged in the general body of the peers of Eng- 
 land, Britain, and the United Kingdom. The 
 cumulative vote is recommended. No qualifica- 
 tion for election is here required except birth — or, 
 more accurately, the possession of a hereditary 
 peerage, whether created or inherited. 
 
 (d) There may also be created by the Crown a 
 moderate number of life peers entitled to sit and 
 vote in the Upper House. Strict limitations are 
 here laid down. This small handful of non- 
 hereditary legislators must never exceed 40 at 
 any one time ; not more than four can be created 
 in any one year ; and only one in any year who 
 is not duly " qualified " by office. 
 
 (<?) The 26 spiritual lords at present in Parlia- 
 ment are to be reduced to 10. The Committee 
 would "gladly" welcome representatives of the 
 other great Churches of the three kingdoms ; but 
 no provision is made for their inclusion. 
 
 (/) Two or three Colonial representatives may 
 possibly be added, to be selected by some method 
 left vague by the Committee, until the views of 
 the Governments of the countries concerned can be 
 obtained.
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME 109 
 
 (g) The Princes of the Royal blood — at present 
 three in number — would retain their seats ; and so 
 would the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, or " law 
 lords " (whose creation to the number of four was 
 authorised by the act of 1887, and who are spoken 
 of in the Report as five in number). As those 
 who have held " high judicial office " are reckoned 
 as " qualified peers," the composition of the 
 House of Lords as a court of final appeal would 
 not be interfered with. 
 
 3. Composition of the Reconstructed Chamber. 
 
 The Report would substitute for the existing 
 House of more than 600 members a reformed 
 Chamber of " something under 400." Its mem- 
 bership would comprise 333 hereditary peers, 130 
 of them " qualified," and 200 of them selected by 
 their fellow-peers but technically " unqualified," ^ | 
 the three Royal Princes completing the number. 
 More than four-fifths, then, of this " reformed " 
 House would necessarily consist of hereditary 
 peers. To balance this compact majority of here- f 
 
 ditary legislators, qualified or selected, there would 
 be at most 40 life peers, 10 spiritual peers, 4 " law \ 
 
 lords," and perhaps half a dozen representatives of 
 the Colonics — say 60 in all. The Committee 
 seem in some doubt as to whether the full number 
 of life peers would be appointed, for they speak of f
 
 no THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 " a possible annual increment" of four. In any 
 event the non-hereditary element would amount to 
 no more than 60, as against 333 hereditary peers. 
 
 Many points of detail have been omitted from 
 this outline, with the view of concentrating atten- 
 tion upon the main issues at stake. 
 
 II. CRITICISM OF THE SCHEME. 
 
 It seems natural to inquire how far a House of 
 Lords thus reconstructed would embody the car- 
 dinal principles from which the Committee started. 
 
 I. Distrust of the Hereditary Principle. 
 
 Emphasis is rightly laid on " the almost ex- 
 clusively hereditary character of the House of 
 Lords " as at present constituted. The need of 
 change is supported by unanswerable arguments. 
 The only question that remains is whether the 
 conclusion reached has been consistently applied 
 in the practical details of the suggested scheme. 
 Lias the undue predominance of the hereditary 
 element been successfully overcome or even 
 reduced .'* The answer must be an emphatic 
 negative. The obvious remedy for the undue 
 predominance of any one element would be to 
 introduce some new element in quantity sufficient
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME iii 
 
 to modify effectually, if not to control, the old 
 one. 
 
 This has not been done. Some 262 of the 543 
 hereditary members ^ of thejpresent Upper Cham- 
 ber would be excluded. (\As a large majority of 
 these men rarely or never enter the House, this 
 change would be greater in theory than reality?) 
 The only new element to be added would consist 
 of the small body of life peers — 40 at most (and 
 that only after 10 years have passed). Thereafter 
 new life peers could only be created as vacancies 
 occurred. It is difncult to see how 40 life peers 
 could possibly leaven the solid mass of 330 here- 
 ditary noblemen. If it is argued that half a 
 dozen, or even twelve, Colonial representatives 
 would be added, it must also be remembered that 
 16 bishops are to be excluded — a measure which, 
 whether admired or deplored on its intrinsic merits, 
 reduces materially the non-hereditary element in 
 the Upper Chamber. 
 
 This scheme of reform would seem to secure the 
 hereditary legislators in a permanent majority of 
 overpowering numbers, instead of sweeping away 
 the principle to which the Committee professes to 
 object. 1 he same unavowcd adherence to the 
 
 ' For the elements of which this number is made up, sec 
 note to p. 30 supra. The Committee's figure (592), includes 
 Scottish and Irish peers.
 
