THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

New Zealander, Volume XVII, Issue 1638, 28 December 1861, Page 5

THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

[From (he “Saturday Review,”] To students of political human nature there are few problems more puzzling than the motive which makes public men like to be promoted to the House of Lords. To those who value the privilege of walking in to dinner in front of people who used to walk in front of them, the gratification is of course intelligible. To persons of an artistic, or aesthetic, or heraldic, or sentimental turn of mind, there arc a certain number of plcasureable sensations, hard to clothe in words, hut not difficult to recognise, which are called up by belonging to a body of historical celebrity. But statesmen are seldom exposed to either the nobler or the meaner of these influences. They arc rarely archaeological, and still more rarely punctilious upon the subject of dinner-table precedence. What they value is fame and power. They love to have their eloquence • recognised in an assembly worthy of hearing it, and j their will felt in the policy that guides the empire. It I is scarcely possible that any public man can dream that i these objects will be attained in the House of Lords. ! And yet a glance at the division lists is sufficient to j show that, considering the scanty number of living English celebrities, they are no inconsiderable number j who have deliberately exchanged the House of Commons for the House of Lords. It is presumable that distance—even so narrow a distance as the width of St. Stepheu’s-hall—lends some sort of enchantment to the view. Yet a walk behind the bar on any ordinary night should have sufficed to dispel any illusions upon the subject. To the public at large, who are satisfied to know no more of Parliamentary proceedings than they read in the debates, the House of Lords may well seem just as good a place for speech-making as the House of Commons. It is only by actual inspection that .a man can realize to himself the full terrors of that purgatory of orators. It is difficult to find any simile that shall adequately convoy, to any person who has not watched it, the chill sense of desolation with which it strikes a beholder. A Quaker jollification, a French horse-race, a Presbyterian psalm, are all lively and exciting compared to an ordinary debate in the House of Lords. It is bad enough even on great nights, when the presence ot the ladies, and a perceptible attendance of peers, prevent the House from seeming empty. Lord Grey, after he had made his first speech there, is reported to have said on coming out that it was like speaking in a church vault. To a spectator it seems still more to resemble a debate in one of Madame Tussand’s showrooms. The misplaced and overdone magnificence of the decoration, rhe immovable Chancellor planted out in the middle of the Chamber, the equally motionless clerks, and the rows of figures on each side, evidently intended to represent celebrities and to convey to posterity an idea of the variety of attitudes in which English gentlemen of the nineteenth century can pose—all conspire to give the idea of a high-class wax-work exhibition. If it were not for the orator thundering, or trying to thunder, at the table, the whole would form a fine picture of still life. Naturally, such an impassive audience has an effect on the nerves of a speaker who is new to the ordeal—unless, indeed, he be endowed with Lord Westbury’s ais triplex. When Lord Herbert made his first speech there, it was universally said that he had not done justice to his reputation. How was it to be expected that he should? He is eminently a sympathetic speaker. Ho was accustomed to an audience who gave signs of being alive—who cheered him when he pleased them, and gave vent to various other inarticulate sounds when he did not, He was not prepared to struggle against the icy somnolence of these aristocratic altitudes. Point, epigram, wit, sentiment, passion, clan, were all frozen out of him in a moment, by the mute insouciance of his new auditory. If they would only have hooted him, he would have done better. He felt like A'cxander Selkirk on meeting ilie unknown beasts—“their silence was horrid to me.” It is like no other lay assembly in the world. Some of the leaders, like Lord Derby and Lord Granville, get acclimatized to it at last ; besides, they arc helped out by their colleagues or ex-colleagues, who cheer them officially once or twice during their speeches in a courtly manner. The only speakers who are thoroughly at their case, and have the full use, such as it is, of all their powers, are the Bishops. But then the assembly resembles no other audience so much as one in which they are naturally at home —the asphyxiated congregation of a West-end chapel. A very slight lapse of memory might lead a bishop into thinking he was preaching to a congregation in the Chapel Royal. The prevalent demeanour of the audience would certainly confirm the illusion. The only difference is, that at Westminster the Peers may go away when they have had enough of the sermon —a liberty of which they largely avail themselves. But whatever the terrors of a great night may be, the public man who enters the House of Lords with an intention of continuing his Parliamentary activity must take it as a luxury rarely to be enjoyed. On ordinary nights he must make up his mind to every species of mortification to which any man who takes an interest in the conduct of public business can be exposed. His usual audience will be about six—two Ministers, two chiefs of Opposition, a young peer who hopes