Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1929-04-07
Reforming the Lords
Continued From Third Page

took council among themselves and re-
piled that 1T appears preferable to find
any extra time which may be required
By an expansion of the sitting on three
days each week on which the House
now sits than by adding a fourth day
IT is not unreasonable, they con-
cluded heroically, that the House
should be prepared to sit normally until
o'clock when the amount Of business
10 requires"
AZ The House meets about in the
afternoon, which allows time for siesta
at the club or In the library after
lunch, with the old port and q cigar,
the Lords can scarcely complain that
they are sweated.
But they do complain that they are
treated as II they already had ceased
to exist. The late Marquis Curzon,
magnificent. pompous able, an eight
zenith century great noble born by some
nischance into the twentieth century,
arose one day in wrath because the
Commons would throw bills into the
Lords at the last minute, making proper
and dignified examination impossible.
He demanded that all business should
be in their lordships' hands by 6:15
pm. (Which would at least allow their
lordships three-quarters of an hour
with the bills before it was time to go
and dress for dinner.
I'VE cannot go on quibbling here"
cried the outraged marquis. while they
are discussing what their Irish policy Is
If they have one" he added crush
ingly =. "A distinguished man in an
other place used the term patient oxen
in reference to another party. That Is
the way we are treated here"
Not Ripple Caused.
In another century these words would
have caused sensation, but now they
did not even make a ripple upon the
complacent surface of the busy Com
mons. Down there they went on de-
batting and examining bills in commit
tee and shouting at one another across
the benches and telling stories in the
smoking room and intriguing in the
Hobbies. and no one worried about this
other in the Lords at all.
Once cabinet minister said scorn-
fully as he dined late with crony at
his club: Lords? What do we care for
lords? We make EN-. Two a penny"
Come, come" chided his friend
'You speak loosely. Not two penny,
or even one penny. The price of
peerages is high. You people have
manipulated the market disgracefully."
This was in the days of the coalition
government, when Mr.. Lloyd Georges
party chest was bullying with the gold
extracted from the fat Golfers of whisky
dtstillers, brewers, newspaper magnates
and heavy industrialists, whose desire
to be ennobled the willy Welsh radical
was always prepared to crafty at a
price ranging from 100000 TO $500 900.
Battles between the Lords and Com
mons have been frequent in the long
story of the mother of Parliaments
Even when the Commons were strong
in power and temper, the Lords
haughtily kept the great statesman and
orator, Burke, waiting three hours with
the bill he was bearing from the lower
to the upper chamber.
Burke waited, but reported the indig-
nifty to his fellow Commons, who were
so indignant that they unanimously re-
jected the next bill the Lords sent
down. The Speaker threw it on the
floor and crowd of members kicked it
to the door of the House, and out.
Intrenched in Their Right.
Intrenched in their right to veto, the
peers could afford to laugh at these
ebullitions of the lower house. They
packed the ministries and often headed
them. Even the old radical, Gladstone,
had to dress his cabinets, which so
alarmed the die-hard Queen Victoria,
with good showing of Lords. But by
the time the nineteenth century turned
the corner into the twentieth, the tide
of democracy was already tapping the
outer moat of the Lords house, and 10
years later it crashed against it in
tidal wave of irresistible force.
The wave was rolled up by the long
standing quarrel over home rule for
ireland. The Lords would have none
OF 1t. Asquith vowed he would make
600 new peers in order to secure the
requisite majority in the upper cham
Der. He could plead precedent. When
the Lords in 1882 rejected the first great
bill for the extension of the franchise,
which ushered in the era of democracy,
William w, alarmed by riots and blood
shed and the prospect of popular
rising and civil war, forced the Lords
hands by threatening to make new
peers to pass the measure If their lord
ships would not do so. Their lordships
capitulated.
adamant. So were the Liberals in
power. The ding-dong struggle went
on for two years. The peers used the
weapons of social favor and obstacles,
and lost; the Liberals fought a couple
OF general elections, and won. Lloyd
George solved the constitutional crisis
by suggesting that the peers could buy
of the threatened assault upon their
order and chamber by agreeing to yield
their ancient right to veto measures
passed by the Commons
So the Lords were left in hereditary
possession Of their House, but with their
teeth forever drawn. After the passage
of the Parliament act any bill sent up
from the Commons became law auto
matically after certain lapse of time,
whether or not it had been thrown out
by the Lords.
Weakening Gives Alarm.
The weakening of the upper chamber
pleased all liberal-ininded men then; 1t
alarms them now. 1t may be BOOM
erang when a Labor government swings
into power with program of natnional-
ization. At its best the House of Lords,
not being under the necessity of offer
ing brides to voters or pandering to the
crowd, has rescued the nation from
some tight corners.
For example, more than a century ago
they did battle with the cynical and willy
coalition Of Fox and North and defeated
an astonishing bill the purpose of which
was to place SO much patronage in the
hands Of the government of the day that
it would be able to buy OF opposition
and so remain permanently in office.
More recently 1t was the Lords who
made possible the blockade of Germany
in the World War by refusing to ratify
the Declaration of London after The
Hague Peace Conference
But for that obstruction England
would have found herself, on the OUT
break OF war, committed to the doc
fvsir4a that fha fac nor,nre fy,a <yn.Se av,d
the British sea strangle hold on Ger
many would have been broken by neu-
trail ships sailing through the British
Gordon with their fingers to their nose
and carrying all the war material that
the besieged Germans needed.
It Is the memory of such things,
added to approximations of what a So