Social Transformations of the Victorian Age Part 7

CHAPTER XVIII

THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS A LANDMARK OF POLITICAL PROGRESS UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA

Comparative novelty of const.i.tutional government as understood to-day, and of real parliamentary representation during the first years of the Queen's reign. Dissatisfaction with, and defects in, Lord Grey's Reform Act. The new Chamber for the Commons nearly contemporary with the reformed House. Retrospect of different places in which the Commons have sat. Growth of social conveniences at Westminster. Recent changes that after half a century would most strike the visitor to Westminster. The ladies in Parliament. Discomforts of their earlier parliamentary position as compared with its luxuries and ascendancy to-day. Changes in the House itself. The day of the youthful M.P.

Modifications in the procedure of the House of Commons. Obstruction.

Its origin and prevention. Influence of the House to-day.

Const.i.tutional Government and a popular legislature, did on Her Majesty's accession, both exist in England. Neither of them was more than four or five years old. Each therefore had arrived only at the experimental stage.

The Reform Bill of '32 had scarcely begun to be operative when its imperfections made themselves felt. For the first time indeed in English history popular const.i.tuencies had been organized by that Measure. But while all householders rated at 10 and upwards had a voice in the national Government, various old historic franchises had been abolished.

At Preston, for example, the suffrage had previously been in practice universal; so that there, and at Windsor like Preston, the Reform Act had a disfranchising effect.[51] All sections of the middle cla.s.s were enfranchised by the Measure of 1832.

With some show of reason it was complained that, while numbers were now supreme, opinions and interests were, as in the case of pocket boroughs, better able to make themselves felt under the nominally exclusive regime which had been swept away. The new const.i.tution was not the only parliamentary novelty that signalized the opening of the Victorian epoch.

In addition to a new parliament returned by fresh const.i.tuencies there had recently risen at Westminster a new Palace containing of course a House of Commons comparatively fresh from the workmen's hands. The old structure had been burnt down in 1834. The pile of buildings designed by Barry as its architect which is now so familiar a feature in the London landscape did not a.s.sume its present proportions in all their completeness till the reign had entered upon its second decade. During the six years between 1834-40 the Houses sat in a temporary building which had been run up with miraculous rapidity. As nearly as possible ten years after Her Majesty received the early visit of her Chancellor at Kensington Palace, more exactly on April 13, 1847, the Peers took possession of their new Chamber.

Three years later, May 30, 1850, the Commons met for the first time beneath the roof that shelters them to-day. Since the People's Representatives and the Barons were const.i.tuted into separate a.s.semblies, the building which the famous Clock Tower surmounts is in fact the fourth meeting place that has been a.s.signed to the Commons of England. It was not till 1547, the first year of Edward VI. that the chapel of St Stephen in Westminster Palace was prepared for the Commons. Before that date they had a.s.sembled in the Chapter House.

The Speaker's Chair was then the former seat of the Abbot. Beneath this roof were pa.s.sed the Statute of Provisors 1350, the Statute of Praemunire, the Act of Supremacy, and the Act of Submission. Until St Stephen's became the synonym for the Popular House, party government can hardly be said to have been, even rudimentarily, established. Government by groups, the rule in the French Chamber theoretically held to be so mischievous in England, but in whose direction we seem to be making further progress each year, was practically the rule in the pre-St Stephen's period. Nor would it be easy to exaggerate the influence favourable to a hard and fast dichotomy into parties exercised by the structural arrangements of the secularized shrine.

What are the points of contrast in the economy of the Commons' House of Parliament and its precincts to-day which would most strike the shadowy observer revisiting the place by the glimpses of the moon after half a century's absence.

The accommodations of comfort, study or pleasure that now make the House of Commons not perhaps the best but a really good club, are only the fulfilment of undertakings which our imaginary spectator would remember as having been begun when he was last there. Neither would he be much surprised by the increase in the occupants of the Strangers' Gallery; nor in the greater conveniences enjoyed by the reporters. Long before the necessity for Barry's new building had arisen these improvements in the internal fittings of any House of Commons were antic.i.p.ated. When in 1847 the Hereditary legislators were about to settle in their new home, they were much exercised by the conditions under which, and the exact places where, their wives and daughters should view the progress of their debates. The first suggestion of appropriating to the peeresses the gallery that runs above the Ministerial Bench elicited from the late Lord Redesdale the blunt remark: 'It will make the place like a casino.' To-day the bright toilettes lit up by the sun pouring through the multi-coloured gla.s.s, and blending with the bright tints of the decorated walls form nearly the most picturesque feature in the afternoon of a London season.

