disestablishment of the Irish church in 1869 there have been none. In England five ecclesiastics, by statute, are entitled invariably to seats, i.e., the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the bishops of London, Durham, and Winchester. Among the remaining bishops the law allows seats to twenty-one, in the order of seniority. There are always, therefore, some English bishops—in 1909, ten—who are not members of the chamber.[146] All ecclesiastical members retain their seats during tenure of their several sees, but do not, of course, transmit their rights to their heirs, nor, necessarily, save in the case of the five mentioned, to their successors in office. Bishops and archbishops are elected, nominally, by the dean and chapter of the diocese; but when a vacancy arises the sovereign transmits a congé d'élire containing the name of the person to be elected, so that, practically, appointment is made by the crown, acting under the advice of the prime minister. Bishoprics are created by act of Parliament.[147]
106. Qualifications and Number of Members.—A peer may be prevented from occupying a seat in the chamber by any one of several disqualifications. He must have attained the age of twenty-one; he must not be an alien; he must not be a bankrupt; he must not be under sentence for felony. On the other hand, a man who inherits a peerage cannot renounce the inheritance. Upon more than one occasion this rule has been a matter of political consequence, for its operation has sometimes meant that an able and ambitious commoner has been compelled to surrender his seat in the more important chamber and to assume a wholly undesired place in the upper house. In 1895 Mr. William W. Palmer, later Lord Selbourne, inheriting a peerage but desiring to continue for a time in the Commons, put this rule to a definite test by neglecting to apply for a writ of summons as a peer. The decision of the Commons, however, was that he was obligated to accept membership in the upper chamber, and hence to yield the place which he occupied in the lower.
The House of Lords numbers to-day 620 members. In earlier periods of its history it was a very much smaller body, and, indeed, its most notable growth has taken place within the past one hundred and fifty years. During the reign of Henry VII. there were never more than eighty members, the majority of whom were ecclesiastics. To the first parliament of Charles II. there were summoned 139 persons. At the death of William III. the roll of the upper chamber comprised 192 names. At the death of Queen Anne the number was 209: at that of George I. it was 216; at that of George II., 229; at that of George III., 339; at that of George IV., 396; at that of William IV., 456. Between 1830 and 1898 there were conferred 364 peerages—222 under Liberal ministries (covering, in the aggregate, forty years) and 142 under the Conservatives (covering twenty-seven years). More than one-half of the peerages of to-day have been created within the past fifty years, and of the remainder only an insignificant proportion can be termed ancient.
II. The Reform of the Lords: the Question prior to 1909
107. The Status of the Chamber.—As a law-making body the House of Lords antedates the House of Commons. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the theory was that the magnates assented to legislation while the Commons merely petitioned for it. In a statute of 1322, however, the legislative character of Parliament as a whole was effectively recognized, and at the same time the legislative parity of the commons with the magnates. Thenceforth, until very nearly the present day, the two chambers were legally co-ordinate and every act of legislation required the assent of both. It is true that during the course of the nineteenth century there was a remarkable growth of legislative preponderance on the part of the House of Commons, until, indeed, the point was reached where all important measures were first presented in that chamber and the Lords were very certain not to thwart the ultimate adoption of any project of which the nation as represented in the popular branch unmistakably approved. Yet upon numerous occasions bills, and sometimes—as in the case of Gladstone's Home Rule Bill in 1893—highly important ones, were defeated outright; and at all times the chamber imposed a check upon the lower house and exercised a powerful influence upon the actual course of legislative business. Under the provisions of the act of 1911, however, the status and the legislative functions of the House of Lords have been profoundly altered, and an adequate understanding of the workings of the British parliament to-day requires some review of the changes wrought by that remarkable piece of legislation.
Throughout upwards of a century the "mending or ending" of the Lords has been among the most widely discussed of public issues in the United Kingdom. The question has been principally one of "mending," for the number of persons who have advocated seriously the total abolition of the chamber has been small and their influence has been slight. The utility of a second chamber, in a democratic no less than in an illiberal constitutional system, is very generally admitted,[148] and no one supposes that the House of Lords will ever be swept completely out of existence to make room for the establishment of a new and entirely different parliamentary body. If it were to devolve upon the people of Great Britain to-day to adopt for themselves de novo a complete governmental system, they might well not incorporate in that system an institution of the nature of the present House of Lords; but since the chamber exists and is rooted in centuries of national usage and tradition, the perpetuation of it, in some form, may be taken to be assured.
108. The Breach Between the Lords and the Nation.—The indictments which have been brought against the House of Lords have been sweeping and varied. They have been based upon the all but exclusively hereditary character of the membership, upon the meagerness of attendance at the sittings and the small interest displayed by a majority of the members, and upon the hurried and frequently perfunctory nature of the consideration which is accorded public measures. Fundamentally, however, the tremendous attack which has been levelled against the Lords has had as its impetus the conviction of large masses of people that the chamber as constituted stands persistently and deliberately for interests which are not those of the nation at large. Prior to the parliamentary reforms of the nineteenth century the House of Commons was hardly more representative of the people than was the upper chamber. Both were controlled by the landed aristocracy, and between the two there was as a rule substantial accord. After 1832, however, the territorial interests, while yet powerful, were not dominant in the Commons, and a cleavage between the Lords, on the one hand, and the Commons, increasingly representative of the mass of the nation, on the other, became a serious factor in the politics and government of the realm. The reform measures of 1867 and 1884, establishing in substance a system of manhood suffrage in parliamentary elections, converted the House of Commons into an organ of thoroughgoing democracy. The development of the cabinet system brought the working executive, likewise, within the power of the people to control. But the House of Lords underwent no corresponding transformation. It remained, and still is, an inherently and necessarily conservative body, representative, in the main, of the interests of landed property, adverse to changes which seem to menace property and established order, and identified with all the forces that tend to perpetuate the nobility and the Anglican Church as pillars of the state. By simply standing still while the remaining departments of the governmental system were undergoing democratization the second chamber became, in effect, a political anomaly.[149]
109. Earlier Projects of Reform.—Projects for the reform of the Lords were not unknown before 1832, but it has been since that date, and, more particularly during the past half-century, that the reform question has been agitated most vigorously. Some of the notable proposals that have been made relate to the composition of the chamber, others to the powers and functions of it, and still others to both of these things. In respect to the composition of the body, the suggestions that have been brought forward have contemplated most commonly the reduction of the chamber's size, the dropping out of the ecclesiastical members, and the substitution, wholly or in part, of specially designated members in the stead of the members who at present sit by hereditary right. As early as 1834 it was advocated that the archbishops and bishops of the Established Church should "be relieved from their legislative and judicial duties," and this demand, arising principally from the Non-conformists, has been voiced repeatedly in later years. In 1835 the opposition of the peers to measures passed by the Commons incited a storm of popular disapproval of such proportions that more than one of the members of the chamber gloomily predicted the early demolition of the body, and throughout succeeding
