THE House of Lords has been threatened. Its remodelling, if not its extinction, has been and is still demanded by those who profess to be the true exponents of public opinion. The Radicals of Birmingham have invited a general meeting of the representatives of Liberal boroughs to meet in deliberation on the measures to be taken against an assembly, which is painted as impeding the progress of the nation. The summons, it is true, has met with no response as yet but it is manifest that the design is not abandoned, and that a fierce desire is burning in the heart of democrats to emasculate, and indeed to destroy, an institution which stands in the way of their designs. It is charged with being out of harmony with the people. It is animated, cry its assailants, with feelings which jar with those of the House of Commons. The House of Lords holds different views on political questions, aims at different objects, and is inspired with different passions from those which fill the breasts of the people of this country. The good of the people, it is alleged, is not its ruling motive. The peers occupy a position personal to themselves, and are intent only on defending their own advantages. They think only of their own interests and the interests of the classes immediately associated with them, and such a state of mind necessarily throws them into resistance to the beneficial proposals of the House of Commons. The spirit of the two Houses of Parliament is thus essentially unlike; they are not joint deliberators on the public good, but adversaries occupied with assailing and defending. It cannot

be doubted, exclaim Radicals, that the House of Commons speaks with the voice of the whole people it is always pursuing the public advantage, always wise, always proposing measures founded on public utility, always in the right, both as to principle and practice: how then can an opposition which is founded not on the merits of the questions debated, but on the animus and temper of the Upper House, fail to generate an uncertainty or retardation in the councils of England, full of irritation for the people, and grievously prejudicial to its welfare? And then, are not Peers men who acquire this power over the weal of the nation by the simple fact of being their fathers' sons, without any guarantee for ability, for experience, or for knowledge of the country's wants? Is not their mental power below the average of cultivated Englishmen certainly at least far below the standard of the chosen representatives of the Commons? In these modern days of education and general culture, when able and trained men swarm all over the country, whose lives have been spent in energy and perpetual activity, is it to be endured that the legislation of the nation should be kept at the mercy of those whose wealth has enabled them to devote their days to frivolity and ease? Is the House of Commons to brook the rescinding of its votes and the rejection of measures devised for the advancement of the general good by men, who are redeemed from obscurity only by the sonorousness of their titles? And if a challenge is given for the proof of these accusations, is it not sufficient to point

to the enormity of the Lords' recent conduct in respect of the Army Purchase and the Ballot Bills?

Such are the thoughts which are fermenting in Radical minds and democratic newspapers; nay, we will say more, which are filling many high-minded and thoughtful intellects with misgivings. We are in no way blind to the fact that these are considerations-many of them at least—which cannot fail to suggest themselves to numberless persons, whenever the Lords seem to carry themselves against the will of the people. It is the condition of the life which Englishmen live, that they should challenge institutions as often as they seem to be in discord with popular ideas. We dislike the fact; we think it often unreasonable at the present, and full of danger for the future, that tradition has lost much of its authority, that experience often counts for so amazingly little, and that the feeling is so common that a change, even a profound one, has the presumption of advantage on its side. But it is a fact, nevertheless; and it would be folly not to recognise it. We can no longer defend an established arrangement on the ground that it has worked well in the past, and that nothing but the clearest proof that its vitality is spent should be allowed to justify its modification. Every institution, nowadays, is called upon to give an account of its raison d'être, to explain why it exists, to justify whatever power it may possess, to let the world know that it is not afraid to propound the theory of its rights, and to make good its practice. We admit, therefore, the obligation to defend the House of Lords which the constitution has bestowed on England upon a solid basis of political philosophy. It is in the highest degree important that the country

should clearly understand the nature of the most peculiar branch of its legislation, and should be brought, if possible, to apprehend, clearly and correctly, the value and the extent of the services which it renders to the people. The present seems to us a favourable moment for such an investigation. There is excitement enough afoot to win attention to a discussion of the utility and the composition of the House of Lords; and yet there is not sufficient passion engaged to prevent a calm and fair estimate of the quality and working of this great institution. The manifest failure of its enemies to inflame the public mind against its retention in the constitution, proves that the sense of its usefulness is strong amongst the people; and this fact renders it the more just and important to allay doubts by a frank, and, it is hoped, faithful statement of what the House of Lords ought to be and is.