Amazement, approbatory or the reverse, at this spectacle is the beginning of surprises which the spectral visitor would find in store. Descending into the hall which separates the two Houses, he would meet a commoner acting as a squire of dames, escorting detachments of ladies to points whence they could best see the House of Commons celebrities of the hour.

Looking through the swing door of the Representative Chamber, the parliamentary Rip Van Winkle would for the first time in his experience note the flutter of muslins and silks through the grating that bars the compartment just above the reporters' benches, and that is known to-day by the name of the Ladies' Cage. In 1834 this was a novelty as yet undreamed of. The germs of it may perhaps first be detected during the opening year of the present century.

In 1800 the admission of the Irish Members after the Act of Union involved structural alterations in the Chamber. Among other things a chandelier was fixed in the centre of the ceiling. At the same time a round hole was cut for the escape of the hot air. The top of the orifice was protected by a bal.u.s.trade. From above this chandelier ladies were permitted surrept.i.tiously to peep over. In that extremely uncomfortable and rather perilous position they saw what they could of the speakers and heard murmurs of the debate. The first subsequent novelty was the introduction of a few chairs. The temporary structure for the Commons after the 1834 fire was in the old House of Lords formerly known as the Court of Requests, occupying as it did much, if not all, of the site of Edward the Confessor's palace. The Lords themselves at that time met in the present St Stephen's where the Commons meet to-day. Nor was it till after the first Reform Bill that the domiciles of the two a.s.semblies were exchanged.

In the building which served the Commons between 1836-40, no provision was made for ladies. By the report of the select committee of 1836 this fresh accommodation was suggested. On the 3d of May in that, or in the following year, the House ordered[52] that a place should be provided where, with less discomfort, and more dignity than from the lamp bal.u.s.trade, ladies could listen to the speeches, and catch an occasional glimpse of those who delivered them. In the temporary structure the exact spot thus allocated to them seems to have been behind the Speaker's chair, if not actually beneath the floor. Experts at least have discovered no alternative situation as possible. The Ladies' Gallery of to-day as it exists just above the Reporters' box is divided into three parts. The western third is reserved for Mrs Speaker. It is called by that lady's name. Here she receives as her guests personal friends or semi-official personages of her own s.e.x. The two eastern thirds of the compartment now spoken of are at the disposal of Members for their wives and friends. There is a ballot for the Ladies' Gallery a week in advance. Certain representatives of the people have been favoured, as the result of consummate dexterity or rare luck, with singularly uniform success in this ordeal. During the earlier period to which reference has been made, there are believed to have been instances in which ladies clandestinely found a place not only in the bal.u.s.trade above but in the ventilating chamber beneath the floor. Thus, when they did not flutter as angels above, they burrowed like moles below.

Nor, as we have seen, was it till Barry's plan had become an architectural fact that the wives and daughters of the people's elect were delivered from these two predicaments.

To-day a lady visiting the House of Commons during debate has her 5 o'clock tea as comfortably as in her own drawing room. If the weather be sultry, or the debate tedious, she can refresh herself during the interval between tea and dinner with strawberries and ice as luxuriously as at Gunter's in Berkeley Square. During the more monastic period of the modern House of Commons, there occurred a short interval in which a very few ladies on the floor of the House itself on the same side as the Treasury Bench were stationed on chairs so placed that their occupants could hear without being seen. One day a sudden witticism of an orator upset the gravity of the listening stateswomen, and scandalized the Speaker. That laugh proved fatal. Henceforth Members were forbidden expressly by the House to secrete ladies in any part of the Chamber, either above or under the floor. To-day in the interior of the Chamber itself ladies are not more visible than formerly. The proposal to remove the grille that converts their gallery into a cage is still made periodically; but with as yet no great appearance of success.

