The Constitution is on trial. As I write, the jury of the nation is considering its verdict, and in a few days the cause célèbre, Lords versus Commons, will have been decided. The peers broke with precedent and took the "revolutionary step" of referring a Finance Bill to the people. The Commons disputed their right, and reluctantly became parties to the action. But it is to be for the last time. The Radicals have had enough of it. A Chamber which dares to appeal from them to the people from whom they are sup posed to derive their authority, must go-always supposing the people should give them the necessary new lease of official life. The Lords, they say, are out of touch with the democratic spirit of the time. They are a privileged body. They have presumed upon powers which exist but must not be exercised. Progress, whatever that may mean, is impossible if this hereditary pretension is to stand. That the peers have not rejected a measure which they could not in conscience be expected to endorse; that they, the assumed enemies of the people, should have insisted on consulting the people, is too much for the Radical-Socialist mind. If ever a privileged body took a step which would commend itself to the opposing force it surely is this. Why object? Obviously, if the Lords are beaten-and they took the risk well knowing what the consequences of defeat must be then the way will be clear for all Radical-Socialist schemes. The dreams of the visionary will indeed have come within the compass of practical politics.

The peers, as a matter of sober fact, have proved themselves much better democrats than any member of the Government or of the Government ma

jority. They are prepared to abide by the will of the people as it may be declared at the polls in this January, 1910. They were not prepared to accept without inquiry the Radical-Socialist pretence in 1909 at interpreting the will of the people as expressed in 1906. Could resolution more democratic than that be taken? And why in the name of democracy should the Lords pass such a Budget as that of 1909 without taking the view of less partial judges than Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George, and Mr. Winston Churchill? It was aimed at interests which the Radical-Socialist hates, always has hated, always will hate. Landowners and license-holders are his peculiar aversions. If in the process of crushing both he crushed others innocent of any offence which could be brought home to either, what matter? The State would come into its own the more quickly. On the showing of those twin exponents of vituperative statesmanship, Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill, the Lords threw out the Budget because it touched their pockets and their privileges. To put the action of the peers on the lowest ground of self-interest, why should they not defer the passage of a measure which hits them financially as well as others? A cardinal principle of democracy is that there shall be no taxation without representation, and that the people alone shall tax the people. Judge the Lords by that principle. They are called upon by the Commons, as they have been called upon again and again recently, to pass a financial measure aimed avowedly at themselves.

They are to endorse, without

a voice in the matter, the financial expedients devised by their enemies, and if they dare say that the measure is un

fair, is bad economy, and at least should be sanctioned first by the nation, they are told they are acting unconstitutionally. When the people are content to tax themselves, it would be preposterous for the Lords to refuse to acquiesce, even though they felt that the tax were unwise. But when it comes to the taxation of the Lords at the bidding of any demagogue who may hold office, it is surely more than flesh and blood, blue or otherwise, can be expected to stand.

Think of the absurd position in which the peers are placed. Fivesixths of them are among the best intellects in the land. The debate on the Budget was the answer to their most uncompromising critics. It had weight, dignity, knowledge, eloquence, experience, reason behind it to an extent which the most thorough-paced advocate of the Commons' supremacy would hardly claim for the shifts and excitements of the proceedings in the Lower House. A peer may be in the

House of Lords because he is the descendant of someone ennobled long ago: his descent is not necessarily proof that he is not better fitted to gauge the needs of a State and the interests of a people than the man whose associations have been those of the cottage or the workroom. Other peers are there as the reward of public service or of merit; others again have been made peers because they were able to contribute largely to the party funds, and as the Liberals themselves have made more peers than their opponents in the last seventy or eighty years, the chances are that a careful investigation would show that Radical money for party purposes has purchased more elevations than Tory. It matters little how they got there; the effect is the same. Directly they are made members of the House of Lords they are subject to disabilities in the commonwealth-disabilities which the mean

His

est and least worthy of the community who cannot call himself a peer does not suffer. Imagine a man like Mr. John Morley being made Lord Morley of Blackburn, and then being told that in return for the privileges of the peerage he must give up the precious privilege of ordinary citizenship. A peer's solitary chance of making his influence on legislation felt is to speak and vote in the House of Lords. political rights are controlled in a way which would not be tolerated by the veriest tub-thumper and demagogue. When an election is taking place, all peers are bound and gagged: they must not vote, they must not speak. And now they are told that they must not even exercise their rights in Parliament itself. As Lord Curzon said at Brighton, "The idea that a peer's mouth might be open as wide as he liked up to a certain date, but from the issue of the writs was to be shut like a clasp, was an obsolete idea which was doomed soon to disappear." This antiquated custom may be a compliment in its way to the influence of the peers, but it is what Lord Curzon calls it--arbitrary and absurd.

From the Radical point of view it is one of our ancient customs that it would possibly be well to preserve. In the preliminary skirmishes of the present campaign the peers took to the platform in unusual numbers. They faced the music of mob organization with a frank determination to place their case before the people in entire keeping with the spirit and the letter of Lord Lansdowne's motion on the Finance Bill. If at times they added distinctly to the gaiety and wit of meetings, they showed themselves quite equal to holding their own against all save the most resourceful and experienced of platform oraters. Peers like Lord Lansdowne, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner, Lord Rothschild are exceptional men; it is men like Lord

Hardwicke who show the latent and wholly native quality which has to be reckoned with whenever the peers are permitted to take up the democratic rôle. Some of our democrats will find in noble lords rivals of no mean calibre; not men who tickle the ears of the groundlings to catch votes, but men who are prepared to take the common judgment when facts and reasons have been properly set forth. The Duke of Norfolk faced the hecklers of Brixton, and Brixton voted Unionist. "It is an essential principle of democracy that Government should be carried on with the consent of the governed. Unfortunately in practice this ideal is unattainable," writes Lord Robert Cecil.' The Lords may at least claim that they have taken a course which is not inconsistent with that ideal.

