1883-84]

HIS PLAN TO CURB THE LORDS

439

veto on the enfranchisement of the rural democracy. The discussion turned much on this prospect, and Bright delighted the Conference by bringing forward his famous proposal, that has become still more famous owing to its partial adoption more than twenty years after his death:

'The Crown,' he said, 'cannot now reject any Bill sent up for its acceptance. If the Crown may be limited in this way, why may not the Peers? Why not enact that if the Peers have rejected a Bill once and it has been considered in a subsequent session by the Commons, and, after due deliberation, has been again sent up to the Peers, then the Peers must pass it on and it will receive the Royal assent and will become law?'

In January 1836 James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill, published an article in the London Review which he signed by the initials P. Q.,' advocating the precise measure passed in the year 1911. Whether John Bright or any one else remembered this in 1883-84 it is impossible to say. But it is certain that Bright's speech first brought the proposal to the serious notice of the political world, though in a somewhat more stringent form.

In 1884 the County Franchise Bill was duly brought in, passed and sent up to the Lords. As had been foretold, its passage was there barred; but in cautious mood the Peers left their retreat open in case they found the country against them. They shelved the Bill, and demanded that before it was further pressed, a Redistribution Bill should be produced. In the crisis that followed John Bright remembered his ancient valour. Punch had a cartoon of 'The Old Lion' coming out of his lair to crush the lordly coronet beneath his paw.

Thegame began at a party meeting of the Liberal Members summoned to the Foreign Office to consider the situation. Mr. Goschen made a speech, not well received, deprecating an agitation against the Lords. The moment he sat down John Bright was seen to have risen at the other end of the room:

'I hope,' he said amid much cheering and laughter, that everybody that can be calm during the next three months, like my Rt. Hon. friend, will be as calm as they can, and will not unduly judge those who may show by their expressions a little warmth for the great question which is before the country. I recollect the crisis of 1846, and the crisis of 1866 and 1867, but looking back on these

periods I do not take the advice of Mr. Goschen. I do not know whether it was given then; I dare say it was, but it was not followed. . . . A hereditary House of Parliament is not and cannot be perpetual in a free country. The Crown, so popular throughout the country, and so important in our system, has long ago given up its absolute It would be to the great advantage, in my opinion, of the House of Lords, if some limit were put upon their power of veto.'

While the crisis lasted John Bright used to the full the liberty of exceedingly free speech to popular audiences which he enjoyed as being no longer a member of the Government. But he noted with pleasure in his journal that his Birmingham colleague, when they two addressed their constituents from the same platform on August 4, 'spoke well-very strongly against the Lords for a member of the Government. At this meeting Bright again put forward his scheme for limiting the veto of the second chamber, after dismissing the alternative proposals of total abolition and reduction of numbers, the former as too strong to meet with general acceptance, the latter as inadequate to secure fair treatment for Liberal measures.

"The proposition that I should make would be this: that they should have, unimpaired, all the power they have now with regard to any Bill that has passed the House of Commons during the session in which the Lords are called upon to deal with it. That is, in the case of this Bill they would be at liberty to amend it, and send it back to the Commons. If the Commons did not like the amendments, and would not accept them, the Bill would go back to the Lords, and if the Lords chose they might reject it. But, in the second session, if practically the same Bill was sent up to the Lords, they would then also have a right to debate and to amend; but when the Bill came down to the House of Commons in this second session, and the Commons would not agree to the amendments of the Lords, then the Lords should be bound to accept the Bill.'

Before the autumn was over, further agitation proved to be unnecessary. Negotiations were opened between the two parties, which ended in the passage into law of the County Franchise Bill and of a Redistribution Bill drawn up on lines agreed between the Liberal and Conservative chiefs.

1881-85]

THE 'FAIR TRADE' MOVEMENT

441

For several years past there had been a revived Protectionist movement, based on the two facts that agricultural depression had set in in the late 'seventies, and that foreign countries had not adopted Free Trade. Bright wrote a number of public letters from time to time combating the new arguments.

In answer to the cry raised in 1881 for the re-establishment of Corn Laws to save agriculture in years of bad English harvest, John Bright pointed out that in those very years Corn Laws must have caused dear bread for all.

