met early in June, and were found to involve little change in the existing relations between the two bodies, which were already very cordial. They practically aimed at nothing more than eliminating the possibility of friction or overlapping between the two bodies at General Elections in places where there was substantial agreement between them on general policy. It was explained that local societies in the movement would retain their complete political independence, but even so non-Labour members took the alarm, and the resolution was carried only by a narrow majority; nor did the agitation within the movement die down for some little time.

While controversy was still raging both inside and outside of Parliament round the Trade Union Bill, the Government went out of its way to bring into the arena of public discussion a still more highly contentious subject the reform of the House of Lords. The Cabinet Committee appointed to consider the subject had reported some little time before, and the Government had by now framed a fairly definite scheme. This was made public in the form not of a Bill, but of a preliminary announcement in a debate in the House of Lords on June 20, initiated by a motion of a type by now familiar inviting the Government to introduce a measure for reforming the Upper House. This time the invitation, somewhat to the general surprise, procured a response, and after a few speakers had expressed their views on the desirability or otherwise of amending the House, the Lord Chancellor stated the Government's views and plans. There could be no question, he said, of repealing the Parliament Act of 1910; on the other hand, it was both possible and desirable to amend that measure in two important particulars. One was to give the Second Chamber the power to force an appeal to the country in cases where it differed with the Lower House. The other was to transfer the power of certifying money bills from the Speaker to a committee composed of members of both Houses. A Second Chamber thus strengthened could, of course, not retain the composition of the present House of Lords. The idea of the Government was that it should consist altogether of about 350 peers; that these, with the exception of peers of the Blood Royal, Lords Spiritual, and the Law Lords, should be partly elected by their own order and partly nominated by the Crown, the proportion between the two sections to be determined by statute; and that with the exception of peers of the Blood Royal and the Law Lords, every member of the reconstituted House should hold his seat for a term of years, and be eligible for re-election, those not elected to the House of Lords being eligible for election to the House of Commons. It was further intended that the reformed House of Lords should have the power of rejecting any Bill passed by the Commons affecting its own constitution.

While the Lord Chancellor merely laid these proposals before

1927.]

House of Lords Reform Proposals.

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the House with a view to eliciting their Lordships' opinions, the Earl of Birkenhead, at a later stage of the debate, affirmed that the mind of the Government was fully made up, and that it intended to pass these proposals into law in the lifetime of the present Parliament. The course of the debate in the House, which lasted for three days, was on the whole calculated to confirm it in this purpose. Liberal and Labour peers naturally denounced the scheme uncompromisingly as being designed to keep the Conservative Party permanently in power, whether in office or not. Conservative peers were torn between their attachment to the hereditary principle and their desire to make the Upper House a stronger bulwark against socialistic and revolutionary tendencies. With most of the speakers the latter sentiment prevailed, and they welcomed the scheme cordially, if without enthusiasm. One Conservative peer, the Earl of Arran, moved an amendment deprecating the introduction of such a measure until after the electorate had had an opportunity of expressing its views. This was defeated by 208 votes to 54, and the original motion of Lord Fitzalan was then agreed to without a division (June 23).

In the House of Commons on June 23 Mr. Clynes asked the Government if it was really its intention to "reform" the House of Lords on the lines it had indicated without consulting the electorate, and Mr. Churchill, in reply, referred him to the statement made by Lord Birkenhead on the previous day. Taking this as an affirmative answer, the Labour Party requested and obtained leave from the Government to bring the matter before the House in the form of a vote of censure at an early date. Meanwhile, Liberal and Labour speakers in the country, having got over their first sense of stupefaction at what they called the impudence" of the Government's proposals, set themselves to stir up public opinion against them, and to exploit to the utmost the opportunity so unexpectedly presented to them of bringing the Government into discredit.

Even Conservatives outside the House of Lords were taken aback by the far-reaching character of the Government's proposals, and some of them were unsparing in their criticism. Mr. J. L. Garvin, the editor of the Observer, and the most prominent of Conservative publicists, in his issue of June 26, stigmatised the step taken by the Government as a crime against the Constitution, and an act of madness calculated to bring disaster on the Conservative Party. Many members of that party in the House of Commons shared Mr. Garvin's opinions, though they eschewed the vigour of his language, and they soon showed themselves to be less docile followers of the Government than their fellows in the other House. It so happened that the meeting of the National Council of Conservative and Unionist Associations fell on June 28. Sir J. Marriott took the opportunity to introduce a motion pledging the meeting to offer whole-hearted support to

the Government in giving legislative effect to its House of Lords proposals in the session of 1928. A considerable minority supported an amendment urging that no definite proposals for the reform of the Second Chamber should be made until the matter had been fully considered by the Conservative and Unionist members of Parliament. Nor was the motion itself carried before the members present gave themselves a freer hand by substituting the word "sympathetic " for "whole-hearted."

The debate in the House of Commons took place on July 6. Mr. MacDonald moved a resolution declaring that it would be an outrage on the Constitution to force the Government proposals through Parliament without a mandate from the people. He criticised the Government severely for not having presented its proposals in the first instance to the House of Commons, and for having forced the Opposition to resort to the device of a vote of censure in order to procure a discussion upon them. He put in a very few words the main objection of his party to them. The Government scheme, he said, was one under which, whatever party was in office, the Tories would be in power. No man of self-respect in his party would take office under such conditions, because he would feel that he was in a false position and that he was condemned to failure before he began his work. The proposal of the Government to take away from the House of Commons the sole control of money bills was also wholly unacceptable. He characterised the act contemplated by the Government as revolutionary, as one aimed at destroying the balance of the Constitution. He challenged the Prime Minister to point to a single case in other countries of a Constitution being made by a party majority or imposed on a nation without an election or a referendum.

