Commons are subject to no effectual control. The nation never attends
to any but the principal matters of policy and State. Upon these it
forms that rude, rough, ruling judgment which we call public opinion;
but upon other things it does not think at all, and it would be useless
for it to think. It has not the materials for forming a judgment: the
detail of bills, the instrumental part of policy, the latent part of
legislation, are wholly out of its way. It knows nothing about them,
and could not find time or labour for the careful investigation by
which alone they can be apprehended. A casual majority of the House of
Commons has therefore dominant power: it can legislate as it wishes.
And though the whole House of Commons upon great subjects very fairly
represents public opinion, and though its judgment upon minor questions
is, from some secret excellencies in its composition, remarkably sound
and good; yet, like all similar assemblies, it is subject to the sudden
action of selfish combinations. There are said to be 200 "members for
the railways" in the present Parliament. If these 200 choose to combine
on a point which the public does not care for, and which they care for
because it affects their purse, they are absolute. A formidable
sinister interest may always obtain the complete command of a dominant
assembly by some chance and for a moment, and it is therefore of great
use to have a second chamber of an opposite sort, differently composed,
in which that interest in all likelihood will not rule.
The most dangerous of all sinister interests is that of the executive
Government, because it is the most powerful. It is perfectly
possible--it has happened and will happen again--that the Cabinet,
being very powerful in the Commons, may inflict minor measures on the
nation which the nation did not like, but which it did not understand
enough to forbid. If, therefore, a tribunal of revision can be found in
which the executive, though powerful, is less powerful, the Government
will be the better; the retarding chamber will impede minor instances
of Parliamentary tyranny, though it will not prevent or much impede
revolution.
Every large assembly is, moreover, a fluctuating body; it is not one
house, so to say, but a set of houses; it is one set of men to-night
and another to-morrow night. A certain unity is doubtless preserved by
the duty which the executive is supposed to undertake, and does
undertake, of keeping a house; a constant element is so provided about
which all sorts of variables accumulate and pass away. But even after
due allowance for the full weight of this protective machinery, our
House of Commons is, as all such chambers must be, subject to sudden
turns and bursts of feeling, because the members who compose it change
from time to time. The pernicious result is perpetual in our
legislation; many Acts of Parliament are medleys of different motives,
because the majority which passed one set of its clauses is different
from that which passed another set.
But the greatest defect of the House of Commons is that it has no
leisure. The life of the House is the worst of all lives--a life of
distracting routine. It has an amount of business brought before it
such as no similar assembly ever has had. The British Empire is a
miscellaneous aggregate, and each bit of the aggregate brings its bit
of business to the House of Commons. It is India one day and Jamaica
the next; then again China, and then Schleswig-Holstein. Our
legislation touches on all subjects, because our country contains all
ingredients. The mere questions which are asked of the Ministers run
over half human affairs; the Private Bill Acts, the mere privilegia of
our Government--subordinate as they ought to be--probably give the
House of Commons more absolute work than the whole business, both
national and private, of any other assembly which has ever sat. The
whole scene is so encumbered with changing business, that it is hard to
keep your head in it.
Whatever, too, may be the case hereafter, when a better system has been
struck out, at present the House does all the work of legislation, all
the detail, and all the clauses itself. One of the most helpless
exhibitions of helpless ingenuity and wasted mind is a committee of the
whole House on a bill of many clauses which eager enemies are trying to
spoil, and various friends are trying to mend. An Act of Parliament is
at least as complex as a marriage settlement; and it is made much as a
settlement would be if it were left to the vote and settled by the
major part of persons concerned, including the unborn children. There
is an advocate for every interest, and every interest clamours for
every advantage. The executive Government by means of its disciplined
forces, and the few invaluable members who sit and think, preserves
some sort of unity. But the result is very imperfect. The best test of
a machine is the work it turns out. Let any one who knows what legal
documents ought to be, read first a will he has just been making and
then an Act of Parliament; he will certainly say, "I would have
dismissed my attorney if he had done my business as the legislature has
done the nation's business". While the House of Commons is what it is,
a good revising, regulating and retarding House would be a benefit of
great magnitude.
But is the House of Lords such a chamber? Does it do this work? This is
almost an undiscussed question. The House of Lords, for thirty years at
least, has been in popular discussion an accepted matter. Popular
passion has not crossed the path, and no vivid imagination has been
excited to clear the matter up.