The case against the peers rests upon an ordinance almost as antiquated, certainly as anachronistic, as some of their so-called privileges. No one is so keen as your modern Radical on "ancient lights" when they seem to afford a pretext for his own privileges: none so ready to denounce them when he wishes to erect some structure in his own interests. Mr. E. T. Cook, one of the most level-headed, sober, and patriotic of Radical writers, takes an extract from a speech by Pitt, the great commoner, and makes it the text for an article on what Sir Frederick Pollock calls "the exorbitant action of the Lords within the limits of the Constitution as understood by our fathers." Pitt asserted that taxation is no part of the governing or legislative power. "The taxes are a voluntary gift and grant of the Commons alone. The concurrence of the peers and the Crown to a tax is only necessary to clothe it with the form of law." Pitt was, of course, merely summarizing the well

1 The "Saturday" Handbook.

2 "Contemporary Review," January, 1910.

known resolutions of the Commons, one of 1671 which said

That in all aids given to the King by the Commons the rate and tax ought not to be altered by the Lords. the other of 1678

That all aids and supplies, and aids to his Majesty in Parliament, are the sole gift of the Commons; and all Bills for the granting of any such aids and supplies ought to begin with the Commons; and that it is the undoubted and sole right of the Commons to direct, limit, and appoint in such Bills the ends, purposes, considerations, conditions, limitations, and qualifications of such grants, which ought not to be changed in the Lords.

By

The condition of things to which that resolution applied, the condition of things nearly a century later which Pitt had in mind, was vastly different from the condition of things which obtains to-day. The Commons took their stand on their right to tax themselves, and denied the Lords the right to any voice in the aids which they "cheerfully granted" to the sovereign. the middle of the seventeenth century a great change had come over the relations of Lords and Commons. In early days-for instance, in the "Statutum de Tallagio non concebendo" of Edward I.-the King undertook that "no tallage or aid shall be levied without the goodwill and assent of the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, knights, burgesses and other freemen of the land." As feudalism lost ground, the Commons began to assert what they conceived to be their special rights, and they were gradually successful in conflicts with the peers, whether it was a question of a controverted election or of interference in elections. The Petition of Rights in its preamble recites the Statute of Tallagio, and his Majesty's subjects "hum

The story has been admirably and concisely told by Mr. Edward Porritt in his "Unreformed House of Commons."

blie pray that no man hereafter be compelled to make or yield any gift, loan, benevolence, tax, or such like charge without common consent by Act of Parliament." And this was a joint petition by Lords Spiritual, Temporal, and Commons. The whole spirit of the time was that men should be allowed to tax themselves: the Commons quite properly would not allow the Lords to interfere with any bill affecting the people's purse, but equally they seem to have made no attempt to tax the Lords. The question turns on the initiation or modification of financial measures. "The Lords could not be taxed without their consent," says Mr. Porritt, "but they could not direct the course of taxation." There is no pretence to-day that they should do the latter, though there is an attempt on the part of the Commons to do the former. If the Lords had thrown out any section of the Budget which bears upon themselves they might have raised a storm because they had dared to amend a Money Bill: they would have been within the four corners of the birthright of every Briton-to grant taxes in his own way at his own expense through his elected representatives for the service of the State. They have never given up the power of amendment, as Mr. Gladstone said in 1861; and circumstances might arise surely such circumstances as have arisen in consequence of the admittedly novel and far-reaching proposals of the Budget-when it might be necessary to reassert their privilege. "In my opinion," said Mr. Gladstone, "the House of Commons would be very much safer if the Lords did claim and exercise the power of amendment than it would be if, without recognizing the power of amendment, it continued to send up its finances piecemeal."

The pother of the platform must be judged by history; the future of the Upper House determined by its past.

Not for the first time are the Lords threatened with extinction or reduction to the status of a debating society. Their record is treated as though it were one alternating between bluster and blue funk. They are called reactionaries at one time, poltroons at another. They stood in the way of the Reform Bill of 1832 until the King intervened, and they were unwise, no doubt, not to do then what they have done ever since-ascertain the views of the people, and, if adverse to themselves, accept what they did not approve with as good a grace as they could command. There is in the speeches of to-day against the hereditary legislator an amusing echo of the 'eighties, when the Lords refused to allow Mr. Gladstone to enfranchise the agricultural laborers until he introduced a Redistribution Bill. To-day Mr. Lloyd George boasts of his thousand-year-old ancestry; in 1884, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, in his attacks on the Lords, boasted that his line of descent was as proud as any baron's. The note then and now is pretty much that sounded by Millbank, the merchant prince of the County Palatine, in his talk with Coningsby. "Dukes and earls, indeed! Ancient lineage! I never heard of a peer with an ancient lineage. The real old families of the country are to be found among the peasantry. Ancient lineage was wiped out by the Wars of the Roses. The House of Commons is a more aristocratic body than the House of Lords”

and so on through page after page of Disraeli's exquisite satire. On the other side, the most effective answer to Mr. Winston Churchill may be found in the speeches of Lord Randolph, who told the Radical Party that they were outraged and indignant because the Tories had adopted as their motto "Appeal to the People" and were taken at their word by the House of Lords. The abolition of the hereditary princi