The Government's defence was made by the Prime Minister in a speech which conveyed the impression that he cared little what the ultimate fate of the proposals would be. Mr. Baldwin descanted at length on the need for a Second Chamber, and conceded without reservation the chief claims of the Opposition on the matter of principle-that the Second Chamber could on no account become an effective rival to the House of Commons, that it could have no power to make and unmake Ministries, and that it could have no equal rights in finance. But he made no attempt whatever to answer the charges of his critics that the Government proposals offended violently against all these principles, and his only defence of them was that they bore a close resemblance to the proposals made by Mr. Lloyd George's Government in 1922. The Government's proposals, he said, were a genuine attempt to implement the pledges not only of this Government but also of previous Governments. They were offered for criticism and ventilation both in Parliament and outside, and they would be guided in framing legislation by the results of the criticism and the ventilation. Mr. Baldwin pleaded for the "greatest common

measure of agreement," adding that if this Government failed to solve the problem, he doubted whether any further attempt would be made in the near future.

He

Almost the first breath of ventilation which the Government proposals received was a freezing draught from the Conservative benches themselves. Mr. John Buchan, the latest recruit to those benches, whose return by a large majority for the Scottish Universities had been the one redeeming feature to the Conservative Party in a long series of by-election reverses, in a brilliant maiden speech voiced the objections of a large number of his fellow-Conservatives against the Government's proposals. expressed himself against making any change in the Parliament Act. That measure, though begotten in haste and born in confusion, had turned out better than its supporters had dared to hope or its opponents had imagined possible, and far better than could be expected of any scheme of internal reform designed to supplement it. By a happy chance that crude measure had chimed in with the national evolutionary process of British institutions, and had actually increased the powers of the Lords by removing from them a certain atmosphere of popular suspicion. Before any serious reform could be undertaken he thought the Lord Chancellor's scheme must be got out of the road. He and those who thought with him--and they were not a few-regarded it as definitely wrong and dangerous in principle, and a contradiction of the fundamentals of the Conservative creed. The argument used in support of so startling a change the fear of some revolutionary intention on the part of some future Governmentseemed to him mere cant; the true barrier against foolish and perilous change was the inherited and inbred political integrity of the British people.

In the remainder of the debate very few of the speakers had a good word to say for the Government proposals. Mr. Churchill, who closed for the Government, said that the object of the Government was to enable the House of Lords, if it chose, to form itself into an assembly which could better and more thoroughly discharge the functions remaining to it under the Parliament Act. If after a fair and free discussion their proposals failed, they would bear the disappointment with what fortitude they could. Conservative members, having expressed their views sufficiently clearly in the course of the debate, refrained from embarrassing the Government further by pressing a couple of amendments which they had drafted, in terms hardly less damning than the vote of censure itself, and this was rejected by 362 votes to 167.

Mr. Churchill's speech was generally understood as an intimation that the Government would take no further steps in the matter unless strong influence was brought to bear upon it. impression was confirmed when, a few days afterwards, in reply to a question in Parliament as to what were the Government's

intentions in regard to the House of Lords, Mr. Baldwin gave an evasive reply, referring to Mr. Churchill's speech. The Lords themselves, however, were not satisfied to leave matters in that stage. On July 18 those peers who had initiated the recent debate in the House of Lords issued a manifesto designed to reopen the question, or prevent it from being closed. They dissociated themselves and the large body of peers whom they represented from the proposals of the Government, which, they said, did not at all represent their intentions. They had no desire to bolster up hereditary privilege as a counterblast to the popular will. On the other hand, they could not acquiesce in the House of Lords being permitted to drag on an inglorious existence on condition of its effacing itself and obliterating the traditions of the past. They therefore appealed to all Conservatives who did not wish to hand over Second Chamber reform to Socialist hands for support in further action to replace by a reliable body what had been justly styled "the weakest Second Chamber in the world." The question of the Government's intentions was again raised in the House of Lords a few days later, and Lord Salisbury then stated that the proposals made by the Lord Chancellor remained the proposals of the Government, though they were only offered as a sketch, the details of which had to be filled in.

While the House of Lords was discussing its own "reform," the House of Commons was disposing of the final stages of the Trade Union Bill. The amendments introduced in Committee were duly ratified in the Report stage. In moving the third reading on June 23, the Solicitor-General paid a tribute to the Opposition for the part they had taken in helping the public to understand the Bill. He claimed for the Bill that it was a modest assertion of the sovereignty of Parliament against the threat of the Trade Union Congress to usurp the place of Parliament. The Bill received the blessing of Sir John Simon, who thought it was now clear enough to cover ordinary cases, though he would still have preferred his own version of the first clause. He devoted a great part of his speech to a warm defence of British judges and juries against allegations of bias and class prejudice that had been freely brought against them by Labour speakers in the House, and to a much greater extent outside; there was, he thought, no ground for assuming that if the law was fairly framed it would not be fairly administered. Mr. Thomas and Mr. Snowden again denounced the Bill as a piece of class legislation, and stated once more that the Labour Party would repeal it as soon as it came into power. The motion for rejecting the Bill on the third reading was defeated by 354 votes to 139.

The Trade Union Bill was debated in the House of Lords altogether for eight days. It was vigorously opposed by a band of Labour and Liberal peers, among whom the lead was taken by Lord Reading. As the result of their criticism, which often was