The House of Lords has the greatest merit which such a chamber can
have; it is POSSIBLE. It is incredibly difficult to get a revising
assembly, because it is difficult to find a class of respected
revisers. A federal senate, a second House, which represents State
unity, has this advantage; it embodies a feeling at the root of
society--a feeling which is older than complicated politics, which is
stronger a thousand times over than common political feelings--the
local feeling. "My shirt," said the Swiss state-right patriot, "is
dearer to me than my coat." Every State in the American Union would
feel that disrespect to the Senate was disrespect to itself.
Accordingly, the Senate is respected; whatever may be the merits or
demerits of its action, it can act; it is real, independent, and
efficient. But in common Governments it is fatally difficult to make an
UNpopular entity powerful in a popular Government.
It is almost the same thing to say that the House of Lords is
independent. It would not be powerful, it would not be possible, unless
it were known to be independent. The Lords are in several respects more
independent than the Commons; their judgment may not be so good a
judgment, but it is emphatically their own judgment. The House of
Lords, as a body, is accessible to no social bribe. And this, in our
day, is no light matter. Many members of the House of Commons, who are
to be influenced by no other manner of corruption, are much influenced
by this its most insidious sort. The conductors of the press and the
writers for it are worse--at least the more influential who come near
the temptation; for "position," as they call it, for a certain intimacy
with the aristocracy, some of them would do almost anything and say
almost anything. But the Lords are those who give social bribes, and
not those who take them. They are above corruption because they are the
corruptors. They have no constituency to fear or wheedle; they have the
best means of forming a disinterested and cool judgment of any class in
the country. They have, too, leisure to form it. They have no
occupations to distract them which are worth the name. Field sports are
but playthings, though some lords put an Englishman's seriousness into
them. Few Englishmen can bury themselves in science or literature; and
the aristocracy have less, perhaps, of that impetus than the middle
classes. Society is too correct and dull to be an occupation, as in
other times and ages it has been. The aristocracy live in the fear of
the middle classes--of the grocer and the merchant. They dare not frame
a society of enjoyment as the French aristocracy once formed it.
Politics are the only occupation a peer has worth the name. He may
pursue them undistractedly. The House of Lords, besides independence to
revise judicially and position to revise effectually, has leisure to
revise intellectually.
These are great merits: and, considering how difficult it is to get a
good second chamber, and how much with our present first chamber we
need a second, we may well be thankful for them. But we must not permit
them to blind our eyes. Those merits of the Lords have faults close
beside them which go far to make them useless. With its wealth, its
place, and its leisure, the House of Lords would, on the very surface
of the matter, rule us far more than it does if it had not secret
defects which hamper and weaken it.
The first of these defects is hardly to be called secret, though, on
the other hand, it is not well known. A severe though not unfriendly
critic of our institutions said that "the cure for admiring the House
of Lords was to go and look at it"--to look at it not on a great party
field-day, or at a time of parade, but in the ordinary transaction of
business. There are perhaps ten peers in the House, possibly only six;
three is the quorum for transacting business. A few more may dawdle in
or not dawdle in: those are the principal speakers, the lawyers (a few
years ago when Lyndhurst, Brougham, and Campbell were in vigour, they
were by far the predominant talkers) and a few statesmen whom every one
knows. But the mass of the House is nothing. This is why orators
trained in the Commons detest to speak in the Lords. Lord Chatham used
to call it the "Tapestry". The House of Commons is a scene of life if
ever there was a scene of life. Every member in the throng, every atom
in the medley, has his own objects (good or bad), his own purposes
(great or petty); his own notions, such as they are, of what is; his
own notions, such as they are, of what ought to be. There is a motley
confluence of vigorous elements, but the result is one and good. There
is a "feeling of the House," a "sense" of the House, and no one who
knows anything of it can despise it. A very shrewd man of the world
went so far as to say that "the House of Commons has more sense than
any one in it". But there is no such "sense" in the House of Lords,
because there is no life. The Lower Chamber is a chamber of eager
politicians; the Upper (to say the least) of not eager ones.
This apathy is not, indeed, as great as the outside show would
indicate. The committees of the Lords (as is well known) do a great
deal of work and do it very well. And such as it is, the apathy is very
natural. A House composed of rich men who can vote by proxy without
coming will not come very much.[5] But after every abatement the real
indifference to their duties of most peers is a great defect, and the
apparent indifference is a dangerous defect. As far as politics go
there is profound truth in Lord Chesterfield's axiom, that "the world
must judge of you by what you seem, not by what you are". The world
knows what you seem; it does not know what you are. An assembly--a
revising assembly especially--which does not assemble, which looks as
if it does not care how it revises, is defective in a main political
ingredient. It may be of use, but it will hardly convince mankind that
it is so.
