The reconstitution of our Upper House of Parliament is at once the most urgent, the most difficult, and in its consequences the most far-reaching of all the reforms of our time. As an old historian and constitutional lawyer, as a veteran reformer who is absolutely detached from any party interest, an onlooker who sees the futility of all revolutionary hustling in such an historic monarchy as ours, I put forth again the same scheme for dealing with the problem of the Lords' Veto which for years I have urged in essays to the public and have privately suggested to Liberal statesmen.

We may start with three axioms which to practical and thoughtful

minds need no discussion:

(1) Heredity as giving any right to legislate is effete.

(2) A real and strong Second Chamber is a sine qua non of efficient legislation and government.

(3) A true Second Chamber must have for its sole title personal merit and service combined with elective choice.

For many years, and long before the formation of the Liberal Government of 1905, I ventured to insist that effective power both for legislation and for administration was rapidly passing from the House of Commons to the House of Lords. This became visible when Mr. Gladstone sustained his second rebuff over Home Rule in 1893; and in his last farewell speech in the House -a speech too little understood and too soon forgotten-he plainly acknowledged this. Now the ascendancy of the predominant House has burst upon Liberals like a thunder-storm, forcing them to take drastic and immediate action, if Liberalism and Reform are in our generation to have any free life at all.

It must be a mind incurably lightheaded which could regard this tremendous problem of reconstituting a permanent Second Chamber as a thing to be run up in a crisis, or even disposed of in a single session. A Constitution like ours, with centuries of glorious traditions inwoven into its fibres and embedded in its roots, does not spring up from a Ministry in flux like the Goddess of Wisdom from the brain of Zeus. It is enough to exhaust the whole energies of one entire Parliament of the normal term. I vehemently deprecate any attempt to rush a revised British Constitution in a Parliament "on the make."

As a temporary expedient to tide over an obstinate financial and administrative deadlock, an eirenicon between two contending parties, I suggest that the leaders of both sides in the two houses might agree to a simple suspensory Act by which, for a definite period, the legislative powers of the House of Lords should be transferred to the existing Privy Council, or to a large Parliamentary Committee of the Privy Council. Such an Act (only possible by agreement) would be a sort of moratorium, as they call it in the civil law abroad, an "emergency exit" from a dilemma, an interim House of Lords such as would have to be found if Barry's Golden Chamber—absit omen were burned down.

The Privy Council is at least as ancient, as historic, as honorable as the House of Lords. It consists almost exactly of three hundred members, the ideal number of a true Senate. Its three hundred members, every one of whom sits by personal nomination for known public service, immensely outweigh in capacity, in authority, in experience, the peers irreverently called "the backwoodsmen." About a hun

dred peers, one-third of the whole, are

now

Privy Councillors. Amongst them are almost every peer who took any part in the Budget debate, and perhaps all of those whom Lord Rosebery declared carried weight in the country. All living ministers, heads of departments, and eminent public servants are Privy Councillors, the present and the late Cabinets and their colleagues; and I see no reason why members of the House of Commons need be excluded if they are Privy Councillors. The whole three hundred are men of long experience of public duties and personally known to the public. They comprise almost all the classes of men which the thoughtful schemes for forming a Senate propose to include. They are as a body preponderatingly Conservative. But is it conceivable that this country will elaborate any Senate which is not Conservative? Conservative as the majority is, the minority of Liberals in the Council is of conspicuous ability and force. And the Conservative majority consists of men all of whom are amenable to public opinion, men who have passed long lives in compromises and in avoiding desperate risks. men of the temper of Wellington, Grey, and Peel, who knew when obstinacy spelt ruin, to whom the true Conservatism was in using to the best end any inevitable development.

The existing Privy Council is even now something like a fair type of an ef ficient Senate, and it could easily be made a much more true type. For the moment of crisis, I think reasonable reformers of the House of Lords might consent to accept it for a Second Chamber until the new British Constitution were ready and at work. A permanent Second Chamber could only be evolved out of the heated debates of many sessions. And what are we to do in the interval, whilst legislation and even taxation is suspended in the air? As to immediately sterilizing the Peers by

abolishing their right to reject Bills, and so establishing, before Easter 1910, a Single-Chamber Constitution—it is an idle dream to nurse, and would need a revolution to enforce.

For my own part I should be content to take the Privy Council as the basis of an efficient Senate, and form out of it, as a revising Second Chamber, a Parliamentary Committee, in which all Ministers could sit, as in France. And of course the jurisdiction of the House of Lords as a Court of Appeal would be absorbed in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, so as to form one supreme tribunal for the whole Empire. The Privy Council might then consist of a small professional Judicial Committee and a large Parliamentary Committee. This scheme, indeed, would satisfy the claim of the extreme Radical wing by terminating the House of Lords in its legislative capacity, whilst it maintains the whole effective force of the Peers in a real and strong Second Chamber.

But having regard to the immense prestige of our historic House of Lords, and the tremendous shake to British traditions which "ending" the Lords would involve, I proceed to consider the current projects for "mending" rather than "ending" the Upper House.