 112 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 hereditary principle may perhaps be detected in 
 some of the minor details of the report. A peer 
 inheriting a title, for example, will be held qualified 
 for membership of the Upper Chamber by lo 
 years' previous service in the Lower one, while 
 20 years' service is required in the case of a peer 
 of new creation. 
 
 2. Salification by Office. 
 
 The second cardinal doctrine, accepted by the 
 Committee " after long and anxious deliberation," 
 is " that qualification should be the main test for 
 admission to the reformed House of Lords," the 
 members " holding that the best guarantee for the 
 satisfactory performance of legislative duties lay 
 in the experience of affairs derived from the tenure 
 of high and responsible ofl^ice or from active service 
 in public life." These sentiments, admirable in 
 tone though not indisputable in application, have 
 been given effect to by allowing the election to the 
 Chamber of a clear majority of its members from 
 among individuals necessarily possessing no 
 technical "qualification" whatever. To balance 
 130 "qualified" hereditary Peers and 30 
 " qualified " life Peers against 200 technically 
 " unqualified " Lords of Parliament is not a con- 
 sistent application of the principle for which the 
 Committee contends.
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME 113 
 
 This part of the scheme is open to further objec- 
 tions. Not only is it easy to picture cases in which 
 insistence upon a hard-and-fast list of qualifications 
 might exclude the fit alonor with the unfit ; but 
 the suggested change would introduce mto the 
 framework of Parliament elements of rigidity, 
 artificiality, and arbitrariness hitherto foreign to 
 the genius of the British Constitution. 
 
 The arbitrariness becomes obvious when it is 
 considered that the Committee's recommendations 
 would tend to exclude from the House classes 
 whom Lord Rosebery in 1884 particularly desired 
 to include — representatives " of the professional, 
 commercial, and labouring classes, of science, art, 
 and literature " men of genius like the late Lord 
 Kelvin, great physicians like Lord Lister, men of 
 varied and useful gifts like Lord Avebury, men 
 who are experts in the science of legislation like 
 Lord Farrer. If qualifications are to be laid down 
 at all, why should all of them be of one general 
 type.'' Why should they not embrace peers who 
 arc presidents of royal societies, chairmen of 
 boards of conciliation, or who have gained experi- 
 ence of administration by life-long apprenticeship 
 as members of county councils and local authori- 
 ties .-^ There is perhaps no a priori' reason why a 
 poet laureate peer should prove either a worse or 
 a better legislator than an carl marshal holding 
 
 p
 
 114 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 office, since the feudal ages, by right of birth ; but 
 a chairman of London County Council would 
 seem at least equally worthy of inclusion as 
 would a Governor of the subject races of Ceylon. 
 In brief, all such lists of favoured offices must 
 necessarily be arbitrary and unfair, y^hey are all 
 tainted with the ineradicable vice of making per- 
 manent a stereotyped system planned to suit pre- 
 sent day conditions which are certain afterwards 
 to change"^ There is therefore no cause for wonder 
 that this particular list presents features open to 
 criticism, or that in it some of the comparatively 
 fit have been passed over in favour of the com- 
 paratively unfit. It is a more grave objection that 
 the list of qualified peers includes the permanent 
 heads of Government Departments, involving the 
 risk of bringing the exigencies of party politics 
 into a sphere from which they have hitherto been 
 jealously and wisely excluded. 
 
 3. The Elective Principle. 
 
 The recommendation that the Peers should 
 select 200 of their own number to represent them 
 is, taken by itself, an admirable one. It must be 
 kept in view, however, that the Peers (some 130 in 
 number) whom the Select Committee consider best 
 suited to act as legislators, have already been 
 awarded seats by right of " qualification," and are
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME 115 
 
 not therefore available as candidates for election. 
 It follows — on the principles of the Committee — 
 that the large number of 200 elected " Lords of 
 Parliament " must be drawn from the ranks of 
 those who are, comparatively speaking, unqualified 
 for the work to which they are called. Their title 
 to admittance depends not on fitness, but on their 
 hereditary rank, combined with selection by an 
 electorate depending also entirely on hereditary 
 rank. 
 
 On the electoral details of the scheme it is 
 unnecessary to dwell. Lords of Parliament are 
 to be elected for each Parliament, not for life. 
 The peerages of Scotland and Ireland are to be 
 merged in the general electorate body, and some 
 care is taken to show that " to all intents and 
 purposes " the terms of the Acts of Union would 
 not be violated. The Committee recommend the 
 cumulative vote ; each peer distributing his 200 
 votes as he sees fit ; while Lord Courtney of 
 Penwith, apparently in a minority of one, presses 
 the advantages of a somewhat complicated scheme 
 of proportional representation. 
 