[5] In accordance with a recent resolution of the House of Lords
proxies are now disused.--Note to second edition.
The next defect is even more serious: it affects not simply the
apparent work of the House of Lords but the real work. For a revising
legislature, it is too uniformly made up. Errors are of various kinds;
but the constitution of the House of Lords only guards against a single
error--that of too quick change. The Lords--leaving out a few lawyers
and a few outcasts--are all landowners of more or less wealth. They all
have more or less the opinions, the merits, the faults of that one
class. They revise legislation, as far as they do revise it,
exclusively according to the supposed interests, the predominant
feelings, the inherited opinions, of that class. Since the Reform Act,
this uniformity of tendency has been very evident. The Lords have
felt--it would be harsh to say hostile, but still dubious, as to the
new legislation. There was a spirit in it alien to their spirit, and
which when they could they have tried to cast out. That spirit is what
has been termed the "modern spirit". It is not easy to concentrate its
essence in a phrase; it lives in our life, animates our actions,
suggests our thoughts. We all know what it means, though it would take
an essay to limit it and define it. To this the Lords object; wherever
it is concerned, they are not impartial revisers, but biassed revisers.
This singleness of composition would be no fault; it would be, or might
be, even a merit, if the criticism of the House of Lords, though a
suspicious criticism, were yet a criticism of great understanding. The
characteristic legislation of every age must have characteristic
defects; it is the outcome of a character, of necessity faulty and
limited. It must mistake some kind of things; it must overlook some
other. If we could get hold of a complemental critic, a critic who saw
what the age did not see, and who saw rightly what the age mistook, we
should have a critic of inestimable value. But is the House of Lords
that critic? Can it be said that its unfriendliness to the legislation
of the age is founded on a perception of what the age does not see, and
a rectified perception of what the age does see? The most extreme
partisan, the most warm admirer of the Lords, if of fair and tempered
mind, cannot say so. The evidence is too strong. On free trade, for
example, no one can doubt that the Lords--in opinion, in what they
wished to do, and would have done, if they had acted on their own
minds--were utterly wrong. This is the clearest test of the "modern
spirit". It is easier here to be sure it is right than elsewhere.
Commerce is like war; its result is patent. Do you make money or do you
not make it? There is as little appeal from figures as from battle. Now
no one can doubt that England is a great deal better off because of
free trade; that it has more money, and that its money is diffused more
as we should wish it diffused. In the one case in which we can
unanswerably test the modern spirit, it was right, and the dubious
Upper House--the House which would have rejected it, if possible--was
wrong.
There is another reason. The House of Lords, being an hereditary
chamber, cannot be of more than common ability. It may contain--it
almost always has contained, it almost always will
contain--extraordinary men. But its average born law-makers cannot be
extraordinary. Being a set of eldest sons picked out by chance and
history, it cannot be very wise. It would be a standing miracle if such
a chamber possessed a knowledge of its age superior to the other men of
the age; if it possessed a superior and supplemental knowledge; if it
descried what they did not discern, and saw truly that which they saw,
indeed, but saw untruly.
The difficulty goes deeper. The task of revising, of adequately
revising the legislation of this age, is not only that which an
aristocracy has no facility in doing, but one which it has a difficulty
in doing. Look at the statute book for 1865--the statutes at large for
the year. You will find, not pieces of literature, not nice and subtle
matters, but coarse matters, crude heaps of heavy business. They deal
with trade, with finance, with statute-law reform, with common-law
reform; they deal with various sorts of business, but with business
always. And there is no educated human being less likely to know
business, worse placed for knowing business than a young lord. Business
is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind,
the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it
does not look as if it did. It is difficult to convince a young man,
who can have the best of pleasure, that it will. A young lord just come
into 30,000 pounds a year will not, as a rule, care much for the law of
patents, for the law of "passing tolls," or the law of prisons. Like
Hercules, he may choose virtue, but hardly Hercules could choose
business. He has everything to allure him from it, and nothing to
allure him to it. And even if he wish to give himself to business, he
has indifferent means. Pleasure is near him, but business is far from
him. Few things are more amusing than the ideas of a well-intentioned
young man, who is born out of the business world, but who wishes to
take to business, about business. He has hardly a notion in what it
consists. It really is the adjustment of certain particular means to
equally certain particular ends. But hardly any young man destitute of
experience is able to separate end and means. It seems to him a kind of
mystery; and it is lucky if he do not think that the forms are the main
part, and that the end is but secondary. There are plenty of business
men falsely so called, who will advise him so. The subject seems a kind
of maze. "What would you recommend me to READ?" the nice youth asks;
and it is impossible to explain to him that reading has nothing to do
with it, that he has not yet the original ideas in his mind to read
about; that administration is an art as painting is an art; and that no
book can teach the practice of either.
