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in 1783, when they threw out the India Bill, can hardly be considered an exception, for this was done by the express desire of the King; and the House of Commons which had passed the Bill was immediately dissolved and replaced by one that agreed with his Majesty. But these august assemblies sometimes quarrelled about minor matters, and on one occasion they proceeded to such extremities in the interchange of rude and coarse language, as to make it a subject of general congratulation that their proceedings were then conducted with closed doors. The scene on December 10, 1770, when the Commons were turned out of the House of Lords with the rest of the strangers,' was thus described by Colonel Barré :

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'I also was a witness of the scene; and never shall I forget it. I was listening to a noble duke, who was speaking upon the important subject of Gibraltar and Minorca. I am not aware that he was in possession of any secret. If he was, he certainly did not disclose it. Suddenly the whole scene became changed. I could not suppose that a single peer remained in the House. It seemed as if the mob had broke in and they certainly acted in a very extraordinary manner. One of the heads of this mob-for there were two-was a Scotchman. I heard him call out several times, "Clear the Hoose! Clear the Hoose!" The face of the other was hardly human; for he had contrived to put on a nose of an enormous size, that disfigured him completely, and his eyes started out of his head in so frightful a way, that he seemed to be undergoing the operation of being strangled. It was altogether the most violent mob I ever beheld. You would imagine that these leaders would have continued so throughout. But no! at the latter end of the day, these two men took their places as door-keepers, and executed the office with as much exactness, as if it had been a well-regulated assembly.'

Sir Gilbert Elliott replied :—

'Personal allusions, though occasionally met with in books, are not frequent in the debates of this House. In the "Spec

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tator we have an account of a club, to which the length of a man's nose gave him a claim to admittance; and a whole volume of "Tristram Shandy" is devoted to the same distorted feature. The noses of the two lords alluded to certainly happen to be remarkably prominent.'

The two lords were the Earls of Marchmont and Denbigh. The Commons immediately retaliated; and it so happened that the only peers below the bar on this first resort to reprisals, were those who had vainly resisted the exclusion of the Commons from the Upper House.

Two years afterwards, in 1772, Burke complained to the House that he had been kept three hours waiting at the door of the Lords with a Bill sent up from the Commons. The Commons were so indignant that, the next time a Bill was brought down from the Lords, it was rejected by a unanimous vote. The Speaker then tossed it across the table on the floor, and a number of members rushed forward and kicked it out of the House.

The constitutional mode of dealing with a refractory House of Commons is by dissolution. When the House of Lords asserts its independence, the only mode of compelling its co-operation with the other branches of the Legislature is by the creation of new peers; as in 1712, when Oxford and Bolingbroke gazetted twelve in one day. On their taking their seats, Wharton inquired if they were to vote like a jury by their foreman; and Bolingbroke, on hearing that the question had been carried by a majority of one, exclaimed: If those twelve had not been enough, we would have given them another dozen.'

This is the solitary instance of a creation in mass to carry a measure: the purpose has been commonly effected by a threat, which has gradually become nugatory and impracticable; the Conservative majority in the Upper House being now roughly estimated at

more than seventy. The only available mode, in the contingency of a decided split between the two Houses, would be an appeal to the country by a dissolution upon an implied understanding that the Lords would be guided by the result. As regards votes of censure, a vote by the Upper House might be neutralised by the vote of the Lower. This was done in the Pacifico affair; and might be done again; as plainly intimated by the Duke of Argyll and the Lord Chancellor (Lord Hatherley) in the debate on the appointment of Sir Robert Collier. This (said the Lord Chancellor) is as clearly a party manoeuvre as ever came before Parliament.' "But, my lords, I tell you plainly, I will hold my ground. I will not quail till my profession tell me I ought, or, at all events, till the House of Commons shall censure me for what I have done.' More than one embarrassing collision has been averted by the graceful and judicious leadership of Lord Granville.