Outside but still beneath the parliamentary roof, or within the parliamentary precinct, the s.e.x that is no longer 'suppressed,' pervades the place at all hours. The Members' dining room, where male strangers can be invited, is not yet open to guests of our new _ecclesiazusae_. All other parts of the premises are already pervaded by them. In the bas.e.m.e.nt a room has been discovered in which the fair guests of Members can be entertained when the debate is over by a supper which may well repair the omission of a dinner. The river frontage of the Westminster Palace during some years has been surrendered at discretion to the politicians of the petticoat. Lord Redesdale foresaw the coming resemblance of the interior of the Peers' Chamber to a music and dancing saloon. Even his alarmist imagination never pictured at the height of the London season an a.s.sembly of ladies upon the Terrace just outside the Chamber, enjoying as the guests of the elected of the democracy ices, strawberries and cream, all the other modish adjuncts of 5 o'clock tea. This they have done since 1888. More recently there have been added waitresses attractively dressed in a black and white uniform. Some years ago Mr John Bright, a special habitue of the tea room, arranged a subscription for a wedding present to the young person who presided over the cups and saucers, when on her marriage she retired into private life. Even that statesman would not perhaps have undertaken his graceful and chivalrous task in the case of a whole regiment of tea room nymphs.

The lady M.P. has still to come into existence. Her s.e.x controls votes and vicariously receives them. In New Zealand and other Colonies the same s.e.x records votes directly as well as influences votes indirectly. If, as other precedents might suggest, the mother country is advancing towards the Colonial usage, is there any abiding reason why to their parliamentary influence already established beyond doubt, the mothers and daughters of England should not add the responsibility to public opinion which a parliamentary seat would bring and which they now escape?

The personal changes in the composition of the House of Commons are only less striking than the innovations in its social life. Years have pa.s.sed since Mr Disraeli's oft reiterated remark that the future of English politics was to the English youth. In a sense different perhaps from that which the phrase was first intended to bear, this consummation seems in gradual process of fulfilment. In 1837 a chief amus.e.m.e.nt of visitors to the House of Commons was to count the number of bald heads in the a.s.sembly. Those phenomena, as the legitimate results of age, are very nearly unknown to-day. During the first three decades of the Queen's reign the average age of a Member was between 50 and 60. Now it is probably not much more than 40. Often it happens that senators are so fresh from school as to be unable to forget their schoolboy phraseology, and to address the Speaker in the exact terms they used but the other day to the master of their Form. Thus, 'If you please, Sir, Mr Speaker, Sir!' is the opening often heard of late years from a boyish senator who rises to address the House in response to the eye of its President. In other respects, the typical M.P. has changed not less conspicuously. Men of the social and political quality who followed the lead of Sir Robert Peel first, and of Mr Disraeli afterwards, who could be taken for nothing else than the country gentlemen that they were, have been replaced by men whose antecedents and whose interests are not less manifestly commercial.

Long after the abolition of the Corn Laws the description of the Conservative party given in the Life of Lord George Bentinck continued to be true. A glance sufficed to show that these 'men of metal and of acres'

were the products of their native soil. Specimens of this cla.s.s lingered at times pretty plentifully after Household Franchise was added to the Statute Book. The tall erect figure of Mr Newdegate, broadened, but not bent, by age, still retaining much of the elasticity of youth; the less rugged and angular, but physically not less well developed, presence of Sir Rainald, afterwards Lord, Knightley; these were specimens of Members not uncommon within the memory of the present generation. To the same order, in spite of a very different appearance, belonged the parliamentary Cato of those days, Mr J. W. Henley, the veteran Member for Oxfordshire.

If the wisdom of the House, its occasional intolerance, and its hereditary good sense, were ever incarnate in an individual, they resided surely beneath the compact st.u.r.dy figure with the countenance, seamed and gnarled as of an ancient oak, of that remarkable man. Before Quarter Sessions had given place to County Councils, Mr Henley and others of his cla.s.s ceased to be known in their places.

These were the men, contemporaries of Disraeli and Northcote, brought up in the same parliamentary, often in the same social, school as them.

These, too, were they who for his mastery of parliamentary law, his excellence of parliamentary manner, and his maintenance of historic standards in parliamentary debate, could almost tolerate the Liberalism of Mr Gladstone. With a pang they antic.i.p.ated the day when his withdrawal would rob the a.s.sembly of the last surviving monument of the eloquence and bearing which used to be the familiar attributes in the first a.s.sembly of gentlemen in the world. Already debating of the old stately order had begun to go out of fashion. Thirty years after the Queen's accession, in the Reform discussions of 1867, Mr Lowe had made one of the latest and happiest hits ever secured by a familiar phrase from Virgil. In 1881, after the death of Lord Beaconsfield, Mr Gladstone pointed a reference of the same kind with not less felicity when he applied to his rival on returning from Berlin the words by which the Latin poet indicated the commanding presence of Marcellus among the winners of the _spolia opima_.

With these exceptions, there is no recent record of signally successful quotation in the House of Commons from cla.s.sical authors. Not indeed for want of cla.s.sical scholars. Professor Jebb, Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Sir M. W.