 4. Life Peerages. 
 
 The Committee " recommend that the Crown 
 should be empowered to summon annually four 
 Peers for life as Lords of Parliament. Read by
 
 ii6 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 itself, this clause of the Report might be taken to 
 mean that from among the class of Peers for life 
 the Crown might in each year summon four indi- 
 viduals to serve as "Lords of Parliament" for 
 that year only. In the light of the context, how- 
 ever, the intended meaning would seem to be that 
 the Crown is to be empowered to create in any one 
 year not more than four life peerages carrying with 
 them the right to act for life as Lords of Parlia- 
 ment. As the inclusion of life Peers is practically 
 the only expedient for introducing new blood 
 among the Lords, it seems necessary to examine 
 this part of the scheme somewhat narrowly. 
 
 {a) The report takes for granted that the Crown 
 has at present the power to create life Peers, but 
 that it cannot (without consent of the House) 
 confer on them any right to sit in Parliament. 
 This is, indeed, the doctrine upheld in the 
 Wensleydale Peerage Case (1856). {h) Under 
 Section 24 sub-section v. of the Report, any such 
 life Peer who has served for 20 years in the Llouse 
 of Commons shall be entitled to a writ of sum- 
 mons to the Lords without election. To carry 
 this into effect would of course, as regards such 
 qualified Peers, abrogate the principle of the 
 Wensleydale decision, {c) Under Section 27, the 
 Crown may in addition create a few life peerages 
 carrying with them seats in the Upper Chamber ;
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME 117 
 
 but this is possible only under jealously guarded 
 limitations already specified. 
 
 The Committee's anxious endeavours to 
 broaden the basis of the House of Lords, " to 
 invigorate it by some element from without," and 
 to effect " a periodically renewed contact with the 
 aspirations of the nation " (to quote from the 
 original rough draft of the Report) have led to 
 nothing more startling than this inclusion of a 
 handful of life Peers. These 40 Peers (they may 
 be fewer but not more) have to leaven by their 
 presence a homogeneous mass of 330 hereditary 
 Peers. 
 
 The members of Committee seem to have an- 
 ticipated severe ^rictures on this part of their 
 Report, for they introduce it almost with an 
 apology — " With respect to peerages for life . . . 
 it is perhaps necessary to make one or two re- 
 marks." The remarks need not be here repeated, 
 for they are half-hearted and unconvincing. The 
 smallness of the number of the life Peers is the 
 more remarkable when it is remembered that Lord 
 Newton's bill of February, 1907, allowed 100 to 
 be created, while Lord Salisbury's bill of 1888 
 was willing to admit 50. It is instructive to learn 
 that on a motion by Lord Helper to reduce the life 
 peers from the inadequate number of 40 to an 
 even more inadequate 25, eight members of
 
 \ 
 
 ii8 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 Committee voted each way, the original number 
 being retained only because the "not contents" 
 preyail when a tie occurs. 
 
 To attempt seriously to balance 40 life members 
 against 330 hereditary peers would be obviously 
 absurd. The Report, while nominally condemn- 
 ing the principlc-of a hereditary Chamber, is in 
 reality demanding for it a new charter of privileges 
 / and a renewed lease of life. 
 
 5. Encroachment on the Royal Prerogative. 
 
 The Report takes no notice of the obvious fact 
 that its recommendations involve a serious in- 
 fringement of one of the oldest and most valued 
 powers of the Crown. It has sometimes been 
 maintained that " the composition of the House 
 of Lords depends on the royal prerogative." 
 While ignoring the Crown's inability to take back 
 a peerage that has once been granted, the opinion 
 cited contains an element of truth. The Govern- 
 ment of the day can advise the King to increase 
 the membership of the Upper House to any 
 extent. This power not only acts as a steady 
 counterpoise to the hereditary principle, but also 
 forms a weapon in reserve for " swamping" the 
 Lords (or threatening to do so), which has proved 
 valuable on more than one occasion. 
 
 The Crown, it is now proposed, should re-
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME 119 
 
 nounce these powers for ever, receiving nothing in 
 return except the right to create four life peers a 
 year (when the number does not ab-eady amount 
 to 40). The compensation is inadequate. The 
 British Constitution is delicately poised ; by 
 touching one part, it is possible to endanger the 
 stability of the whole. Gladstone, ever mindful 
 of the salutary effects of the mysterious powers 
 held in reserve by the Crown, regarded with 
 jealous eye any change that threatened to impair 
 the royal authority. It is now almost a common- 
 place that under our present system of govern- 
 ment " the prerogatives of the Crown have be- 
 come the safeguards of the people's rights." 
 
