THE TWILIGHT OF THE LORDS
Weyl, Walter E.
The Twilight of the Lords Taken by and large, the regord of the House of Lords is a story of one long-gontinued obstruction op progress. It is one long record of legislative dead-locking by a small...
...Ireland demands—and justly demands—a measure of autonomy...
...Lords, provided for the taxation of the unearned increment, and also increased the burdens upon the liquor interests (who are allied to the Peers...
...Next Summer—The Crisis THIS SUMMER a crisis will be reached...
...the average Marquess 47,500 acres...
...In so doing, whether they foresaw it or not, they have opened a wider and more far-reaching issue...
...If the Lords did possess a veto over finance, they would have the power to make and unmake governments, since no ministry could maintain itself without the power to provide funds...
...Taken by and large, the record of the House of Lords is a story of one long-continued obstruction to progress...
...The House of Lords," he said, "has deliberately chosen its ground...
...The House of Lords must be reformed...
...There must be a Reform of the House of Lords, a limitation of its powers, or both...
...These "backwoodsmen" (as they are called) would be unutterably bored by the debates and divisions of their aristocratic Chamber, and their abstention does not in any way affect legislation...
...These proposals, behind which the progressive sentiment of the country is arrayed, are impossible so long as the reactionary Lords hold their absolute veto upon legislation...
...When the Conservatives are in a majority in the House of Commons, the Lords do nothing...
...There are always five or six Conservative Lords to every Liberal Lord...
...Birrell, "represents nobody but themselves, and they enjoy to the full the confidence of their Constituents...
...To avoid losing their veto, they are willing to reform themselves...
...On December 2, after the Lords had rejected the Budget, the Prime Minister made a powerful speech in the House of Commons...
...They have been almost uniformly hostile to Ireland, and have opposed not only the demand for Irish autonomy, but also measures for the reform of the Irish land system and for religious reform...
...They have elected to set at nought, in regard to finance, the unwritten but time honored conventions of our Constitution...
...new elections were ordered, and again a Liberal, Labor and Irish majority was returned...
...With the narrow obstinacy of irresponsible and irremovable Peers, representing no one, they reject or mutilate all—or nearly all—Liberal measures...
...The dismal, stagnant, agricultural life of England is bound up with the power of the Lords and of allied landed magnates...
...As the conflict draws to its final stage, all sorts of rumors float in the air...
...They have the choice of accepting a bill repugnant to them or to have the bill carried against their remonstrance by new Peers, who will thereafter rule the House according to their own theories...
...The Peers were then (as they still are) an impediment to democratic progress, and it wars hard to believe that such a body could retain its position against a rising tide of democratic sentiment...
...But the Lords are not widows, but eldest sons of eldest sons of eldest sons, and they promptly and decisively threw out the bill...
...For thirty-six years they delayed the admission of Nonconformists to the Universities...
...A nobleman who sat in the Upper Chamber seventy years ago (when Aaron Burr was still alive) may still be wheeled to the House of Lords, and although he may not have read a newspaper or a book since he went to school, he still has the right to vote and the power to undo the work of the responsible House of Commons...
...There are able men among them, but the level of ability is not high...
...Upon its past record, the House of Lords stands condemned at the bar of Democracy...
...Today there are millions of Englishmen who admire the uncompromising honesty and directness of that old declaration, and who believe that the country would be better off with a single chamber...
...This proposal, like the others, is still tentative...
...Digging Their Own Graves IT WAS no slight danger...
...Not only does he draw huge rents, but he exercises a tyrannical power over thousands of people...
...like certain others, would have the effect of making the House of Lords a more efficient body, but until it can be shown that the new House of Lords would be less reactionary than the old, there is not likely to be much enthusiasm for the proposal...
...The Lords were enraged...
...We believe that the first principles of representative government, las embodied in our slow, our ordered, but ever-broadening developments, are at stake, and we ask the House of Commons by this resolution to-day, as, at the earliest possible moment we shall ask the constituencies of the country, to declare that the organ and voice of the free people of this country is to be found in the elected representatives of the Nation...
...The danger, which they had incurred, had been incurred in vain...
...It follows that the Lords are entirely unrepresentative...
...The defiance of the Lords had fallen flat...
...It would not be so bad if the Lords—even though they were not elected—were recruited from the general mass of the population...
...They have presented a steady resistance to, and have exercised a deadening influence upon, the democratic and progressive London County Council...
...I do not think," said Lord Rosebery, speaking in the House of Lords on the first reading of the Finance Bill of 1894, "that it is necessary, for the purpose of passing the Bill, that they should make themselves master of it, because I deprecate altogether the idea that the House of Lords has anything to do with Money Bills...