Ridley, are at least the equals in this respect of their seniors.[53] The simple reason is that Latin and Greek quotation which were once held to be, as Mr Disraeli said of invective, an ornament of debate, have pa.s.sed into the heritage of outworn words and faces. To-day if honourable gentlemen ill.u.s.trate their meaning by a metaphor or clench an argument by an epigram, they go for their _tropes_ and ideas, not to the library, but to the laboratory. Thus one of them not long since was heard to compare the mind of an opponent to a series of condensing chambers. The masters of the grand style in parliamentary oratory, as it may be called, cannot be said to have pa.s.sed away while David Plunket, Lord Rathmore, lives. But the business of the House of Commons is done in Committee. A Committee of the House of Commons is like a committee of any other gentlemen professedly met together to transact the greatest amount of work in the shortest s.p.a.ce of time. Telling arrangement of ideas, clearness of thought, conciseness of phrase, dexterous support of special views by figures and facts; these are the qualities bred in the parliamentary atmosphere to-day. In such categories are the ideals consciously aimed at to be found. No competent person seriously supposes the average of intellectual power in Parliament to have declined. Mr Gladstone and other experts have testified that it has increased, and that the 1893 Parliament contained more men of first rate capacity than any within modern memory.

The interest taken by the nations in the doings of the House of Commons has not permanently abated, nor is likely to do so, seeing that its attraction resides less in the letter of its debates than in the circ.u.mstance of its being a continuous commentary on the social as well as political history of the day, a concentration, epitome, and amalgam of the human nature of the period. The vicissitudes of human affairs, the sudden growth, the not less sudden rupture, of human friendships; the involuntary perjuries of political allies surely as laughable in the sight of Jove as the perjuries of lovers; the sworn confidants and colleagues in one Administration transformed into the mortal antagonists of the next; these are the episodes of everyday life reflected upon the stage of the Theatre Royal St Stephen's. Can they then, fail to be more full of dramatic charm than the entertainments provided in any other playhouse of the realm? The parallel between the theatrical and parliamentary stage might be made still closer. As on the former, so on the latter there are certain stock parts always sure to be enacted, whatever the t.i.tle of the play, or the nature of the discussion.

The Mr Henley already named, pre-eminently representative as he was of the hard good sense and rugged honesty of the Tory squire, was not a novelty in the Chamber. He had his forerunner in the 'down-right' Shippon, as Pope calls him, of a Georgian House of Commons. He it was who, as a Jacobite opposed to Sir Robert Walpole yet said of himself and his adversary, 'He is for King George; I am for King James. We differ on most things; but Robin and I are the two most honest men in Parliament.' The theatrical and parliamentary a.n.a.logy might be ill.u.s.trated much further. One or two more instances will suffice. The stage character whose chief function is to keep the audience smiling and to enliven dulness by a laugh has his exact a.n.a.logue in the parliamentary humorist, whose very rising is the signal for a burst of antic.i.p.atory merriment. In the nineteenth century the name of that humorist has been, during its first half, Sir Charles Wetherell.

He relieved the severity of the 1831-2 Reform Bill discussions by convulsing his hearers with laughter at the farcical absurdity of his sallies, or by the ludicrous incongruity of the metaphors with which he pointed his invective.

Half a century later the name of the performer is changed. The function discharged is identical. In the place of a Wetherell there sits now a Bernal Osborne, now a Patrick Boyle Smollett, now a William Gregory, and again a Wilfried Lawson, or a Labouchere. In any case the wag is indispensable to the proceedings of the House. In every new Parliament he makes his appearance, if not quite so early, yet with the same regularity as the Queen's Speech, or the Debate on the Address.

Other roles are equally familiar, and with the same undeviating regularity are forthcoming. High or Low Church, dry or Evangelical, the different champions of the Church, each in their own era and from their own point of view, come forward to defend the national Establishment. These are the gentlemen whom in once addressing a deputation of them Mr Disraeli characteristically styled 'the children of the Church.' Of this section, during the earlier decades of the reign, Sir Robert Inglis was a chief.

Round him were grouped a little band in which Mr Spooner, and thereafter the intrepid Mr Newdegate, and poor Mr Whalley, with his jaded, hunted look, had a place. The burly presence of Sir John Mowbray, the less robust, but wiry figure of Mr Talbot, both Members for Oxford University, belong to a later date. When these may have disappeared, successors are already visible to take their place. The stalwart form and patriarchal beard of Sir John Kennaway, the less athletic and more sensitive figure of Mr Stanley Leighton are even to-day powers in that ecclesiastical faction.