 6. Unsolved Problems. 
 
 On another side the Report seems open to 
 criticism. While raising several profound ques- 
 tions as to the relations that ought to prevail 
 between the two Chambers of the Legislature, or 
 between that Legislature and the nation, it leaves 
 them all unsolved. The Committee " feel that 
 the party in power in the elected Chamber should 
 be able to count upon a substantial following in 
 the House of Lords," but they have no suggestion 
 to make for obviating the existing evil, l^xpedi- 
 ents were discussed for invigorating the House 
 " by some element from without," by admitting
 
 I20 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 representatives of the great urban communities, 
 and also of the county councils, or by allowing 
 the Government of the day to nominate a number 
 of its own supporters during their period of office ; 
 but the Committee have failed to agree on making 
 any such recommendations. 
 
 They have done nothing towards representing 
 the varied aspects of the national life, wisdom, or 
 enterprise. They have suggested nothing towards 
 reducing the inequalities of party in the Upper 
 Chamber, or for promoting harmony between the 
 two branches of the Legislature. While appar- 
 ently in favour of the Referendum, they make no 
 recommendation either for or against its adoption. 
 The doubts and difficulties which contributed to- 
 wards these omissions are readily understood ; yet 
 it cannot be denied that the members of the 
 Select Committee have detracted greatly from the 
 value of their own Report by shelving some of the 
 most vital questions included in the scope of their 
 investigation. 
 ( In conclusion, it may willingly be admitted that 
 Lord Rosebery's task was a tenfold harder one than 
 that of any of his arm-chair critics. He has had 
 O to mediate among the three rival schools of 
 Ox-' thought of which his Committee was composed. 
 ^^ The minutes show that he was outvoted on car- 
 dinal points of his own suggested scheme ; and
 
 THE COMMITTEE'S SCHEME 121 
 
 it is evident that, to avoid total shipwreck, he has 
 made jettison of much he held of value. The 
 Report is of the nature of a compromise, and 
 shows in almost every section traces of resulting 
 inconsistencies.
 
 X. 
 
 THE NEED OF AN ALTERNATIVE 
 SCHEME. 
 
 The problem of adjusting the relations between 
 the two branches of the Legislature is still un- 
 solved. The scheme outlined in Sir Henry 
 Campbell-Bannerman's Resolution would abolish 
 the Imperial Parliament now existing in favour of 
 a new untried one-chambered legislature ; and it 
 could only be carried by some revolutionary pro- 
 cedure. Lord Rosebery's scheme, on the other 
 hand, is unlikely to satisfy entirely either the 
 friends or enemies of the Upper Chamber. 
 
 The whole question, then, is still an open one. 
 An effective scheme of reconstruction that would 
 strengthen the House of Lords without making 
 it too strong, that would hold out any real prospect 
 of obtaining the support of both Houses of Par- 
 liament and the goodwill of the Ministers who 
 control the royal prerogative, has yet to be devised. 
 The atmosphere of the House of Lords has proved
 
 AN ALTERNATIVE SCHEME 123 
 
 too rarified for the development of a reform scheme 
 with sufficient vitality to survive in the rough 
 world of politics. The only hope of maturing a 
 more virile scheme would seem to be in the freer 
 air of public discussion outside the House. 
 
 Any suggestions, however crude, fitted to 
 stimulate popular interest may forward in some 
 measure the desired result. This consideration 
 may help at least to excuse the attempt here made 
 to construct an alternative framework for a re- 
 formed Upper Chamber. Some such outline, 
 indeed, however tentatively drawn, would seem 
 called for, if only for the sake of logical complete- 
 ness. The following suggestions are offered 
 accordingly, as a contribution to the discussion : 
 
 I. Preliminary Suggestions. 
 
 The criticisms already hazarded upon the Report 
 of Lord Rosebery's Committee, and indeed the 
 terms of that Report itself, suggest directions in 
 which it is capable of improvement. 
 
 (i) When excluding a considerable number of 
 hereditary legislators, it is admittedly of the first 
 importance that the individuals who retain their 
 seats in the Upper Chamber should be those best 
 fitted for the varied work to be done there. Two 
 methods of obtaining this result are possible : (a) 
 To draw up, once and for all, a stereotyped list of
 
 124 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 "qualifications" — the method adopted in theory 
 by the Select Committee ; (b) to trust the peer- 
 electorate to choose the best men of their own 
 number, according to the changing needs of 
 chanp-incy times. The latter is the better course : an 
 opinion which would appear to have been shared by 
 many members of the Committee ; for the original 
 draft of the Report declared (in words toned down 
 in the final version in accordance with the terms of 
 an amendment) that two of the three sections 
 composing the Committee concurred " in thinking 
 that the hereditary peers might be trusted to elect 
 for themselves the best of their body to sit as 
 Lords of Parliament." 
 