...It was a Pyrrhus victory...
...Gladstone had promised compensation to holders of commissions and speculators in them...
...The means of compelling the Lords lie in the hands of the House of Commons...
...It is the British phase of a conflict which is being waged in all industrial countries between the forces of Reaction and the forces of Progress...
...The leading constitu-ti rial authorities among the Lords had over and over again conceded that the Upper Chamber possessed no jurisdiction over finance...
...Today four-fifths of the land of England is owned by less than ten thousand people, who form a huge land monopoly, with the holdings of the great Peers as the centre and the point of resistance...
...The young countrymen, with no chance of acquiring land, with no chance of earning a decent living or even of maintaining independence, flock to the cities in shoals...
...A dissolution of Parliament followed, as was inevitable...
...By WALTER E. WEYL THERE IS only one political problem in England to-day— the problem of the House of Lords...
...Therefore the veto must go...
...It further provides that any other bill which has passed the House of Commons in three successive sessions shall become law without the assent of the Lords...
...Another proposal of the Lords is a suggested Referendum, by which a minority in either House could compel a vote of all the people on any legislation which had passed the House of Commons...
...If the Prime Minister, who represents the Lower House, advises the King to create five hundred new Peers, the King will create them...
...Before the veto goes, however, the Lords must give their consent...
...Measures are urged for the alleviation of the conditions of labor, for the governmental insurance against sick-ness and unemployment, for the reform of the poor law, for improved and broadened education, for the regulation of the liquor traffic, for the adjustment of finance as between the national and local governments...
...The average Duke owned 142,564 acres...
...Land Owned by a Select Few THERE IS NOT much land in England, and what little there is, is held by a few people...
...Thus the Lords seem to be between the devil and the deep sea...
...This proceeding was arbitrary, unprecedented and unconstitutional...
...In 1893, however, a liberal government sent up a bill to abolish the law of primogeniture, under which the eldest son inherits the whole landed property...
...These five hundred Peers will be Liberals pledged to vote for the Parliamentary Bill...
...the Welsh clamor for the disestablishment of an alien church...
...There are much less than half as many agricultural laborers in the United Kingdom to-day as there were sixty years ago...
...It was absolutely essential to the success of the party system that such a measure to curb the House of Lords should be proposed...
...They desired a landed monopoly...
...If, however, the present House of Lords, or the new House, as it is hoped finally to reconstitute it, gains in wisdom as it loses in power, it may attain to a moral influence over legislation incomparably greater and better than that which it now possesses, and it may fit itself to occupy an integral position in a far more effective and democratic scheme of government...
...As long ago as 1838, Macaulay predicted "that in a few years the House of Lords must go...
...In the last four years of Liberal administration, the Lords rejected or mutilated practically all the measures of the Government looking to a reform, however slight, of the landed system...
...the mass of the people demand far-reaching reforms of the patch-work electoral system of England...
...It was not without a show of justification that the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, recently asked the following challenging question: "Has the House of Lords ever been right in any of the great contr versies of the last one hundred years...
...The House of Lords," says Mr...
...This monopoly of the land has been an unmitigated curse to England...
...In the first place the House of Lords is for the most part hereditary...
...Until the Lords are ended or mended, until the obstruction of the Peers is placed within bounds, all other programs of reform— social, political, industrial—must wait...
...Except for the one Reform Measure of 1867 the Lords have opposed every extension of the suffrage...
...The Lords awaken...
...Sons of Their Fathers" THE WONDER IS that the House of Lords has survived at all...
...Year by year the population of the rural districts falls...
...Two hundred and sixty years ago, on February 6, 1649, the Commons quietly resolved "that the House of Lords is useless, dangerous, and ought to be abolished," whereupon the Lords were abolished...
...They have been against the secret ballot, which was intended to prevent the wholesale intimidation of poor voters...
...for seven years, they delayed even the opening of graveyards to the members of the Free Churches...
...Agriculture is deserted...
...the average Earl 30,217 acres...
...The holdings of the Lords and of their wealthy landlord allies surround the towns and prevent their growth, and individual Peers own dozens of parishes, including every building lot and every house...
...Between the Devil and the Deep Sea THERE IS ONLY one way to compel the Lords to pass the Parliamentary Bill, and that is, to make rejection a more disastrous policy than acceptance...
...Their plan would be to wipe the Lords out of existence...
...There are social, industrial and political reforms to be effected, and ancient injustices to be redressed...