The two sons of Lord Salisbury, Lord Cranborne and Lord Hugh Cecil belong to another generation, but to the same category of ecclesiastical defenders.

During the Queen's earlier years, Chartism, that is to-day only a name, was an active force. Most of the points of the Charter itself have quietly become law. The Septennial Act has not indeed been repealed; but practically the term of parliamentary life has been shortened. The ballot has quietly superseded the hustings. Payment of Members is seriously discussed. Election expenses have been much reduced. By the Redistribution Bill of 1884, an appreciable step towards equal electoral districts has been taken. The Georgian House of Commons, indeed the House till the full effects of the first Reform Bill were felt, was so small, its members so preponderantly came from the upper cla.s.s of society as to give the a.s.sembly the air rather of a family party than of a national forum.

From 1707 to the beginning of this century, the English, Welsh and Scotch numbered 558. The Act of Union at the beginning of the century added 100 to the House of Commons of 1801. The additions to the House made by the Reform Bill of 1832 in the case of Wales and Ireland 5 each, of Scotland 8, were exactly compensated by the reduction of English Members. The Measure, therefore, which created popular const.i.tuencies and with them a popularly representative Chamber left St Stephen's numerically unaltered.

As to quality, it socially modified rather than, as is sometimes said, revolutionized the a.s.sembly. Nor, as to figures, did the Household Franchise Bill of 1868 enlarge the Chamber. The 7 fresh representatives to Scotland, and the 1 to Wales were balanced exactly by the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of 8 English const.i.tuencies. The House of Commons remained therefore 658.

An increase began with the Reform Bill of 1885. The emanc.i.p.ation of the agricultural labourer by the franchise on the same conditions as his urban brother involved the sole increase since the Irish union to the numbers of the House of Commons. Even that is only represented by 12. The whole of this increase was for the benefit of Scotland. Two new Members were indeed received by England under the latest franchise re-arrangement. Two were also lost by Ireland. Thus the Irish disfranchis.e.m.e.nt balances the English enfranchis.e.m.e.nt. The sole nett profit in the transaction accrued therefore, as has been said, to Great Britain beyond the Tweed.

While the House of Commons as to arrangements, occupants and visitors has changed more than once during the period comprised in this survey, there has been in the opinion of experts like Mr Gladstone no diminution of ability in its general debates. The amount of varied and accurate knowledge displayed during discussions in Committee by the rank and file of its members has increased appreciably since the Derby-Disraeli Reform Act. But, it is said, as our const.i.tution has become more democratic, our popular legislators have grown unmannerly. Those who know the volumes of parliamentary history summarizing debates in the House during the French Revolutionary epoch of 1793-5 may be disposed to doubt the justice of this censure. The violent personality of the recriminations between individual members of the two Whig sections at this period; the revolting grossness of the metaphors and the epithets by which the intellectual majesty of Burke stooped to express his loathing for the new Radicals on both sides of the Channel; the personal menaces exchanged by compet.i.tive debaters of smaller calibre; leave no room for doubt on the point. Two years after the first Reform Act, Church rates and other ecclesiastical topics gave rise in the debates upon them to scenes and noises, c.o.c.kcrowing amongst them, that scandalised the parliamentary decorum of the period, as disgraceful beyond all precedent. These incidents were attended by a degree of parliamentary disorder which was habitually in excess of the ebullitions however scandalous, provoked during the session of 1893 by the Second Irish Government Bill of Mr Gladstone. The great change of recent years in parliamentary methods is of course the organized obstruction on frivolous and irrelevant pretexts raised during debate. Even this is not the novelty that some have seemed to suppose. During that distant era when no chandelier hung over the heads of Members, the only illuminants known in the Chamber were candles. A formal motion was made that these should be brought in. The early pract.i.tioners of obstruction seized upon this issue to delay the discussion. Motions for adjournment became effective instruments for delay during the Reform discussions of 1832. They were then employed with success generally, and with humour sometimes by the popular Sir Charles Wetherell, and in case of unpalatable amendments by Mr Sheridan. While motions for adjournment have thus always been used as methods of delay, they naturally have had different aspects at various times. Thus when employed for fighting a Bill to which conscientious objection was entertained, these motions differed entirely from those to the same ostensible end made by the feigned opponents of perfectly harmless Measures. Mr Pope Hennessy was practically the founder of this later and indiscriminate opposition to all attempts to legislate.