What, then, is the House of Lords? Not what it was indirectly at one period of England's history-the ruler of the State. The Barons can no longer make war upon the Court, and hold both King and people in dependence. Nor are the great families any longer able to dictate to the sovereign the policy of the nation. Neither, since 1832, are they masters of the House of Commons by means of rotten boroughs, Tory corporations, prac tical supremacy over county elections, or other indirect but very effectual machinery of government. The unity of the national administration is no longer accomplished by placing the centre of influence and power in the hands of the peers. That is over; it has passed away, never to return. The Lords knew perfectly how great was the revolution effected in 1832; the threat of a new creation of peers alone forced

them to relinquish the vast power which they wielded. They accepted the Reform Bill, and from that hour their position in the State has been radically altered. They passed into a new category: they became a Second Chamber. Their present position is fundamentally different from what they formerly held. They have lost all initiative in ruling; they do not govern. Individually the peers exercise large influence, founded on the traditional respect paid to their past, and still more on the territorial wealth which they possess; but this influence is not greater than what they would enjoy if their House was abolished, and the peers were all reduced to private individuals. As a House of Parliament, they are essentially subordinate to the House of Commons. The centre of power is transferred to the Lower House. It cannot be otherwise: the vote of the House of Commons is ultimately determined by the constituencies, and the peers do not reign over that body. The Lords possess no power of resisting the House of Commons when their action is supported by the people. When the people is finally and absolutely resolved on a particular measure, there is no possible solution but that the Crown and the House of Lords should give way. At all times government by three estates implied concession, if the veto of any single one was not to stop the administrative machine altogether. But whilst in former times the House of Commons could be managed, there is no means now of dealing with it except by dissolution; and if a dissolution reasserts the policy delayed, nothing is left but acquiescence. The Lords have accepted this position thoroughly. Their bitterest foes bring no other charge against them than that they are obstructive. No one accuses them

VOL. CX.-NO. DCLXXIV.

of ever attempting to impose a policy on the House of Commons or the country beyond resisting a change to which their assent is asked. It is impossible to overrate the overwhelming significance of this fact in every discussion on the House of Lords. The utmost blame which can be imputed to them by any one is, that they retard the progress of the nation. That they seek to rule it no living man asserts. The feeling has thoroughly penetrated the minds of the Lords that the English constitution has, by the inevitable development of society, been so modified as to alter their power in the State. They have bowed to the supreme law of development; and by the frankness with which they have accepted a change which the welfare of the nation demanded, they have shown how entirely they are impregnated with the spirit of the constitution, and what ample securities their good sense and their patriotism furnish for the beneficial discharge of the great duties which still belong to them.

The House of Lords, then, is not, directly or indirectly, the ruler of the nation. What is it? A Second Chamber. But what is a Second Chamber? A revising body. But this expression in turn requires explanation. It is not a committee of notables, more or less independent, statesmanlike, and far-seeing. It is this, but much more besides. It is a public force, wielding a power that is anything rather than wisdom embodied in the minds of the individual peers. Its strength resides in the nation itself; in the interests bound up with the House of Lords; in the ideas and feelings which are equally shared by large classes amongst the people, nay, which lie deep in the hearts of all Englishmen, with the exception of

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an insignificant minority. House of Lords can only revise that is, it cannot dictate to the country the policy that should be pursued; it can only check and balance the supreme action of the House of Commons. But it performs this great function as the representative of interests most profoundly important for the people itself. It should never be forgotten for a moment that the House of Lords is as truly a body representative as the House of Commons. But for this quality of representing essential elements of the people's life, the House of Lords would have long ago been as effete as the French Senate, and been swept away from its place in the Constitution. The peers take their seats in the Upper House by a different mode of election than that by which the Commons appear in the palace at Westminster; indeed, it might seem that they are not elected at all.