 The reasons for prefering this indirect method 
 of securing the services of the men best qualified 
 are mainly two. Not only would such a method 
 prove more flexible and less arbitrary in its opera- 
 tion ; but it is more in accordance with the tradi- 
 tions of political life that now prevail in Great 
 Britain, where men are usually chosen to serve as 
 representatives of their fellows by an election based 
 upon an estimate of the abilities they have shown 
 in public life. Peers who have distinguished 
 themselves in local administration, in diplomatic or 
 departmental work, as Governors of Colonies, or 
 on the floor of the House of Commons (that great 
 arena for " the testing and selecting of public men
 
 AN ALTERNATIVE SCHEME 125 
 
 in debate," ^ would naturally be among those 
 chosen. From another point of view, this method 
 is desirable ; for to leave to the excluded heredi- 
 tary peers an absolutely free hand in electing their 
 own representatives would seem only a fair com- 
 pensation for the loss of their individual seats. 
 Less could not reasonably be offered. 
 
 Unfortunately, as it will seem to many, thej 
 members of the Select Committee have decided to I 
 adopt both methods concurrently. They propose > \ m ^ 
 to allow the peers best qualified, in their opinion, T 
 to sit by right of office (past or present), and, in \ 
 addition, to allow more than three-quarters of the^ 
 remaining places to be filled by "unqualified" 
 elected peers. As a result, no room is left for the 
 adequate representation of any other class or 
 interest. These defects might readily be remedied 
 by strictly limiting the seats reserved for hereditary 
 legislators, as such, to 200 ; leaving the task of 
 selecting the whole of these to the peers them- 
 selves. In all probability the greater number of 
 the 130 peers marked as " qualified " by the Select 
 Committee would find places among the successful 
 candidates for election. 
 
 (2) Abundant room would thus be left for the 
 introduction of new blood. Instead of the insig- 
 nificant band of 40 life peers, a number equivalent 
 
 ^ See Sidney Low, Govertianre of England, p. 59.
 
 126 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 to that of the hereditary peers might be gradually 
 appointed, thus providing an adequate counter- 
 poise without destroying the identity, traditions, 
 or historic continuity of a time-honoured insti- 
 tution. 
 
 How far the Government of the day, in advis- 
 ing the Crown to make such appointments, ought 
 to enjoy an unfettered choice may well be matter 
 for debate. Any restriction of the field of selec- 
 tion would introduce, in a modified form, the 
 elements of artificiality and fixity shown to be 
 inherent in the Select Committee's scheme. 
 
 On the whole, it would seem preferable to leave 
 the Crown an almost unlimited discretion. It 
 would be manifestly necessary for the Govern- 
 ment's credit and for its success in party warfare 
 that it should be careful to appoint only the best 
 men available to support its measures in the Upper 
 House. Aspirants for honours, whose claims to 
 promotion in return for services rendered could 
 not be ignored, particularly those more distin- 
 guished for social ambitions than for any unusual 
 endowment of brain-power, would readily accept 
 a hereditary peerage without a seat in Parliament 
 in preference to a life peerage encumbered by the 
 performance of legislative duties which confer no 
 perpetual " ennoblement " upon their descendants. 
 The right to create new peers would thus become a
 
 AN ALTERNATIVE SCHEME 127 
 
 safety-valve, instead of, as at present, a source 
 of danger to a rapidly expanding House of 
 Lords. 
 
 (3) While provision must of necessity be made 
 to enable certain members of the existing House, 
 such as the four lords of appeal in ordinary, to 
 retain their seats ; and while it may be advisable 
 to introduce certain new members representing, 
 for example, the Colonies and various religious or 
 learned societies ; the less complex the method 
 adopted for effecting this, the more acceptable, 
 ceteris paribus, the resulting scheme will be. 
 This view is supported by the words of Section 34 
 of the Report, which deprecate the introduction to 
 the House of a certain class of members merely 
 " for the duration of a Parliament, or of a Govern- 
 ment," holding rightly that such " Lords of Par- 
 liament would be in a position anomalous as 
 regards the House and unsatisfactory as regards 
 themselves." Such reasoning would seem to be 
 quite general in its bearing, and ought not to be 
 confined to the special class of members to whom 
 the Report applies it. 
 
 It would be well, then, in the cause of simplicity^ 
 and to avoid awkward anomalies, that the House / 
 should contain only two constituent classes — the 
 elected hereditary peers and the nominated life 
 peers ; and that the composition of these two
 
 128 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 classes should be so refjulated as to include all 
 interests which deserve to be represented. 
 