...In 1860, they opposed the proposed abolition, in the interest of a cheap press, of the excessive duties on paper...
...They may, however, attend...
...The Conservatives then have a majority in both Houses, and the Liberals are helpless...
...It has not been suggested that all adult males—to say nothing of all adults—shall participate in the Referendum, and it has not even been decided whether plural voting shall be allowed in the Referendum, as it is now allowed—thanks to the Lords,—in the Parliamentary elections...
...The Referendum-say the Liberals—must be considered in relation to the whole problem of electoral reform...
...The conflict between Lords and Commons, which has been going on for centuries, has come at last to a head...
...If the present Lords refuse their assent they will simply be voted down by the new Lords, who will entirely change— at least for a time—the tone and character of the at present Conservative House of Lords...
...They did not want the dispersion of large estates...
...It is one long record of legislative dead-locking by a small group of like-minded, unrepresentative, and caste-selfish men, holding the keys of power, and enjoying with the class which surrounds and supports it, a monopoly of land, of wealth, of social prestige, and of political prerogative...
...But for over two hundred years the King has not exercised his veto, and the Lords have not thrown out any general revenue or appropriation bill, although before 1860, they occasionally rejected certain unimportant measures, partly financial in character...
...They have opposed over and over again the reform of legal procedure, and have only given way to an overwhelming sentiment...
...On April 28, 1910, within a few hours, the objectionable Finance Bill of 1909 was read a second time in the House of Lords, committed, and read the third time...
...The House of Lords and the land system," says William T. Stead, "are Siamese twins...
...for eleven years they delayed the abolition of the archaic Church rates...
...a RSeferendum may be adopted, but neither proposal is acceptable to the Government as a substitute for the abolition of the Lords' absolute veto...
...A few decades ago statistics were prepared which showed that 525 peers owned over one-fifth of all the land of the country...
...The Liberal, Labor and Irish members of Parliament, who represent a majority of about one hundred and fifteen, are in favor of this Bill...
...The Labor members would prefer to go further...
...They have opposed many bills seeking to extirpate political corruption in Parliamentary and municipal elections...
...The wisest among the Lords have proposed various plans...
...We have not provoked the challenge...
...Almost everyone admits, however,— even many of the Lords themselves—that to maintain the Upper Chamber as constituted at present and with its present powers is absolutely impessible...
...Generally the little farmers and their agricultural laborers vote as the great land-owning Lord wishes them to vote...
...With the present veto of the present House of Lords intact, party government in England is impossible...
...In 1871 they vetoed the bill to put an end to the purchase of commissions in the army, even though Mr...
...Some men claim that the King will refuse to create the new Peers...
...I have come to the conclusion," said Lord Cromer, speaking in the House of Lords on November 23, 1909, "that objectionable as the Budget is, we cannot reject it without incurring other and more formidable risks than would be involved in its adoption...
...This bill provides that the Lords shall have no jurisdiction over financial legislation, either to initiate, amend or reject...
...Until recently the House of Commons has not even attempted to reform the land system, recognizing that the House of Lords would throw out any bill...
...The hereditary principle and the principle of the rule of the people do not mix...
...and the average Baron, 14,152 acres...
...tails we lose...
...From the point of view of its present plenary powers, this step may look like a dethronement of the Peers...
...Why the Lords Killed the Budget IT WAS BECAUSE the Lords are landlords that the present constitutional crisis arose...
...Its members are merely "the sons of their fathers...
...A candid analysis of the votes of the Lords during this period compels the answer that they have not been right...
...But for many generations the Kings of Great Britain and Ireland have wisely refrained from interfering in domestic controversies, and the best informed people believe that for the King to refuse to create Peers would be to imperil the Monarchy...
...When, on the other hand, the Conservatives are defeated at the elections, the Liberals are still helpless...
...The crops lessen decade by decade, while more and more the country becomes dependent upon foreign food...
...The Lords had a legal right to reject the Budget, just as the King has a legal right to veto a bill...
...If there were merchants and farmers and workingmen and doctors and teachers among the Lords, the body would be more in touch with the real aspirations of the people...
...As a result of past experience, the Liberals have come to the conclusion that it is "Heads you win...
...Never before in the history of England has there been greater necessity of letting down this bar...
...The undistinguished among the older peers do not see why they should be sacrificed for their noble brothers, and the Liberal, Labor and Irish sections of the community would frankly prefer a weak to a strong House of Lords, so long as that body was uniformly Conservative and obstructionist...
...It is a battle between Conservatives and Liberals, between Reactionaries and Progressives, between a narrow, selfish, plutocratic and aristocratic clique and the great mass of men with ideals of a better future for the United Kingdom...
