The first but by no means the last or most crucial stage of our
twentieth-century Revolution has now been completed; the old
Constitution, which was perhaps the most adaptable and convenient
system of government that the world has ever known, is definitely at an
end; the powers of an ancient Assembly have been truncated with a
violence that in any other land would have spelled barricades and
bloodshed long ago; and the road has been cleared, or partially
cleared, for developments that must profoundly affect, and that in all
probability will absolutely transform, the whole scheme of the British
State.
Thus far, with their usual effective, good-humored, shortsighted common
sense, with few pauses for inquiry, and with a characteristically
indifferent grasp on the ultimate trend of things, have our politicians
brought us. Our politicians, I say, and not our people, because one of
the distinctive features of the Revolution so far is that it has been a
political rather than a popular movement. It did not originate in the
constituencies, but in the Cabinet; it was not forced upon the caucus
by an aroused and indignant country, but by the caucus upon the
country; nine-tenths of its momentum has been derived from above and
not from below; the true centers of excitement throughout its polite
and orderly progress have been the lobbies of the House and the
correspondence columns of _The Times;_ it was only at the last that the
urbanities of the struggle between the "Die-hards" and their fellow
Unionists furnished the public as a whole with material for a mild
sporting interest. When Roundheads and Cavaliers were lining up for the
battle of Edgehill a Warwickshire squire was observed between the
opposing forces placidly drawing the coverts for a fox. The British
people during the past twenty months have seemed more than once to
resemble that historic huntsman. They have answered the screaming
exhortations of the politicians with whispers of more than Delphic
ambiguity; they have gone unconcernedly about their pleasures and their
business, to all appearances unvexed by the din of Revolution in their
ears; they have presented the spectacle, more common in France than in
England, of a tranquil nation with agitated legislators.
The Ministerial explanation of this lethargy and indifference is that
the people had no occasion to grow excited; their "mandate" was being
fulfilled, they were getting what they wanted, demonstrations were
superfluous. But no one who has read the history of the Reform Bill of
1832 or of the Chartist movement or who remembers the passions stirred
up by the Franchise agitation and the Home Rule struggle of the
eighties will swallow that explanation without mentally choking.
The truth probably is, first, that the multiplication of cheap
distractions and enjoyments and of cheaper newspapers has not only
weakened the popular interest in politics, but has impaired that
faculty of concentrated and continuous thought which used to invest
affairs of State with an attractiveness not so greatly inferior to that
of football; secondly, that for the great masses of the democracy the
politics of bread and butter have completely ousted the politics of
ideas and abstractions; and thirdly, that the Constitutional issue was
precisely the kind of issue in which our people had had no previous
training, either actual or theoretical, and which found them therefore
without any intellectual preparation for its advent. Up till the end of
1909 we had always taken the Constitution for granted, and were for the
most part comfortably unaware that it even existed. We had never as a
nation, or never rather within living memory, troubled ourselves about
"theories of State," or whetted our minds on the fundamentals of
government. There is nothing in our educational curriculum that
corresponds with the _instruction civique_ of the French schools, nor
have we the privilege which the Americans enjoy of carrying a copy of
our organic Act of Government in our pockets, of reading it through in
twenty minutes, and of hearing it incessantly expounded in the
class-room and the Press, debated in the national legislature, and
interpreted by the highest judicial tribunal in the land.
When, therefore, we were suddenly called upon to decide the infinitely
delicate problems of the place, powers, and composition of a Second
Chamber in our governing system, the task proved as bewildering as it
was unappetizing. Any nation which regarded its Constitution as a vital
and familiar instrument would have heavily resented so gross an
infraction of it as the Lords perpetrated in rejecting the 1909 Budget.
But our own electorate, so far from punishing the party responsible for
the outrage, sent them back to the House over a hundred stronger, a
result impossible in a country with any vivid sense, or any sense at
all, of Constitutional realities, and only possible in Great Britain
because the people adjudged the importance of the various issues
submitted to them by standards of their own, and placed the
Constitutional problem at the bottom, or near the bottom, of the list.
In no single constituency that I have ever heard of was the House of
Lords question the supreme and decisive factor at the election of
January, 1910. It deeply stirred the impartial intelligence of the
country, but it failed to move the average voter even in the towns,
while in the rural parts it fell unmistakably flat.
Even at the election of December, 1910, when all other issues were
admittedly subordinate to the Constitutional issue, it was exceedingly
difficult to determine how far the stedfastness of the electorate to
the Liberal cause was due to a specific appreciation and approval of
the Parliament Bill and of all it involved, and how far it was an
expression of general distrust of the Unionists, of irritation with the
Lords, and of sympathy with the social and fiscal policies pursued by
the Coalition. That the Liberals were justified, by all the rules of
the party game, in treating the result of that election as, for all
political and Parliamentary purposes, a direct indorsement of their
proposals, may be freely granted. It was as near an approach to an _ad
hoc_ Referendum as we are ever likely to get under our present system.
Party exigencies, or at any rate party tactics, it is true, hurried on
the election before the country was prepared for it, before it had
recovered from the somnolence induced by the Conference, and before the
Opposition had time or opportunity to do more than sketch in their
alternative plan. But though the issue was incompletely presented, it
was undoubtedly the paramount issue put before the electorate, and the
Liberals were fairly entitled to claim that their policy in regard to
it had the backing of the majority of the voters of the United Kingdom.
Whether, however, this backing represented a reasoned view of the
Constitutional points involved and of the position, prerogatives, and
organization of a Second Chamber in the framework of British
Government, whether it implied that our people were really interested
in and had deeply pondered the relative merits of the Single and Double
Chamber systems, is much more doubtful. "When he was told," said the
Duke of Northumberland on August 10th, "that the people of England were
very anxious to abolish the House of Lords, his reply was that they did
not understand the question, and did not care two brass farthings about
it." That perhaps is putting it somewhat too strongly. The country
within the last two years has unquestionably felt more vividly than
ever before the anomaly of an hereditary Upper Chamber embedded in
democratic institutions. It has been stirred by Mr. Lloyd-George's
rhetoric to a mood of vague exasperation with the House of Lords and of
ridicule of the order of the Peerage. It has accepted too readily the
Liberal version of the central issue as a case of Peers _versus_
People. But while it was satisfied that something ought to be done, I
do not believe it realizes precisely what has been accomplished in its
name or the consequences that must follow from the passing of the
Parliament Bill. There are no signs that it regards the abridgment of
the powers of the Upper House as a great democratic victory. There are,
on the contrary, manifold signs that it has been bored and bewildered
by the whole struggle, and that the extraordinary lassitude with which
it watched the debates was a true reflex of its real attitude.