The late Mr Parnell extended that system to routine business such as the nomination of Committees, also to un.o.bjectionable votes in supply, and finally in 1877 to private Members' Bills as well as Government Bills, with the avowed aim of paralysing the whole machinery of Statute law. The late Sir Stafford Northcote, who more than any other statesman of our time resembled, in his conscientious caution and chivalrous devotion to principle, Mr Perceval, dealt perhaps too gently with this abuse of forms, nor saw fit to employ the new rule that was suggested to him by the consummate experience of the late Sir Thomas May. Mr Gladstone's management of this matter in 1881-2 was more drastic; it would have been successful but for the tactics of the late Lord Randolph Churchill and the present Sir John Gorst. After this came in 1888 the leadership of Mr W. H.

Smith, resulting as it did in 15 new Rules. The practical result of the latest changes in House of Commons procedure may be summarized popularly and briefly as follows. The French principle of closure already adopted in all other Popular a.s.semblies is now part of the law of the English Parliament. This instrument can be moved for at any time. It depends wholly on the Speaker or, if the House be in Committee, on the Chairman, whether the motion for it be put to the House. If put it is generally opposed. Then follow debate and division. For its adoption there must be not only a majority but one composed of not less than 100 Members.

With its larger numbers, the representative character of the House of Commons has been increased also. The steps by which it has acquired control of the executive as well as the legislative machinery of government need not be recapitulated here. Its moral, educational and social influence in the country is probably not proportionate to its actual power. The theory of delegacy so indignantly repudiated by Conservative speakers during the first Reform Bill debates is to-day accepted and actively ill.u.s.trated by a majority of Members. More and more the tendency is for the const.i.tuencies to call into existence a Government to undertake a specific task of legislation whose scope is defined by the individual possessing for the moment the national confidence. To support in that special work that particular statesman, or, if he falls into disfavour, to thwart him, the householders send to St Stephen's men whose discretion is restricted within very narrow limits.

This arrangement immensely increases the authority of the democratic favourite of the moment. It is less favourable to the prestige or usefulness of the Chamber as containing the collective wisdom of the nation. The apt.i.tude for business talk that shall be to the point in Committee has not, when the House has a mind to it, declined. The great speeches, no sooner delivered than they const.i.tute national text-books, are less frequent than the display of excellence in debate. Afraid of boring the a.s.sembly, dreading the imputation of mere rhetoric, the Member who has something to say usually prefers delivering it to his const.i.tuents at his periodical reunion with them, or upon some other extra parliamentary occasion. The terse diction and urbane gravity of manner of Sir Charles Dilke made him, during his Foreign Under-Secretaryship, a parliamentary model. Such oratorical efforts as he sometimes made, were reserved for the meetings with his electors. The clever young politician, being on his promotion, speaks when he can that he may give his future chief a taste of his quality. Popular meetings therefore, and the periodical press have detracted from the House of Commons as a school of eloquence, or as a national educator. On the other hand the House of Lords has no const.i.tuencies in the background. Its time is less preoccupied. It is to-day far more representative of the English people than was the House of Commons a few years before the Queen's accession. It does indeed chiefly consist now of men whose station and whose antecedents are not very dissimilar from those of the House of Commons before that Chamber had been thrice Reformed. Hence some of those debates, especially on foreign policy, or grave points of const.i.tutional procedure that used to mark epochs in the Elective Chamber are now almost confined to the Hereditary House.

Outbursts of periodical petulance against the Peers will doubtless continue. Such Radicals as may be left in England to-day are at heart far more tolerant of a second Chamber, composed as that at Westminster is, than were the 'root and branch' men not merely of Cromwell's day, but of half a century ago. Something therefore may perhaps be said on behalf of the opinion that any movement which may be successful against the House of Lords is likely to affect the House of Commons as well.[54]

CHAPTER XIX

CROWN, COUNTRY AND COMMONS

Comparative youth not the only point of difference between the House of Commons to-day and formerly. Its reflection of social characteristics of the time shown in the disappearance of the old County Member extinct in the country as well as in Parliament.

Modifications in _personnel_ of the Liberal party since the great fortunes made in trade and since the first Reform Act; also in that of the Conservatives. Mr Gladstone's opinion and experience on this subject. The obstacles in the way of oratorical efforts or success in the House of Commons, have increased under new conditions. Rivals to House as representative of national feelings. The press, the House of Lords and local debating societies.