 2. Outline of Alternative Scheme. 
 
 Neglecting all points of detail, the essential 
 features of the reconstruction, now proposed as a 
 substitute for that of the Select Committee, may 
 be broadly summed up under three heads : 
 
 (i) Apply the principle of delegation (or elec- 
 tion if that word be preferred), exactly as Lord 
 Rosebery's Committee recommend, so as to cut 
 down the hereditary members of the House from 
 600 to one-third of that number. When we 
 consider the smallness of the average House, and 
 the numerous Peers who have never attended more 
 than once or twice, 200 seats would probably be 
 ample to protect the vested interests of all those 
 peers who were really prepared to act regularly 
 as legislators, and would certainly include all those 
 who by their previous diligence in performing 
 their flinctions in the House had established a 
 claim to special consideration. 
 
 It is not desirable that the main issues here 
 raised should be obscured by the discussion of 
 details ; but a few subsidiary points and possible 
 alternatives may be briefly mentioned. 
 
 {a) There are two possible systems on which 
 the elected peers might hold their seats — for life,
 
 AN ALTERNATIVE SCHEME 129 
 
 as is the case at present with representatives of the 
 Irish peerage ; or for each separate Parliament, as 
 with the peers representing Scotland. Something 
 could be said for either system, but the Committee 
 have probably decided wisely that a new election 
 should take place at the commencement of each 
 Parliament. It is, of course, imperative that some 
 method of election should be adopted which would 
 be certain to provide for an adequate representation 
 of the minority among the peers. 
 
 (b) As twenty years must elapse before full 
 effect is given to the operation of the complemen- 
 tary provision (to be immediately explained) for 
 filling the places thus left vacant, a period of tran- 
 sition is inevitable. It would thus be possible, at 
 the expense of slightly complicating the scheme of 
 reform, to permit at first the election of 400 here- 
 ditary peers (if so many were willing to accept 
 nomination for election at the hands of their 
 brother peers) — the number elected suffering a 
 diminution each elec:ion (proportional to the 
 efflux of time), until the minimum of 200 was 
 reached in twenty years. The advantages of this 
 would be twofold : violent fluctuations in the total 
 membership of the House would be obviated ; 
 while opposition would be softened by making 
 more gradual the exclusion of those existing peers 
 who desired to retain their seats. A momentous, 
 
 R
 
 I30 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 but not too violent, change would thus have been 
 gradually effected without infringing on individual 
 vested interests and without any awkward disloca- 
 tion during the period of transition. 
 
 (c) The historic character of the House, as con- 
 taining a graded hierarchy of ranks, might be, to 
 a great extent, preserved if the seats were allocated 
 on some simple scheme, according to the various 
 grades of the peerage, each rank appointing its 
 own delegates. On the other hand, it may be 
 urged, with perhaps greater force, that prominent 
 members of the higher grades are sure to be 
 elected, on the grounds of influence and personal 
 qualifications combined, to a number greater than 
 any such stereotyped formation of constituencies 
 would provide. 
 
 (d) Much might be said for merging the entire 
 number of existing bishops in the new electorate 
 of the Upper House and allowing them to become 
 candidates for election like the lay lords. The 
 hereditary peers might thus, if they pleased, assist 
 in electing as many bishops as seemed good to 
 them. The presence of these representatives of 
 the Anglican Church might be balanced by the 
 action of successive Governments, who would be 
 free to include members of other Churches among 
 their annual lists of peers for life. 
 
 These are minor points. The first essential
 
 AN ALTERNATIVE SCHEME 131 
 
 feature of the proposed scheme consists in the 
 election of 200 hereditary peers to represent their 
 fellows. 
 
 (2) The counterpart of this exclusion of some 
 400 hereditary peers would be supplied by vest- 
 ing in the Crown, by Act of Parliament, the 
 right to appoint ten life peers annually. If these 
 life peers were chosen, on the whole, from among 
 men who had already gained high distinction in the 
 public service, in professional life, or in science, art, 
 or literature, their average age might be roughly 
 reckoned at fifty, and their prospects of survivance 
 (according to the actuarial tables of the life assur- 
 ance societies) at twenty years. This would allow 
 a gradual expansion in their number, proceeding 
 by annual increments of ten, until an approxi- 
 mately constant body of about 200 life peers had 
 been finally attained. It would, of course, be 
 possible — if thought advisable — to fix an absolute 
 maximum at 200, or even at a somewhat lower 
 figure. The elected hereditary peers (on either of 
 the alternatives above suggested) being then fixed 
 at 200, the House of Lords would thenceforward 
 consist of, approximately, 400 members equally 
 divided between the two classes. 
 
