thoroughly in touch with the local opinion of the counties in which they reside. They form sometimes a truer estimate of the real importance of the political questions of the hour than we can do who live in the atmosphere of political strife. If they sometimes carry big divisions, they not unfrequently refuse to carry them, as Conservative leaders and whips could testify.

A much more objectionable class are the fops and rowdies, of which there are sure to be occasionally a few in any Chamber composed on the hereditary principle. But their number is so small, and they are so seldom seen, that it is a question whether it is worth while to run any risk for the sake of getting rid of them.

Whether the number of hereditary peers is diminished or the number of life peers increased sufficiently to balance them matters little so long as a substantial alteration in the proportion between them is effected. To that reform I believe that all others are of secondary importance.

I have no sympathy whatever with proposals for making the House of Lords a representative, in the sense of an elective House. It is not only that I believe that an assembly composed of the most distinguished men, the judges, the chief officials, and the great magnates of the country, would be far more likely to gain a hold upon the popular imagination than any that we should be likely to obtain by the best elective system that we could devise; but I believe that such an assembly, from the very fact of its non-representative character, and its profound consciousness thereof, can carry on the functions of a Second Chamber with less friction than any other. Its members being responsible only to the nation at large, and thus at once unhampered by obligations to constituents and unable to shift the responsibility for their actions on to the shoulders of any electorate, it is easier for such an assembly to rise above party feelings, and to sink its own predilections in the treatment of political questions, and far easier for it to yield gracefully to the opinion of the popular Chamber. There may be a dispute between them on this question or on that as to which represents what may be called the better mind of the country; there can never be any dispute as to which is the representative House. Make the Upper Chamber an elective one and this valuable clearness of distinction between their positions disappears. They are placed in a false position of rivalry. The duty of customary deference to the assembly which represents the people becomes less obvious, and its practice more difficult. At the same time the interference of such a Chamber is felt to be more invidious by the popular House. The very fact that its authority is based on a representative sanction inevitably suggests the question, whenever there is a difference of opinion between them, which House is the more representative of the two; and there is a tendency to try all disputes upon this false issue. The popular House feels that the less representative Chamber

ought always to give way. What right has any limited electorate to override the suffrages of the people? France has given us lately a very good example of the ill-working of the system.

It will be said perhaps that the American Senate is a success. The political circumstances of America are so widely different from our own that any analogy drawn from the Senate would be most unsafe as a guide. In the first place, the Americans possess in the State legislatures a set of political bodies on which to found a Senate to which we have, and can have, no equivalent in this country. These State governments rest on the widest popular basis, exercise most of the powers of independent states, and are regarded by the people with as much loyalty and respect as any other part of the constitution. No county or other divisions that we could invent on which to base a Second Chamber could possibly hold a like position in English eyes.

Secondly, those constitutional questions that form the most dangerous element of friction between our two Houses are dealt with in America by neither of them, but by the judiciary.

Lastly, the American House of Representatives holds a totally different position in popular estimation from the House of Commons. That House is the only power in the English constitution which directly represents the people. The American House shares its popular character, not only with the Senate as described above, but with the President, who is elected by the people, and wields more power than most constitutional sovereigns. The same thing may perhaps be said of an English Prime Minister. But there is this difference between them. The President is independent of the House of Representatives. He owes to it neither his election nor his powers. The Prime Minister, on the other hand, is only connected with the people through the medium of the House of Commons; and his powers, and even his political existence, are dependent on his ability to conciliate and control it. He may outshine it and dwarf it, but he is too much a part of it to be its rival.

For all these reasons the Americans feel an indifference to the supremacy of the House of Representatives that is not likely to find any parallel in English sentiment towards the House of Commons, in our day at any rate.

I look with no less distrust upon all schemes having for their object the equalising of political parties in the House. They seem to me not merely futile, but misleading in a very dangerous way. It ought never to be admitted for a moment that party victories in the division lobbies should be a chief aim of leaders, or party objects paramount considerations in the House of Lords. Every peer should feel that he has a duty above and distinct from his party allegiance. And I may say that this patriotic ideal is better maintained in practice in the House of Lords than the general public is apt to fancy. Party organisation of course there is, and party discipline

strict enough on occasion. But it can only maintain existence on the condition that the leaders of the majority exercise it with great forbearance, and take a national rather than party view of their general duty. No man could lead the House of Lords for two sessions who did not recognise this obligation. When a Liberal Government is in power, Bills innumerable are passed, which would be rejected at once if the majority did not admit the duty of governing its conduct by the widest view of the interests of the nation. The cases in which it does oppose the House of Commons are exceptional, and seldom undertaken without great reluctance. Mr. Gladstone, during one of his Scotch speeches, seemed to be suddenly struck by this generally forgotten aspect of the conduct of the House of Lords, when he looked back on his long career and called to mind the vast catalogue of reforms that had somehow been passed in rapid succession under its auspices.