...The seven million voters of the United Kingdom are beginning to ask why their will should be frustrated by six hundred unrepresentative and irresponsible Lords Spiritual and Temporal...
...The Lords have therefore lost any constitutional right over finance, which they may have ever possessed, for the British Constitution is founded not on legal rights but on usage...
...Upon its past record, the House of Lords stands condemned at the bar of democracy...
...A bill to restrict the veto of the Lords is being vigorously pushed through the House of Commons...
...It was because the Upper House was determined to preserve intact the hundreds of millions of dollars which annually flow to landlords who neither cultivate nor improve their land, that the Peers were encouraged to throw out the Budget of 1909...
...The Lords are a Conservative body...
...It is one long record of legislative dead-locking by a small group of like-minded, unrepresentative, and caste-selfish men, holding the keys of power, and enjoying with the class which surrounds and supports it, a monopoly of land, of wealth, of social prestige, and of political prerogative...
...To-day, even the Lords are willing to surrender in part the hereditary principle...
...The House of Lords has always been overtly or covertly opposide to Democracy...
...They have opposed municipal reform, the grant of power to municipalities, and the democratization of local bodies...
...They do not desire to depose King Log for the sake of King Stork...
...Two-thirds of the six hundred Peers never take the trouble, year in or year out, to attend the House of Lords...
...In 1831, and 1832 the Lords fought with a bitter desperate obstinacy against the great Reform Act which was to change the House of Commons from a corrupt congregation of delegates from rotten boroughs to a more representative assembly, and it was not until the King threatened to swamp the House of Lords with new Peers especially created to vote the old Peers down, that the Upper Chamber finally surrendered...
...They sleep a sleep as profound as that of Rip van Winkle in the Catskill mountains...
...The death of one entails the death of the other...
...But the Budget levied a tax on the undeveloped lands of the great...
...Constitutionally or unconstitutionally, they were bound to defeat this Budget...
...The Parliamentary Bill, so abhorrent to the Peers, must be accepted by the House of Lords...
...The reform which takes precedence over all others, and upon which all ethers depend, is the extinguishment of the Lords' absolute veto, and the conversion of the House of Lords from a partisan, obstructionist and reactionary body, to a critical, advisory and merely delaying assembly...
...The Lords used their power as hereditary legislators to defeat all plans to remedy the injustices, or to mitigate the evils, of the close landed monopoly upon which they prospered...
...The effect of the Parliamentary Bill is to deprive the Lords of their present absolute veto and to substitute for it a merely suspensory veto...
...Practically, however, the House of Lords is a house of landlords, of men who have monopolized the land and who live upon the labor of farmers and agricultural laborers, without contributing to the product of the soil...
...Not long ago a certain Lord "gave notice" to eight hundred cultivators of his land, alleging that they were "discontented," but the true reason was that the eight hundred had voted against the brother of the noble Lord in a sharply contested election...
...When the Budget of 1909 came before the Upper House, many of the more far-seeing Peers advised its immediate acceptance...
...People are Aroused THE PROGRESSIVE SECTIONS of the people of Great Britain and Ireland have determined once for all that the century-long obstruction of the House of Lords must go...
...A Barrier to Democracy DEMOCRACY IS equally impossible...
...It was represented that in the case of a man dying possessed of a small farm, it was hard upon his widow and younger children to be entirely disinherited...
...Balfour, the Leader of the Conservative Opposition in the House of Commons, has proposed a plan, according to which the Lords would choose certain Peers to represent them in the House of Lords, while other distinguished Peers would be qualified by their admitted public service, and still others would be elected or selected from the outside, This plan...
...The majority, however, seem in favor of two chambers...
...In 1831, '34, '36, '48, '51, '53, and '57 they frustrated the House of Commons Bills to remove the disabilities of the Jews, and to permit them to sit in Parliament...
...Republican sentiment is hardly perceptible in England, but it would not be wise to enlist the hered-itaryM'onarchy upon the side of the hereditary Lords, at the very moment when the hereditary principle is in such disfavor...
...From 1906 to 1909, the Lords rejected a bill against Plural Voting, a Scotch Land Values Bill, a Scotch Small Landholders Bill, a (Liquor) Licensing Bill, the Finance Bill of 1909, the London Elections Bill, besides completely wrecking the Education Bill of 1906, and either wrecking or mutilating almost all the other important measures of the four sessions...
...The hand of the aristocratic landlord lies heavy upon all his subject population...
Vol. 3 • April 1911 • No. 17
