IMBECILES IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIX, Issue XIII, 18 September 1897, Page 392

IMBECILES IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

The late Lord Denman was a very curious example of tbe survival ot the name and even the resemblance when everything else was gone. His father was a great counsel, who was able to withstand all the temptations of the court and of society in the great trial between George IV. and his wife, Caroline of Brunswick ; and afterward be was one of tbe best Chief Justices the country ever had. In his son there was a curious and almost hideous resemblance to him (writesT. P. O'Connor, M P. ,in an article on * The Celebrities of the House of Commons,' in Barper'e Magazine for July). There were the same strong and finely chiselled Roman nose, tbe same long, wellshaped face, the same great height, and the same fineness of figure ; the voice was also the same sonorous and melodious organ, and there was even a resemblance in the very clothes; for the son adhered rigidly to the style of dress that used to be the mode in the days of his father’s youth. He wore a curious necktie of many folds, a long coat which in cut and colour was like a survival and there was about the whole figure a curious old world air, not without its dignity, but infinitely melancholy. For this outward resemblance was but the resemblance of the shell ; the old Denman was there in externals and in the body, but the spirit was gone. The Lord Denman this generation knew would be harshly described if he were said to be insane, for he was not violent, and never offended any more than he hurt anybody ; but he was certainly of weak, or at least eccentric intellect. He attended every sitting of the House of Lords quite conscientiously, and no sitting passed with out his rising to speak. Then a very curious thing would happen. You. as a visitor, would be surprised, perhaps even a little shocked, to observe that every peer in the House began at once to talk to his neighbour, and to talk in as loud a voice as he could, until the usually sombre and spectrally silent assembly became positively as noisy as the grasshoppers in a big field. When

you looked at the venerable figure with the hooked nose and heard the melodious voice, you were positively shocked that an assembly of noblemen should show itself so wanting in the commonest courtesies of life. But really there was no choice in the matter. Lord Denman always talked insanities or imbecilities, and there was no method by which he could be kept down except by tbe rough-and-ready method I have described. He made motions ; nobody took notice of them ; the Lord Chancellor did not even go through the formality of putting them to the vote and having them rejected. It was as if nobody had spoken ; as if this figure were a ghost from the grave. The House of Lords has a great advantage over the House of Commons in dealing with such cases, for it is bound by no standing orders, as is the House of Commons. In the House of Commons the case of lunatics has often given a good deal of trouble. In the very first Parliament I attended there was a member for a Scotch constituency who became insane within a few weeks after his elevation ; he never recovered his senses, and his constituency remained vacant for the five years of the Parliament’s existence. I have heard of another and even more curious case. There was a terribly tight division, and every vote counted. The bolder spirits of one of the parties carried out a strange plan of gaining a vote. One of their colleagues was in a lunatic asylum ; he was taken out for the division ; one friend stood at one side of him, another at the other, and in this way they just managed to get him past the turnstiles where the votes are taken. But the next day the matter was reported, and tbe vote was disallowed. In the House of Lords they have to resort to no such direct methods. Some year or two ago there was a strange scene in which a peer got on the woolsack and put a motion for a bill and declared it carried. In the House of Commons this would have meant something terrible, and heaven knows what machinery would have to be brought into action. But in the House of Lords

they are able to hush these things up, and to ignore them as if they had never occurred. The delinquent in this case was also, I heard, tbe bearer of a great legal name. To see these inheritors of illustrious titles and names—these descendants of the men whose swords or brains helped to build up the splendid fabric of the British Empire—ia an object lesson in heredity more painful than anything in Daudet’s * Kings in Exile ’ —sometimes more terrible than any page even in Zola.