The question owes everything to Lord Rosebery. Four times within the last forty years, both in office and out of office, in a series of powerful speeches he has warned his fellow-peers and has implored his fellow-countrymen to set about reform of the House of Lords. The Report of his Special Committee (December 2, 1908) settled the matter in principle, though the timidity and prejudice of his colleagues reduced the scheme to absurdity and impotence. But when the most powerful Committee that the Lords have ever chosen reported-that "the possession of a peerage should not of itself give the right to sit and vote in

might repose on their honors without public burdens. The representation of minorities will be dealt with in a later passage.

A real and efficient Senate should be limited, as is that of France, to three hundred members. Every one of these should be formally selected by some authoritative body. They would all take the oath of a Privy Councillor and would have the official responsibility of a Cabinet Minister. It is needless to encumber the scheme with miscellaneous ex-officio, honorary, or senile members. The three hundred Senators should each be chosen on the ground of personal capacity to serve the State. All special qualifications should be discarded, for even that of age has no force in a country wherein Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-four and Gladstone was Prime Minister at eighty-four.

It would be revolutionary unreason to deny the Peers any voice in the constitution of a Senate. And I suggest that fifty Senators to serve during each Parliament should be selected by the whole body of peers, British, Scotch, and Irish, not excluding peeresses in their own right. These now amount altogether to some seven hundred. And I propose that these seven hundred should elect at each Parliament fifty Senators, who might be peers, commoners, or ecclesiastics of any Church. They would no doubt usually be peers, and would include all those who spoke in recent debates and who had served in any office. It would be folly to water down the Senate with ex-officio,

Α second list of fifty Senators would be nominated for life by the Crown, subject, of course, to the advice of Ministers, but with a limitation that not more than ten could be created in any single year, so that both parties would be represented in proportion to the period of tenure of power. For the original creation the first list would be a subject of mutual agreement between the actual and the late Ministries, as, indeed, the entire scheme here proposed could only take effect after common arrangement for a compromise.

We have thus a body of a hundred members, one-third of a Senate of three hundred, who would have been selected either by the entire peerage without any restriction, or by the Crown under the responsible advice of Ministers of either party. These hundred would in practice be found to be peers whose services had long been before the country, and would include all available statesmen whom reasonable men would expect to find in a Second Chamber. They would be (in the higher sense of the term) eminently Conservative; their influence in such a Senate would be far greater than it is now in a House of Lords, the prestige of which has been finally destroyed by the wisdom of the best of them and by the folly of the worst. It is a dream to imagine that our Parliamentary system can ever be recast-apart from real revolution-without retaining a strong Conservative element. For my own part, I have insisted for these thirty years that, in our antique political system, orderly progress could only be retarded by blind adhesion to the formulas of a doctrinaire democracy. But, though I am no "democrat" in

the proper sense of the word, I am convinced that legislation and government are impossible in the twentieth century unless they have express authority from the nation as a whole. No crude referendum ad hoc, no universal suffrage in direct legislation, no plebiscite, no Single-Chamber Convention, will permanently satisfy this people of England-for all these are devices of doctrinaire democracy. The only verdict which will satisfy this people in the long run and which will truly express the authority of the nation is the collective judgment of the best minds which it chooses to guide it in the vast complications and dilemmas of national action. In other words, this means our secular trust in the familiar method of elective representation. It is only doctrinaire Abbés Siéyès who could dream that the legislation of this huge Empire could ever be entrusted to exofficio Notables of any kind, who, with the veteran's wooden sword, have usually parted with the rapier of their own brains. Representation by chosen men of experience is of the essence of what Englishmen know in politics or will accept in government. But then representation must be absolutely elective, and not, under any cover, official and automatic.

We come, then, to the substantial part of a permanent Senate-two hundred members to be elected by the three kingdoms-two-thirds of the whole. The many various and incompatible bodies which have been proposed as electors are too complicated and miscellaneous to satisfy British plain sense. And the various and incongruous classes of persons who are proposed as qualified to be chosen are equally needless and unworkable. The main body of Senators-the two hundred chosen by popular electionshould all stand on equal and identical origin, and should all be chosen by the same votes.

Are the two hundred Senators to be elected by direct popular suffrage, and by the same electors as the Commons are chosen? Certainly not! If they were, the community of interest and of feeling would make them the same. All sense of balance and compensation between the two Houses would be obscured. They would not be in effect two Chambers, but only one. The essence of a Second Chamber is to bring a moderating and critical judgment to bear on measures voted by a democratic House. The Senates of the Republics of the United States and France are elected by indirect suffrage-in both cases by local provincial Chambers. No Senate having any credit in ancient or in modern times was a mere second edition of a democratic House. For our seven and a half millions of electors at the same time, in the same way, to choose 670 Deputies and 300 Senators out of the same classes of candidates would be to lessen the authority of both, and would be nothing but a clumsy way of arriving at a OneChamber system.

To make a Senate a moderating and revising force, its members must be different men, of a different order, chosen by a different order of electors. The election must be indirect-by elected bodies charged with local public duties. We shall have to follow the French and the American systems, in which the Senate is elected by departmental councils and by State legislatures. We have an analogous set of administrative bodies in the three kingdoms in the county councils, which now co-opt their own aldermen. It would be a simple and familiar practice for two hundred Senators to be chosen by the county councils of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. There would be no good at all in introducing the complication of several administrative bodies as electors. We all know and understand the constitu