But that is a complete mistake. They are very positively chosen for their function, not by a direct and oft-repeated vote, but by a fixed rule, which singles them out upon a very distinct principle of representation. The peers are representative, because, by the practical working of the Constitution, they possess qualities which give effect to wants that the whole country feels it needs in the great matter of legislation. They are independent and conservative, each by virtue of their wealth and status in society. If the system of hereditary transmission of their functions were abolished, the nation, upon the principles of sound political philosophy, ought to elect the peers of the Second Chamber precisely for the possession of these qualities. The country might select some other wealthy and independent men in the places of some individual peers; but if it failed to choose upon this basis, it

-is by its very nature incapacitated to render. To describe the Lords as antagonistic to the people is a misconception almost amounting to the ludicrous. They are public functionaries of a special kind, endowed, it is true, with station and distinction; but so are magistrates, judges, and Cabinet ministers. They discharge popular duties; to regard them as the defenders of their own privileges, or the protectors of their own class, is to give proof of a total ignorance of what they are, and why they were put in the place they hold. Public duty and public function are now the sole essence of the peerage.

But how can it be for the interest of the people, we hear it said, to institute a body of men able to arrest the movement of the nation, and to annul the declared wish of the constituencies and the deliberate judgments of men elected to Parliament-judgments that were arrived at precisely because they are in harmony with the feelings and the opinions of the people? It seems an act of gratuitous perversity to set up wilfully an obstacle which

bars out the nation on its road. The answer is short and decisive. It is a necessity of the first order to have a Second Chamber for the sake of liberty, because liberty can be preserved in no other way-because without a House of Lords the liberty which is the highest, the inestimable, possession of the people of England would perish. Liberty cannot live in a single popular as sembly. No philosophical argument is needed to establish this truth; history records it in the clearest and most uniform language. No people, governed by a single assembly, has preserved its liberty for a hundred years -we had almost said fifty. The most illustrious of republics fell under the weight of an uncontrolled Demos. Rome was free whilst power was shared between antithetical and mutually-balancing bodies; when the senate degenerated into an assembly of great, aye, and most able and eminent, officials, and the tribunes mastered the state by the clamour and the votes of popular comitia, the avenger was at hand, and the longest and dreariest despotism known to history arose out of the ruins of a people which had achieved the grandest of histories. The Parliament of the Commonwealth was created to share power with the master of the country, to relieve his responsibilities, and to become the depository of guarantees for freedom. The explosive force of a single chamber shattered the institution, and the bestower of electoral government was compelled to recall his gift. Cromwell died the supreme arbiter of the fortunes of England. Need one recount the wild frenzy, the insane violence, the tempestuous surging to and fro, the fearful absence of all sense of responsibility, of method, of wisdom and judgment, of the mighty French Convention? The people, as so many phrase the

expression, here were subject to no limit, to no curb, on its desires and its will. If the vast aggregate of individual men, who are called the nation, could originate and sustain good government, never had a country such an opportunity as that presented to the France of the great Revolution, without king, or nobles, or church, or Parliaments, to fetter and baffle the proclamation of popular ideas and the accomplishment of the popular will. How many years did it last? Only long enough to display in the most vivid colours what excesses of blindness, fury, and mischief a single popular assembly can perpetrate. A military despot arose to crush out the hideous spectacle amidst the applause of the people itself. Recent history repeats the tale. In 1848 the National Assembly became the antechamber of the imperial conspirator, and a long and weary season of servitude and demoralisation pressed heavily on the character and the fortunes of the French nation. Again the scenes are changed, and again the same sight presents itself to the gaze of all mankind. The republic follows Cæsar, and falls swiftly under the sway of a democratic master; and who shall foretell the course which the National Assembly is destined to run? Does any one imagine that a single House will save France from despotic intrusion ten years, or even five? The sequence of events is so constant-the effect so unchangeably follows the cause-the growth of the noxious poison is so certain and so uniformly fatal-as to furnish unchallengeable evidence of a law, a law of human nature in the development of political organisation. A single assembly cannot keep men free; it cannot protect its own self from its own violence, its own disruptive forces. It is the sure parent of anarchy, and anarchy calls in the