The average age of its members is not the only respect in which, during the Queen's reign, the House of Commons has been gradually transformed. If the country squire of the old school of Mr Henley has disappeared from it, that is because he is now as unknown in his own county as in Pall Mall.

The social composition of the Whig, or Liberal, party was finally and entirely altered about the period of the first Reform Bill. The change had indeed been going forward from the earlier epoch when the middle cla.s.s of commerce began to be, as from the days of the Edwards it was tending to become, the greatest power in the country. The replacement of the old Whig, with his territorial a.s.sociations, by the new Liberal, like Mr Cobden, was only the last stage in the development of self-government in England. In truth, however, the kind of progress now spoken of was not limited to any single political connection. The Nestorian experience of Mr Gladstone testifies it to have been not less noticeable among Tories than among Whigs. There were not, he thinks, in 1835 five members of the Conservative party owing their seats to commercial or industrial influences. The change which has come about in the composition of the party since then is 'simply marvellous.'[55] The specific legislation that has surrounded the English Crown by a democracy, is the extension of the lodger franchise to boroughs in 1867, to counties in 1884, and the cheapening of elections by the Corrupt Practices Bill of Sir Henry James in 1883. Notwithstanding these advances, the blend between authority and freedom has never been more fortunately conspicuous nor more wisely active in this country than since the period of its self-government began. Before 1870 it used to be said that the Pope, shorn of his temporal power, would exercise a prerogative not weaker, but stronger than when he was sole lord of Rome. Whether that prediction has, or has not been fulfilled, the influence that a const.i.tutional Sovereign can exercise in the United Kingdom has increased rather than diminished since the days of absolute monarchy were over. Whatever in the way of political initiative the Sovereign has surrendered has in the department of social ascendancy and civic influence, been restored with interest to the Crown. The late Sir Henry Maine, differing in that respect from earlier political theorists, has in that very suppleness and elasticity which his predecessors praised discovered a source of weakness to the English const.i.tution. So shrewd an observer as Mr Goldwin Smith bitterly complains of the fickleness of popularly elected Parliaments, and their quickness to reflect the external influences of the moment, as of the chief dangers to our political stability. Into that controversy it is needless to enter. It may seem strange to those who have had more than half a century's experience of her loyalty to const.i.tutional principles; but in 1837 no one certainly knew whether the young Queen would not insist upon her technical right to nominate and dismiss her Ministers at will. Less than four years had pa.s.sed since her uncle William IV. had practically exercised that prerogative. In 1834 Lord Althorp was called by his father, Lord Spencer's, death to the Upper House. Lord Grey had long wished to resign the Premiership. His unsatisfactory relations with the King made him seize this opportunity of doing so. The Sovereign accepted the resignation of the Cabinet with more than alacrity. Substantially therefore, and morally, there would seem something in the statement that William IV.

dismissed the Whigs to please himself.[56] As Mr Gladstone in one of his essays has shown, the principle giving cohesion as well as joint and separate vitality to the members of a Cabinet independently of the personal pleasure of the Sovereign had been established before then. First actively applied if not discovered by Sunderland, the son-in-law of the great Duke of Marlborough, the Cabinet system, as Mr Gladstone has shown, can scarcely be said definitively to have triumphed till 1828, when George IV. reluctantly accepted Canning for Prime Minister. William IV., Mr Gladstone's first Royal master, is, it may be noticed in pa.s.sing, admitted by his early servant to have used his prerogative unwisely; but is defended from the charge of having used it unconst.i.tutionally. So great is the distance in political thought traversed since 1834 by the statesman as well as by others.

No thought of reverting to this family precedent has ever probably occurred to her present Majesty. The comparison of the position voluntarily occupied by the Sovereign to-day to that of the permanent head of a great department of the State unchanged by Ministerial or electoral vicissitudes, roughly but not altogether inaccurately conveys some idea of the practical influence of the Crown upon the politics of the period.

