England cannot claim any place at all comparable to that which she has won in science, or in the healing professions; but if measured, not by a doubtful comparison of three or four of the greatest names, but by the number of men of undoubted genius who have appeared in a single generation, English art has never, I believe, ranked so high as at present, and never compared so favourably with the art of other nations. In 1896, for the first time, a peerage was conferred on an English artist. The doors of the Upper House were never opened to the men who, in this century, have rendered the greatest services to the State and to humanity -to Simpson, whose discovery of chloroform has prevented an amount of human suffering which it would need the imagination of a Dante to realise; to Stephenson, whose engineering genius has done more than that of any other man to revolutionise the whole economical and industrial condition of England; to Chadwick, the father of that great movement of sanitary reform which has already saved more human lives than any, except, perhaps, the very greatest, conquerors have destroyed; to Darwin, who has transformed our conceptions of the universe and whose influence is felt to the farthest frontiers of speculative thought. For their own sakes it is not to be regretted that the claims of such men were not thrown into humiliating competition with those of the acute lawyers and politicians, the great country gentlemen and the opulent brewers, who throng the approaches to the Upper House; but if such a House is to continue, and, in a democratic age, is to retain its weight and influence in the State, it is not likely that elements of this kind can for ever be neglected.

The position of an hereditary Chamber in a democratic age is a problem of much difficulty and obscurity. I have traced in a former chapter the force and the

danger of the current which is making all parts of the political machinery of a piece, breaking down all the inequalities, diversities of tendency, counterbalancing and restraining influences, on which the true liberty and the lasting security of nations so largely depends. Such a movement is naturally inimical to the hereditary principle in legislation, and the danger has been intensified by the enormous increase during the last few years in the political difference between the House of Lords and one of the great parties in the State. This fact is especially significant as about two-thirds of the numerous creations that have been made in the present reign have been made by Liberal Governments, while an appreciable number of the earlier peerages consist of members of those great Whig houses which have been the oldest and steadiest supporters of civil and religious liberty. It is true, as I have said, that an Upper House is naturally a moderating, restraining, and retarding body, rather than an impelling one; that the bias of an hereditary class is naturally on the side of habit and tradition; and that a very opulent class is inevitably conservative in questions relating to property. But these considerations are far from accounting for the full measure of the change that has taken place. Till the death of Lord Palmerston there was no great or steady party preponderance in the House of Lords. It grew up mainly under the policy of Mr. Gladstone; but it only acquired its overwhelming magnitude when that statesman announced his determination to place the government of Ireland in the hands of the party which he had shortly before described as aiming at public plunder and the dismemberment of the Empire. The great body of the Liberal peers refused to follow him, and although he had himself, in his different ministries, created about eighty peerages, his followers in the

House of Lords soon dwindled into little more than a small number of habitual office-holders.'

The disproportion was very great; but it must be acknowledged that it would have been impossible to form, by any fair means, an Upper Chamber consisting of men of large property and considerable and independent positions, in which opinions hostile to Irish Home Rule did not greatly preponderate. It must also be added, that the elections of 1886 and 1895 have shown beyond all possibility of doubt that, on the Home Rule question, the House of Lords represented the true sentiments of the democracy of the country.

And certainly the very remarkable parliamentary history of England from 1892 to 1895 does not weaken the conclusion. It appears that, under our present conditions, some desire for a change of representation and Government at every election acts with an almost tidal regularity on the constituencies, though the strength or weakness of the revulsion depends upon the policy of the rival parties. In the election of 1892, and after a Conservative Government which had lasted for more than six years, the Home Rule party obtained a small and precarious majority of forty votes. In England, and especially in the great towns of England, it was utterly defeated; in Great Britain as a whole it was in a minority; but the skilful organisation and large over-representation of the Irish peasantry, and the strength of the Church disestablishment party in Wales, turned the balance, and a Government was formed depending for its support on a small majority, consisting of a number of discordant factions. The

In his speech on the reform of the House of Lords, March 19, 1888, Lord Rosebery estimated the number of the Home

Rule peers at about thirty, or about 5 per cent. of the House of Lords.

remarkable House of Commons that sat in those years passed a Bill placing the government of Ireland in the hands of a separate Parliament, at the same time leaving a powerful contingent of eighty Irish members in the Parliament at Westminster; it passed a vote in favour of the establishment of a separate Parliament in Scotland; it passed another vote in favour of breaking up the British Isles into a federation, with a number of distinct legislatures. It carried by a small majority, though it afterwards rescinded, an amendment to the Address, in March 1894, praying her Majesty that the power now enjoyed by persons not elected to Parliament by the possessors of the parliamentary franchise to prevent Bills being submitted to your Majesty for your Royal approval shall cease,' and expressing a hope that 'if it be necessary your Majesty will, with and by the advice of your responsible ministers, use the powers vested in your Majesty to secure the passing of this much-needed reform.'

The members of the Government clearly saw that it was impossible to carry Home Rule by a direct appeal to the nation. When the Home Rule Bill, which was a capital portion of their policy, was rejected by an overwhelming majority in the Lords, they did not venture to dissolve upon the question, and submit it to the adjudication of the constituencies. They hoped to secure a Home Rule majority on other grounds, by creating and stimulating an agitation against the House of Lords. The last speech delivered in Parliament by Mr. Gladstone was truly described by Mr. Balfour as 'a declaration of war against the House of Lords.' This and the Home Rule policy were the two legacies which the retiring statesman bequeathed to his party. As early as 1888 no less than seven members who afterwards sat in the Radical Cabinet of 1892, voted in

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favour of a resolution of Mr. Labouchere stating that, in the opinion of this House, it is contrary to the true principles of representative government, and injurious to their efficacy, that any person should be a member of one House of the Legislature by right of birth, and it is therefore desirable to put an end to any such existing rights." It is not surprising that such men should have eagerly taken up the war against the House of Lords, and Cabinet ministers took the foremost part in leading the assault. The policy of 'filling the cup' was openly avowed, and it meant that measure after measure was to be introduced which was believed to be popular, in order that the House of Lords might reject them, and might in this way be discredited with the electors. It was hoped that by such a policy the tide of democratic feeling would rise with irresistible force against the hereditary House. Mr. Morley rarely made a speech on the platform without denouncing the hereditary legislators. Mr. Shaw Lefevre informed his constituents that the wisest course at the moment is to reduce still further the power of the Lords, by depriving them of the power of veto,' thus reducing them to an absolutely impotent body, with no power of even retarding legislation. Sir William Harcourt declared that a majority of a single vote in the House of Commons is a more accurate representation of the popular will than a majority of four hundred in the House of Lords.'2

Other ministers, and their supporters in Parliament, followed suit, and outside the House Radical organisations and Radical speakers and writers vied with one another in the violence of their denunciations, in their

See Charley, The Crusade against the Constitution, pp. 514-16. 2 Ibid. pp. 437, 462.