 If it is argued that the 200 representatives of 
 hereditary rights would still leave the LTppcr Cham- 
 ber unduly exposed to aristocratic and Conservative 
 
 R2
 
 132 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 influences, two partial answers may be suggested. 
 To reduce the hereditary element much further 
 would be to alter entirely the character and tradi- 
 tions of the House ; while, on the other hand, 
 the 200 life peers elected by the Sovereign on the 
 recommendation of successive Cabinets would re- 
 present the opinions of the electorate as expressed 
 during the preceding twenty or thirty years. If 
 the Liberals, for example, had been in power 
 throughout the entire period all the life peers 
 would be composed of those who had originally 
 been Liberals ; while, in the event of both parties 
 having been in power alternately, the number of 
 life peers adhering to each party would be roughly 
 proportional to the periods during which they had 
 enjoyed office and popular favour. This principle 
 of appointment would be completely in accord 
 with the conception that the Second Chamber 
 stands for a revision of the fleeting popular caprice 
 of the moment in the light of the more deliberate 
 and permanent will of the people. 
 
 Here, again, important subsidiary points must 
 be lightly passed over, (a) How far the area of 
 choice should be left unrestricted has already been 
 discussed. Much might be said on both sides of 
 the question. Some basis of compromise might 
 possibly be here devised ; it might be required, 
 for example, that the Army, Navy, Diplomatic
 
 AN ALTERNATIVE 
 
 f^EME 135 
 
 CO 
 
 j^an essen- 
 
 g; clever, 
 
 I— ' o o^m- 
 
 ■t 
 
 Service, the clerical, medical, le 
 professions should all furnish 
 of representatives. 
 
 (b) In some such way the s 
 of the Colonies in the Imperi 
 be provided for, if so desired, 
 directed to appoint life peers either from among 
 certain classes of Colonial officials, past or present, 
 or from among lists prepared for that purpose by 
 the Colonial Legislatures. 
 
 The ultimate possibilities of the scheme need 
 not, however, be allowed to interfere with the 
 extreme simplicity of its essential principle, to wit, 
 the appointment of some 200 life peers by the 
 Crown's responsible Ministers on the basis of ten 
 each year. The new power, if sufficiently unfet- 
 tered, of thus appointing a more generous allow- 
 ance of life peers would prove a not inadequate 
 compensation for the surrender of the Crown's 
 existing prerogative of the right to " swamp " the 
 Upper House. 
 
 (3) The members of the House thus reconsti- 
 tuted, approximately 400 in number, would still in 
 all probability remain unequally divided between 
 the two parties ; although the excessive inequality 
 of the present regime would be at an end. The 
 legislative consequences of this inequality might 
 be further neutralised by the adoption by the
 
 ^3^ T^E HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 in ^^^^ha^niber of a modification in its methods 
 ° i^cedure. By a change in the Standing Orders 
 i the House (or better, perhaps, by Statute) all 
 bills after their second reading might be referred to 
 one or other of a series of Committees appointed 
 more or less on the American model, with the two 
 parties equally balanced under a chairman favour- 
 able to the Government. 
 
 In the United States, legislation is practically 
 the work of Standing Committees of the two 
 Houses of Congress, and not of Congress as a 
 whole. The Vice-President of the States as 
 Speaker of the Senate nominates the members of 
 these Committees at the commencement of each 
 Congress, and it has become a constitutional con- 
 vention that the President's party should have a 
 bare majority of one in each Committee. The 
 Lord Chancellor might be allowed to perform for 
 the Llouse of Lords a similar duty on similar lines, 
 or some alternative method of securing an approxi- 
 mation to equality might be devised, for example, 
 by means of a Committee of Selection, to follow a 
 precedent set by the House of Commons. Ameri- 
 can models need not, of course, be minutely 
 copied, and, in particular, the numerous small 
 Standing Committees of the Senate of three to 
 sixteen members might profitably be replaced in 
 Great Britain by, say, five or six Grand Committees
 
 AN ALTERNATIVE SCHEME 135 
 
 of seventy or eighty each. It would be an essen- 
 tial feature of the suggested expedient, however, 
 that the findings of the House of Lords Com- 
 mittees, like those of Congress, should carry great 
 weight with them. 
 
 The advantage of such a scheme, if found prac- 
 ticable, would be obvious. A line — all the better 
 for being somewhat vague and fluctuating — would 
 be drawn between the revising and the suspending 
 functions of the reformed House of Lords. 
 Where only matters of detail were involved, or 
 questions on which the House was not prepared to 
 take a definite stand, the work of legislation would 
 be accomplished by a Grand Committee in which 
 parties were fairly balanced, and the findings of 
 this Committee would be confirmed by the House 
 almost as a matter of course. Where, on the other 
 hand, vital principles were at stake, the House as 
 a whole would still hold in reserve its suspending 
 power, and might take the risk, as at present, of 
 forcing the Ministry to choose between laying 
 aside their bill or challenging a General Election on 
 a definite issue. The chances of such an absolute 
 deadlock occurring, however, under the scheme of 
 reform, would be, comparatively speaking, remote. 
 