Formerly this defect in the aristocracy was hidden by their own
advantages. Being the only class at ease for money and cultivated in
mind they were without competition; and though they might not be, as a
rule, and extraordinary ability excepted, excellent in State business,
they were the best that could be had. Even in old times, however, they
sheltered themselves from the greater pressure of coarse work. They
appointed a manager--a Peel or a Walpole, anything but an aristocrat in
manner or in nature--to act for them or manage for them. But now a
class is coming up trained to thought, full of money, and yet trained
to business. As I write, two members of this class have been appointed
to stations considerable in themselves, and sure to lead (if anything
is sure in politics) to the Cabinet and power. This is the class of
highly-cultivated men of business who, after a few years, are able to
leave business and begin ambition. As yet these men are few in public
life, because they do not know their own strength. It is like Columbus
and the egg once again; a few original men will show it can be done,
and then a crowd of common men will follow. These men know business
partly from tradition, and this is much. There are University
families--families who talk of fellowships, and who invest their
children's ability in Latin verses, as soon as they discover it; there
used to be Indian families of the same sort, and probably will be again
when the competitive system has had time to foster a new breed. Just so
there are business families to whom all that concerns money, all that
concerns administration, is as familiar as the air they breathe. All
Americans, it has been said, know business; it is in the air of their
country. Just so certain classes know business here; and a lord can
hardly know it. It is as great a difficulty to learn business in a
palace as it is to learn agriculture in a park.
To one kind of business, indeed, this doctrine does not apply. There is
one kind of business in which our aristocracy have still, and are
likely to retain long, a certain advantage. This is the business of
diplomacy. Napoleon, who knew men well, would never, if he could help
it, employ men of the Revolution in missions to the old courts; he
said, "They spoke to no one and no one spoke to them"; and so they sent
home no information. The reason is obvious. The old-world diplomacy of
Europe was largely carried on in drawing-rooms, and, to a great extent,
of necessity still is so. Nations touch at their summits. It is always
the highest class which travels most, knows most of foreign nations,
has the least of the territorial sectarianism which calls itself
patriotism, and is often thought to be so. Even here, indeed, in
England the new trade-class is in real merit equal to the aristocracy.
Their knowledge of foreign things is as great, and their contact with
them often more. But, notwithstanding, the new race is not as
serviceable for diplomacy as the old race. An ambassador is not simply
an agent; he is also a spectacle. He is sent abroad for show as well as
for substance; he is to represent the Queen among foreign courts and
foreign sovereigns. An aristocracy is in its nature better suited to
such work; it is trained to the theatrical part of life; it is fit for
that if it is fit for anything. But, with this exception, an
aristocracy is necessarily inferior in business to the classes nearer
business; and it is not, therefore, a suitable class, if we had our
choice of classes, out of which to frame a chamber for revising matters
of business. It is indeed a singular example how natural business is to
the English race, that the House of Lords works as well as it does. The
common appearance of the "whole House" is a jest--a dangerous anomaly,
which Mr. Bright will sometimes use; but a great deal of substantial
work is done in "Committees," and often very well done. The great
majority of the peers do none of their appointed work, and could do
none of it; but a minority--a minority never so large and never so
earnest as in this age--do it, and do it well. Still no one, who
examines the matter without prejudice, can say that the work is done
perfectly. In a country so rich in mind as England, far more
intellectual power can be, and ought to be, applied to the revision of
our laws.
And not only does the House of Lords do its work imperfectly, but
often, at least, it does it timidly. Being only a section of the
nation, it is afraid of the nation. Having been used for years and
years, on the greatest matters to act contrary to its own judgment, it
hardly knows when to act on that judgment. The depressing languor with
which it damps an earnest young peer is at times ridiculous. "When the
Corn Laws are gone, and the rotten boroughs, why tease about Clause IX.
in the Bill to regulate Cotton Factories?" is the latent thought of
many peers. A word from the leaders, from "the Duke," or Lord Derby, or
Lord Lyndhurst, will rouse on any matters the sleeping energies; but
most Lords are feeble and forlorn.