Party discipline is a necessity in such an assembly. Without it there would be an uncertainty and an inconsistency of legislative action that the country would soon discover to be intolerable. But the House must beware of party spirit, which constitutes the greatest and most insidious danger that it has to face and guard against. It must never be forgotten that, whenever the House of Lords comes to be seriously regarded by the country as the mere instrument of the political party which happens to predominate within its walls, its doom is sealed. The party to which it is hostile will sweep it away the first time that it obtains a large majority at the polls, and there will be no one to say it nay. If the moderate men of the country could have been persuaded last autumn that the House of Lords was nothing but the unscrupulous tool of the Tory caucuses, the impending attack could hardly have been stayed.

The development of party spirit is a most insidious danger. The prevailing forces of the time are fostering it in several ways, and there are no practical tangible means of checking it. Party organisation is still growing in the country, and the House of Lords can hardly fail to be affected by the spirit of the day. And when an institution is standing on the defensive, as the House of Lords has been doing, and is likely to do for some time, the tendency to party discipline grows as the necessity for standing firm in the ranks and trusting implicitly to leaders becomes paramount; and the increase of discipline creates the temptation to use it for party ends.

Individual attempts at independence are generally misunderstood, and do more harm than good. Our chief safeguard must be a vivid consciousness of the danger ever present in the minds both of the leaders and the rank and file. And I should hope that the creation of ex officio peers, such as judges and public officials, would give us a body of men who would keep themselves fairly free from party trammels, and form an independent element. And in connection

with this point, I should like to suggest a practical reform which will be smiled at as trivial, but which may not be quite unimportant. I should like to see the cross benches extended to the full width of the House. It would not hurt orthodox Tories and Whigs to sit on them, when there was no room anywhere else; and at present the accommodation for the independent is miserably insufficient. When the Prince of Wales and the royal Dukes are in the House, there is only room for about a dozen on the cross benches; while the nondescript piece of furniture between the Lord Chancellor and the table is usually monopolised by noblemen who are hard of hearing. Nowhere else can a peer sit down without ticketing himself as a follower of Lord Granville or Lord Salisbury. The cross-bench mind,' which the Duke of Argyll rightly considers so valuable, does not grow quite freely on party benches. If we want to have a strong independent section in the House, I think we shall do well to provide it with a place to sit.

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Let me conclude by making clear my justification for writing this article. If the country were satisfied with the present constitution of the House, I should certainly not have presumed to advance any ideas of my own for its improvement. If the question of its reform had been a sleeping one, I should have been reluctant to say anything that might raise it. But it is one of the burning questions of the day. It may smoulder for a few years, but it is certain to come up for settlement before long; and woe be to us if we have not made a settlement before one is forced upon us from without. As soon as Parliament reassembles, Lord Rosebery intends to call attention to it with all the eloquence at his command, and no diffident silence on the part of Conservative peers can prevent an exhaustive discussion, anxiously followed by the public out of doors. I can have no hesitation then, as a Conservative peer, in pointing out the direction which I think that reform should take; especially when I believe, as I do, that it can be carried out upon Conservative lines, and that the Conservative leaders would do well to make this question their own.

PEMBROKE.

THE DUTIES OF DRAMATIC CRITICS.

Of all the incidents of a career of crime-I speak, as yet, without personal experience, but on the authority of many intelligent felons --the ordeal known as waiting for the verdict is one of the most unpleasant. The dramatic interest, the nervous tension, of the trial is over, and a period of torturing inactivity ensues. The irretrievable errors of the past rise in grim array before the mind's eye-arguments unurged, admissions made in inadvertence, lies unharmonised, alibis disproved, nervous impatience to get rid of the body, rash haste in pawning the plate, and a hundred other slips into the gins and snares that beset the path of crime. In some cases remorse intervenes to pile horror on horror's head, and the unhappy wretch writhes at the thought, not only of errors after the fact, but of the fact itself, from the first conception of its possibility right on to the finishing stroke. It is done and cannot be undone. His head is in the lion's mouth; he feels the points of its fangs upon his throat will the mighty jaws open or close?

If anyone wishes to experience these interesting sensations, yet is restrained by nervousness or class-prejudice from a straightforward plunge into burglary or murder, he cannot do better than write a play and have it produced at a London theatre. In the interval between its production, say on Saturday night, and the appearance of the leading newspapers on Monday morning, he will acquire the most intimate experimental knowledge of the feelings of a murderer awaiting the verdict. In the commission of the crime there may have been some pleasure; during the trial, or, in other words, the first performance, he has at least been buoyed up by excitement; but between the fall of the curtain and the appearance of the criticisms there is nothing but dull inaction, unavailing regret and torturing suspense. It may be objected that the analogy breaks down, inasmuch as a play, however unsuccessful, cannot be reckoned a felony or even a grave misdemeanour. Not failure, but low aim, is crime,' says Mr. Lowell, who, be it noted, has neither written plays nor criticised them. Had he done so he would have made an exception as regards the dramatic world, where low aim is a merit, and failure, so far as its results are concerned, little less than a crime. VOL. XVII.-No. 96.

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