'Between the harvests of 1879 and 1880, that is in the year after the bad harvest of 1879, out of every four loaves of bread eaten by the people of the United Kingdom three loaves came from abroad, and in no other year in my lifetime have our people been fed so cheaply or on bread of such excellent quality.'

In the same year he wrote another public letter on the subject of Foreign Tariffs as an argument for Protection over here:

'We all regret that France, the United States of America, and other countries continue to maintain their high tariffs; it is, we believe, a misfortune to them and injurious to us ; but we can only legislate for our own country and not for them. If you think that, not being able to sell freely, we should mend ourselves by giving up the power to buy freely, I must leave you to that opinion, only expressing my wonder at it. But you will perhaps say that we can force other nations to reduce their tariffs if we impose a tariff against them. You forget probably that we have tried this in past times, and that it has wholly failed. Sir Robert Peel taught this nearly forty years ago, and he believed, as I believe, that the best defence we can have against the evils of foreign tariffs is to have no tariff of our

own.

'If you doubt what Free Trade has done for England, go back to your histories, and read what was the condition of our working men and their families for the first forty years of this century, when everything was supposed to be protected, and compare it with what it is now.'

And in November 1884, when a bad winter' was stimulating the Fair Trade' movement, he wrote:

'To sell freely would be a great advantage, as to buy freely is a great advantage; but neither to buy freely nor

to sell freely as the Fair Traders recommend, would, in my view, enormously increase the injury to our trade arising from foreign tariffs.

'I have known the depression in trade to be much greater than it is now, and the sufferings of traders and workmen during our time of Protection, previous to 1842, when the reform of our tariff began, were beyond all comparison greater than they are now. In foreign countries where high tariffs exist, say in Russia, in France, and in the United States, the disturbance and depression of manufacturing industries are far greater at this moment than with us. Their tariffs make it impossible for them to have a larger foreign trade; we have a wider field for our exports, which they cannot enter. . . . The field for our manufacturing industry is far wider than that for any other manufacturing nation in the world, and I cannot doubt that we shall gradually rise from the existing depression, and shall reap even greater gain from our policy of Free Trade in the future than we have reaped in the past.'

Those who read the trade returns of the last few years will find reason to think that this cheerful prophecy has been most abundantly fulfilled.

1885]

THE GENERAL ELECTION

443

CHAPTER XXI

HOME RULE

'Mr. Gladstone stops the way. He insists on an impossible legislation for Ireland, and insists upon it to the exclusion of legislation for the whole Kingdom, and his followers still have faith in him and are anxious to return him to power. They are furious because the Conservatives are in office, and blame me and others for keeping them there. They seem blind to the fact that Mr. Gladstone put them in office. He would appeal to the Electors on the merits of his Irish Bills, and the Electors of Great Britain by a majority of nearly two to one condemned his Bills and destroyed his Administration. We cannot allow Mr. Gladstone to come back to office with his Irish policy, and are willing to support a Government which the Constituencies have, by a great majority, placed in power. I prefer to join hands with Lord Salisbury and his colleagues than with Mr. Parnell and his friends, the leaders of the Irish rebellion.'-BRIGHT to a correspondent, November 1887.

THE passage of the County Franchise and Redistribution Bills into law was regarded by many Conservative Members as the doom of their party. In March 1885 one of them said to Bright: The Conservative party is almost destroyed. The next Parliament will be fatal to us.' And so it might have been, but for Egypt and Ireland. In June Gladstone was defeated, nominally on the Budget, really on account of the discredit arising from the Khartoum tragedy. An interim Conservative Cabinet carried on affairs until the General Election in November 1885. After negotiations between Parnell and the Conservative Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland on the subject of Home Rule, Parnell tells us that he left Lord Carnarvon believing that I was in complete accord with him regarding the main outlines of a settlement conferring a legislature upon Ireland.' At the General Election Parnell cast the Irish vote in England on the Conservative side. The election was, in fact, fought with great bitterness as between Irish and Liberals in the English boroughs, particularly in Lancashire, and these feelings had not wholly died away when a few months later Mr. Gladstone asked the Liberals to take the Irishmen to their hearts.