Lunatic Legislators

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXV, Issue 21, 23 May 1907, Page 9

Lunatic Legislators

• Great wits are sure to madness near allied.' And some one has even gone so far at to maintain that, conversely, great madness is to wisdom - near allied. But, for the ordinary affairs of life one prtfers the man whose mentality is of the normal type and whose ' bosom's lord sits lightly on its^ throne.' And especially is this true in regard to the "difficult task of ruling a nation or an empire. The British House of Lords is perhaps the only legislative body in the world in which an imbecile or a lunatic may sit and vote. The House of Commons has ever exercised the power of declaring a seat vacant when its occupant becomes insane, and statutory powers for this purpose were passed in £ 86. But not so the Upper Housej whose reform is now in the air. ' A lunatic Peer,' says the ' Wee'Jly Freeman,' ' was, in fact, brought from a lunatic asylum to vote against the Home Rule Bill in September, 1893, and a man liive Lord Townsend, who has been declared by a judicial tribunal to be incompetent to manage his own affairs, is still regarded* as competent to manage the affairs of the Nation in the House of Lords, and receives from the Crown a writ of summons enjoining his presence in that assembly.' In this respect, at least, a reform of the House of Peers is in order.