 Some such scheme, if adopted, would appear to 
 retain many of the best features of the existing 
 system, while reducing the anomalies that expose
 
 136 THE HOUSE OF LORDS 
 
 It at present to adverse criticism. If the reforms 
 suggested do not seem, to extreme men, sufficiently 
 drastic or far-reaching, that very fact may recom- 
 mend them to those who are more moderate in 
 their expectations. If the scheme is far from em- 
 bodying any of those counsels of perfection that 
 find favour with the constructors of Utopias, it 
 has to be remembered that the reformer's best 
 policy is not to reject the attainable because it falls 
 short of his aspirations ; but rather, balancing the 
 ideal with the possible, to make the utmost of the 
 materials at his disposal under the conditions that 
 actually prevail. 
 
 Glasgow : Printed at the University Press by Robert MacLehose & Co. Ltd.
 
 BT THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Magna Carta : A Commentary on the Great 
 Charter of King John ; with an His- 
 torical Introduction. 14s. nett. 
 
 " In the six hundred pages of this admirably printed volume 
 he has given us what will long remain as the standard work on 
 Magna Carta, a book remarkable alike for its solid learning, its 
 fertility in suggestion, and its characteristic note of moderation 
 and sweet reasonableness." — The Times. 
 
 "Of the great merit and value of the present essay there can, 
 we think, be little doubt. The historical and juridical methods 
 adopted by the author are sound and intelligent, and naturally 
 in striking contrast with those of earlier commentators. His 
 style is attractive and sufficiently concise, whilst his equipment 
 for such a formidable task is very considerable. As the result 
 of these elaborate studies we have an entirely new view of the 
 great Charter in its legal and constitutional aspects and political 
 environment." — The Athenaum. 
 
 " Mr. McKechnie's work is of such great value that no his- 
 torian can afford to neglect its clear and reasoned statements on 
 all the questions which centre round the scene at Runnymede, 
 and on the economic facts which led up to, and away from, 
 that momentous conference." — The Spectator. 
 
 "One of the most influential contributions to English 
 diplomatics that has appeared within the last five years." — 
 Weitmimter Review. 
 
 " Mr. McKcchnic may justly claim to have provided us 
 with a most adequate commentary on Magna Carta." — English 
 Historical Review. 
 
 " Im ganzcn tine Arbeit, die jedcr Erforschcr dcr mittel 
 altcrlichcn Rcchts- und Vcrfabsungsgcschichtc Knglands dankbar 
 brauchcn wird." — Prof, Fel;x Liebermann (of Berlin) in 
 Historische Vierteljahrschrift. 
 
 " C'cst un livrc qu'il faudra consultcr pour I'histnire des 
 institutions politiqucs ct adminislrativcs dc rAnglctcrrc au xii" 
 et au xiii* si(^clc ; il a sa place marqu6e k c6t6 dc Stubbs dans 
 la Bib]ioth6(|uc dcj irudits." — Prof Charles I}(^:mont (of 
 Paris) in La Revue Historique.
 
 Br THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 The State and the Individual. An Intro- 
 duction to Political Science, with special 
 reference to Socialism and Individualism. 
 IDS. 6d. nett. 
 
 " Full of acute and fruitful suggestions." — Times, 
 
 "The reproach against so many of our works has been that 
 they did not view problems as a whole, but only in a fragmen- 
 tary way. This charge cannot be made against Mr. McKechnie, 
 whose encyclopaedic sweep in the vast regions of political 
 philosophy fascinates the students of that complex science. . . . 
 A lucid and admirable work which we can confidently commend 
 to the student of sociology." — Daily Chronicle. 
 
 "An admirably clear and well-written exposition of a 
 difficult subject." — The Scotsman. 
 
 "In comprehensiveness of survey and penetrative insight, in 
 lucid argument and subtle analysis Mr. McKechnie's book is a 
 dialectical masterpiece." — Glasgow Herald. 
 
 " He deals with his subject in a sober spirit, and endeavours 
 to hold the scales of justice evenly with regard to both Socialism 
 and Individualism, awarding praise and blame impartially. His 
 literary style is exceptionally good and concise, and, though his 
 book is a bulky one, it would be difficult to put the same 
 matter in a more compressed form." — Liberty Review. 
 
 " The work of a scholar and an earnest thinker, well worth 
 reading, and fitted to provoke fruitful discussion." — Professor 
 N. J. D. Kennedy in the Juridical Review. 
 
 " Mr. McKechnie's book seems to me to deserve the hearty 
 appreciation which it has generally received." — Mr. Sidney 
 Ball in the International Journal of Ethics. 
 
 GLASGOW : JAMES MACLEHOSE & SONS, 
 Publishers to the University.

 
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