The true cause of the declining authority of the hereditary assembly is the increasing importance and authority of the Commons. It cannot be attributed to any falling off in personal qualifications, in dignity, patriotism, or ability. When (says Lord Russell) a great question arises which requires a display of more than ordinary knowledge of history, more accurate learning, more constitutional lore, and more practical wisdom than is to be found in the usual debates of Parliament, I know not where

"the general debate,

The popular harangue, the tart reply,
The logic and the wisdom and the wit,"

are to be found in greater perfection than among the prelates on the episcopal bench, the peers of three centuries of nobility, and the recent occupants of the woolsack.'

It may be doubted whether the peers of three cen

turies of nobility, a small minority, are endowed, in proportion to their pedigrees, with the logic, the wisdom, or the wit, although this limit includes the house of Russell, ennobled in 1539. Peers of meaner blood are quite on a par with them in this respect. Nor should it be forgotten how many of those who reflect, or have reflected, most honour on their House, received their training, their baptism of debate, in the House of Commons, and left that assembly with foreboding or regret. 'When I have turned out Walpole,' said Pulteney, 'I will retire into that hospital for invalids, the House of Lords.' On entering it as Earl of Bath, he was thus addressed by his old adversary, who had recently become Earl of Orford: My Lord Bath, you and I are now two as insignificant men as any in England.' When (in 1766) the citizens of London learned that the great commoner was to be First Minister, they were in transports of joy, and prepared for a general illumination. The lamps had actually been placed round the Monument, when the Gazette' announced that he had become an Earl. The lamps were taken down. The contemplated entertainments were countermanded, and (according to Macaulay) the clamour against him appears to have had a serious effect on the foreign relations of the country. The name of Pitt had been a charmed name. Our envoys tried in vain to conjure with the name of Chatham.'

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A few months after his elevation, the first Lord Holland wrote to Selwyn that his object in taking a peerage was to cut up any further views of ambition by the roots. Brougham, in the Lords, after three or four exciting years, was like Samson with his hair cut. There is a letter from Charles Fox to the first Earl Grey, earnestly condoling with him on the acceptance of a peerage by his father; and who would not condole with a man of energy, laudable ambition, eminent political ability and debating power, like Lord Salis

bury, on his being excluded in the prime of life from the arena in which all the decisive battles of the Constitution must be fought?

The House of Lords is generally and justly regarded as a main pillar of the social edifice; but a political writer of authority has plausibly maintained that the peerage would gain instead of losing by a fusion: that the eminent members would exercise more influence in the long run by (so to speak) leavening the popular assembly than they can ever hope to exercise in their hereditary one.1

Forms long outlive realities. The standing Order of the Lords for the regulation of conferences between the Houses runs thus:

The place of our meeting with the Lower House upon conference is usually the Painted Chamber, where they are commonly before we come, and expect our leisure. We are to come thither in a whole body, and not some lords scattering before the rest, which both takes from the gravity of the lords, and besides may hinder the lords from taking their proper places. We are to sit there, and be covered; but they are at no committee or conference ever either to be covered or sit down in our presence, unless it be some infirm person, and that by connivance in a corner out of sight, to sit, but not to be covered."

The Personal Anecdotes,' comprising three-fourths

1 'England and the English.' By the late Lord Lytton. The noble author, who delivered more than one fine and effective speech in the House of Commons, never addressed the Lords, although he carefully prepared five or six speeches, left among his papers, for delivery in the Upper House. Lord Macaulay, also, never spoke as a peer. Yet surely the House of Lords offers the most congenial audience for speakers who shine by intellectual richness and brilliancy, who owe little or nothing tɔ the exciting current of debate. It is unfortunate that a tacit convention or understanding excludes the episcopal bench from secular topics of debate; for it is rich in eloquence of a high order. The late Lord Fitzwilliam, meeting the late Bishop of Winchester (Wilberforce) soon after his celebrated speech on the Corn Laws, told him that such a display of episcopal eloquence in the House of Lords was altogether contrary to rule. The Bishop of Peterborough (Magee) has more than once laid himself open to a similar reproof.

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