The Great Events by Famous Historians

Many things combined to make the last phase pass quickly. It was impossible that the Peerage could long survive the Reform Bill, for it took from the great families their pocket boroughs, and so much of their influence. And there followed hard upon it the educational effect of new facilities for exchange of ideas, the railway trains, the penny post, and the halfpenny paper, together with the centralization of general opinion and all government which has resulted therefrom. But above all reasons were the loss of the qualifying ancestral lands, a link with the soil; and the ennobling of landless men. Once divorced from its influence over some countryside a peerage resting on heredity was doomed; for no one can defend a system whereby men of no exceptional ability, representative of nothing, are legislators by inheritance. Should we summon to a conclave of the nations a king who had no kingdom? But the pity of it! Not only the break with eight centuries of history—nay, more, for when had not every king his council of notables?—not only the loss of picturesqueness and sentiment and lofty mien, but the certainty, the appalling certainty, that, when an aristocracy of birth falls, it is not an aristocracy of character or intellect, but an aristocracy—save the mark—of money, which is bound to take its place.

Five short years and four rejected measures. Glance back over it all. The wild blood on both sides, and the cunning on one. The foolish comfortable words spoken in every drawing-room throughout the United Kingdom. "Yes, they are terrible: what a lot of harm they would do if they could. Thank God we have a House of Lords." Think now that this was commonplace conversation only three short years ago. And all the time the ears of the masses were being poisoned. Week after week and month after month some laughed but others toiled. The laughers, like the French nobles before the Revolution, said contemptuously, "They will not dare." Why should they not? There were men among them for whom the Ark of the Covenant had no sanctity. And then, when the combinations were complete, when those who stood out had been kicked—there can be no other word—into compliance, the blows fell quickly. A Budget was ingeniously prepared for rejection, and, the Lords falling into the trap, the storm broke, with its hurricane of abuse and misrepresentation. We had one election which was inconclusive. Then befell the death of King Edward. There was a second election, carefully engineered and prepared for, rushed upon a nation which had been denied the opportunity of hearing the other side. The Government had out-maneuvered the Opposition and muzzled them to the last moment in a Conference sworn to secrecy. It was remarkably clever and incredibly unscrupulous. They won again. They had not increased their numbers, but they had maintained their position, and this time their victory, however achieved, could not be gainsaid. For a moment there was a lull, only some vague talk of "guaranties," asserted, scoffed at and denied, for the ordinary business of the country was in arrears, and the Coronation, with all its pomp of circumstance and power, all its medieval splendor and appeal to history and sentiment, turned people's thoughts elsewhere.

And then, on the day the pageantry closed, Mr. Asquith launched his Thunderbolt. Few men living will ever learn the true story of the guaranties, suffice it that somehow he had secured them. Whatever the resistance of the Second Chamber might be, it could be overcome. At his dictation the Constitution was to fall. There was no escape; the Bill must surely pass. It rested with the Lords themselves whether they should bow their heads to the inevitable, humbly or proudly, contemptuously or savagely—characterize it as you will—or whether there should be red trouble first.

Surely never in our time has there been a situation of higher psychological interest, for never before have we seen a body of some six hundred exceptional men called on to take each his individual line upon a subject which touched him to the core. I say "individual line" and "exceptional men." Does either adjective require defending?

The Peers are not a regiment, they are still independent entities, with all the faults and virtues which this implies; free gentlemen subject to no discipline, responsible to God and their own consciences alone. At times they may combine on questions which appeal to their sense of right, their sentiment, perhaps some may say their self-interest; but this was no case for combination. Here was a sword pointed at each man's breast. What, under the circumstances, was to be his individual line of conduct?