Continuous experience of public affairs is not however the sole source of the influence upon them which a const.i.tutional monarch may be enabled or obliged to exercise. The familiar Bedchamber Plot, presently to be mentioned more in detail, and the momentary friction between the Sovereign and her responsible statesmen that followed it, is now known to have originated in a misapprehension. The Minister only desired that a few ladies should give up their places in the Household. The Sovereign resisted the dismissal of her entire suite. If, indeed, a solution of the difficulty had not been found; if, that is, the Queen had pressed her personal wishes to the point of the Premier's retirement, it is by no means certain that she would have lacked const.i.tutional arguments justifying her course. A sort of plebiscite in 1841 had been given to Sir Robert Peel. On some national issues of broader import, the popular feeling at this time notoriously had not been expressed with convincing clearness. On all sides there seemed balance and consequently confusion of public opinion. From the alt.i.tude of her throne, and by the light of her ancestral knowledge, the Queen might have argued that she saw the situation more correctly than her Ministers in Parliament or her people outside, and so have vindicated the dissolution of the House had she chosen to adopt that course. This prerogative of sanctioning the recourse of a Minister to the const.i.tuencies is one of which the Crown can never finally divest itself. In the last resort, however much he may wish to abdicate his power, the first magistrate of a State must be prepared on that point for a definite individual responsibility. The latest indubitable ill.u.s.tration of this truth was given in 1868. In that year Mr Gladstone's Irish Church resolutions secured the defeat of the Disraeli Government. The Conservative Premier did not, as precedent for doing even then existed, resign immediately. He placed before the Queen the alternative of a dissolution then, or six months later, leaving absolutely to the Crown the responsibility of the choice. If that situation has not since exactly repeated itself, obviously from the very nature of things it is one which may at any moment recur. Thus it will be seen that under parliamentary government, the self effacement of the Sovereign is an impossibility. Years have pa.s.sed since the sense of popular disappointment at the visible results of the Grey Reform Act found expression in _Coningsby_, and since the Sidonia of that romance ridiculed to his young disciple the imperfect vicariate of a House of Commons. However essential a part of our inst.i.tutions it may be, its power and popularity are not to-day without compet.i.tors in popular favour. These rivals to the House of Commons are in their way as much as itself integral parts of the national life. If, notwithstanding all the gibes against it, the House of Lords, composed as it is to-day, be not a representative body, nothing which exists in England can deserve that epithet. Socially the peers of the later Victorian epoch are as a whole indistinguishable from the Commoners at St Stephen's of an earlier epoch. They reflect at least as faithfully the variety, the interests, the pursuits, and the convictions of the nation. The great difference between election to the Lower and promotion to the Upper House is that the former generally goes by local interest.

The latter depends usually on political service, on personal merit, or individual achievement. That distinction was unknown before the present generation. Macaulay, a great writer and the best informed man of his day, received a peerage. His personal claims to the honour were admitted by reason of his place in the party which from 1832 he had continuously served in Parliament. His pretensions to a peerage were emphasized by his services as a State official. He had occupied Cabinet rank; he had been Secretary at War when that office was equivalent to a Secretaryship of State. No coronet was ever given to literary genius alone before that conferred upon Lord Tennyson.

The younger Pitt is reported to have said that any man with 40,000 a year had a right to a seat in the House of Lords. Some of his creations notably that of Lord Carrington gave effect to that opinion. These peerages, however, did but foreshadow faintly the elevations of men actually engaged in commerce as in the case of Lord Armstrong, vicariously through his widow in that of Mr W. H. Smith, and many more. The press, too, is not less representative than the House of Commons. Nor in all probability is Lord Glenesk the last representative of journalism, as he has been the first to receive a seat in the Hereditary legislature. Under any circ.u.mstances, the well placed English newspaper is likely to be not less expository of public opinion than any body of gentlemen, by whatever mode elected, sitting at Westminster. Special tendencies of the time make the press an exceptionally lifelike measure of the thoughts and wishes in every department of life of every section of the English people. Newspaper proprietorship has in fact become not less a fashion of the day than theatrical lesseeship was a few years since. A number of men agreed on certain points such as the development or exploitation of particular enterprises, are seized with the conviction that 'an organ' is essential to their success. They combine, therefore, to buy or to press into their service by subsidies some printed sheet which may yet have the ear of the nation but which happens just now to have fallen upon evil times. If no such opportunity as this present itself, newspaper starting has become a recognized industry of commerce. After a time, therefore, a new literary champion of the Empire enters the lists. Its real object may be narrow and even personal. Its managers know that if their end is to be accomplished it must be veiled by a programme of more disinterested generalities, and that popular sentiment should form the first study of its conductors. In this way therefore, apart from the great newspaper oracles of the time which in all but name are national enterprises, the press has increasingly an inducement, that never fails, to hold up the mirror to the convictions, prejudices and sentiments into which public opinion can be a.n.a.lysed. The reptile press of Germany is, upon any considerable scale, not known in England. The connection between most journals whose support is envied, or whose opposition is dreaded, and some or more of the leading public men of the day, has been often very close[57] and is perhaps, still not quite unknown.