MEN I HAVE PAINTED
HOUSE OF LORDS REFORM.
To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.
SIR,
The attitude of a portion of the Unionist Press, and of some of the Peers themselves, towards the hereditary principle is far more surprising than the periodical outbursts of defeated Radicals and Socialists against the restraining influence and the usefulness of a Second Chamber. The latter is but the legacy of the extremists in the first congress of the colonists of America and of the revolutionaries in France; the former can only come from a latent fear that concessions to the mob may be necessary to preserve the fabric of the Constitution from decay and ruin.
It might possibly have been wiser, unquestionably it would have been both politic and magnanimous, on the part of the autocrat Tsar of Russia to have listened favourably to the petition of his clamouring subjects on that fateful Sunday morning when they begged loudly for a measure of political freedom; but for Unionists and Royalists to join voices with Socialists and Radicals in the outcry against the most enlightened form of government the world has yet seen, or will ever be likely to see, displays an unpardonable ignorance of history and of human nature.
Consider the Republic of the United States after one hundred and twenty years of trial. The counsels of Thomas Jefferson, the democrat, prevailed over the more subtle insight and foresight of Alexander Hamilton—whose statecraft was estimated more highly by Talleyrand than Napoleon's or Washington's—with the result that aristocratical and hereditary principles were rigorously excluded from the Constitution. In compensation for this exclusion a logical regard for the principle of natural fitness has made the office of Senator almost an office for life, whereby veteran Senators, through repeated re-elections, have been forced, quite naturally, into the aristocratical position; it is only another step to the hereditary. So much for political evolution.
It may now be asked, In what does the Republican system excel the English Monarchical system? No one can truthfully affirm that the temporary President of the United States receives the same degree of loyalty from the two political parties, or from the people at large, as the King of England receives from his subjects: or that the House of Representatives is superior, by the integrity and ability of its members, to the British House of Commons: or that the Senate is as reserved in its legislative action as the House of Lords.
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