to get a chance of speaking, and a bishop meditating upon the approach of dinner-time. If be persists in speaking beyond the witching hour of seven, probably this last constituent of his auditory will also disappear. If he is pertinacious in discussing the multitudinous Bills which the assembly in which he is sitting is supposed to sanction, and thereby reduces official peers to the vulgar habit of early dining prevalent among the Commons, be must make up bis mind to be voted a bore of the first water, and snubbed on every occasion in any seemly manner that may offer itself. He may console himself, however, with the reflection that he has had a real career elsewhere, and may still have a sham one, it he will put his zeal in his pocket, and, abandoning the real work of legislation, be satisfied with occasionally haranguing on the condition of things in general and some foreign country in particular. His position is at least far better than that of that most helpless of human beings—a young peer of an ambitious turn of mind. There is no kind of animal to which the Peers show such a determined and inflexible dislike as to a young member of their own body afflicted with a taste for public affairs. The laws of the country will not permit them to give him over, as they would like to do, to the Usher of the Black Rod, to undergo the application of that functionary’s peculiar weapon. They arc obliged to content themselves with throwing the most saturated of wet blankets on every ebullition of his youthful zeal. When more than one peer rises to address the House, the House itself selects whom it will hear; and that selection is never in favor of a voting speaker. Before dinner, therefore, he rarely has a chance; during dinner, he must lash himself up to withstand the coldly contemptuous looks of the half-dozen who remain, or steel himself against those mute appealing glances at the clock with which the last survivor of the episcopal bench warns him to do as he would be done by ; and there is no afterdinner, as a rule, in the House of Lords, It is needless to say that on the great nights he is utterly shut out, and that, if he were to venture upon so unheard-of an excess as moving the adjournment of a debate, the very woolsack would rise up to smother him. Under these circumstances, zealous young peers have naturally become as rare as liberal journalists in France. With one or two exceptions, such as Lord Wodchouse and Lord Carnarvon, the succession of peers is absolutely cut off, and the future eminence of the House depends entirely upon the recruits it receives from the House of Commons. According to present appearances, there is every probability that when the present race of statesmen shall have passed away, Lord Bath will be among the most distinguished of the peers. This is not a very hopeful state of things. The hereditary principle, spite of its conflict with the mass of modern ideas, is still valued by the majority of the nation. It possesses all the strength of a long historical tradition, and has become instinctive with the holders of property. And even stern political logicians, looking at it as a rough security for the predominance of the wealthier and more educated classes, are not inclined to lift their hands against it. In the present aspect of the world, it is likely to be left unmolested for an indefinite period. Even extreme theorists hesitate now to offer social equality as a certain remedy for human ills. But there is one assault against which the hereditary principle cannot stand. It cannot resist the voluntary abdication of those who represent it. If the peers really mean to tell the world that as a body they are unequal to their duties, or unwilling to perform them —that their scanty attendance, and miscroscopic division-lists, and perfunctory sittings, and debates mainly conducted by those who have not inherited their peerage, indicate a genuine repulsion for their duties the Constitution lays upon them—no doubt can be entertained of the end to which such a state of feeling must lead. The peerage cannot survive a deliberate condemnation by the peers. They bear too many marks of an institution from which the life is departing. The leaders take no pains to train disciples to succeed them—the younger men show no eagerness to step into the thinning ranks. If it is to be so, they j must be conscious that the end will be of our own contriving. It is idle to say that the spirit of the age is against them, and that they dare not exercise the powers which the Constitution has placed in their hands. They have never genuinely tried. They have never ascertained by experiment what amount of trust the public, would repose in a body doing its duties with as much zeal as an elective assembly, and with all the independence which an elective origin takes away. In any case, the question should be brought to the test.* A Second Chamber, active, vigilant, and powerful,’S ? T’tal nsoMfßy ” well-regulated State; The

general belief is, that the House of Lords is perfectly competent to fulfil those conditions. The only people who appear to doubt it are the Lords themselves. Whatever the truth may be. the sooner iffis known the better. It will be time to provide a substitute when the House of Lords has shown by actual experiment that public opinion docs not trust it to exercise a vigorous and effective control over legislation. But the most pernicious alternative to which we can be reduced is that of a sham Second Chamber, itself only taking a perfunctory part in the business of legislation, and yet by its presence excluding the possibility of a more efficient substitute.